Call for Faculty: Latinist
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (BISR), a non-profit critical education and research institute which integrates rigorous but accessible scholarly study with the everyday lives of working adults, seeks an experienced Latinist to join our expanding language study program.
Language instructors teach a total of 72 hours over 36 weeks and are competent to bring absolute beginners to such a point that, by program’s end, students are prepared to undertake guided reading of texts foundational to a given tradition. The qualified candidate will also contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary lecture series that complements language courses and sets BISR’s program apart from others.
BISR Language Learning and Critique is a new model for language learning, integrating formal language acquisition with the critical exploration of the literary, philosophical, and philological traditions of classical languages and their evolving contexts of reception. Over 12-week trimesters, students work cumulatively through the alphabet, morphology, grammar, and syntax of individual languages, all the while attending to overarching questions of rhetoric and poetics, translation, and reception history. Unique to the BISR model, language courses are paired with an interdisciplinary lecture series that brings scholars from a variety of linguistic traditions into lively and generative conversation, providing a wide view of the ancient world for a modern community of learners.
Recent highlights in the lecture series include, by way of example: Gregory Nagy on comparative fables, Peter Fenves on Marx’s reception of the Atomists, Bruce King on queer reception of Achilles and Patroclus, Olga Levaniouk on women in Greek and Indic epic, and Lynn Kozak on The Bacchae as proto-horror. Upcoming lectures include Jackie Murray on racecraft in The Odyssey, and Nancy Worman on Virginia Woolf’s On Not Knowing Greek.
Interested candidates should submit a CV and cover letter to BISR’s Language Program Head Bruce King (bruce@thebrooklyninstitute.com), Managing Director (mark@thebrooklyninstitute.com), and Program Coordinator (lauren@thebrooklyninstitute.com) with the subject line “BISR Languages: Latinist.” The deadline to apply is Monday, October 30th.
BISR Language faculty are paid on a per course basis, earning 50% of the total enrollment revenue generated by a Language Course and 70% of the total enrollment revenue generated by a Reading Group.
BISR is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or other legally protected status. We strongly encourage, and will strongly weigh, applications from women and historically underrepresented minority groups.