Antigone in Wisconsin built upon the success of The Arabian Nights in Wisconsin, Things Fall Apart in Wisconsin, The Brothers Karamazov in Wisconsin, One Hundred Years of Solitude in Wisconsin, Dante’s Inferno in Wisconsin, and Don Quixote in Wisconsin programs. During the 2011-2012 academic year, over 900 high school students and college classes from across the state participated in reading Sophocles’ classic play, Antigone, and presented their work to each other at a Spring Conference on March 28, with a keynote address from Peter Meineck, of Aquila Theatre, director of the Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives project.
Teaching Resources
Educators from 16 high schools attended two all-day workshops, on October 2011 and February 2012, where they received an Educators’ Guide to Teaching Antigone, heard talks from experts on the text and its contexts, and collaborated to plan their curricula.
Keynote Speaker: Student Conference and Public Lecture
The Antigone in Wisconsin Student Conference was held on March 28, 2012. Nearly 300 students from sixteen Wisconsin high schools participated, presenting their work, engaging in workshop activities with UW-Madison faculty and graduate students, and listening to a keynote presention by Peter Meineck of Aquila Theatre.
Peter Meineck is the Founder and Program Director of the Aquila Theatre, which reinterprets classical plays for contemporary audiences. He is also Clinical Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Studies at New York University.He has published several translations of Greek plays, including Aeschylus’ Oresteia (winner of the Lewis Galantiere Award for Literary Translation). In 2010, Meineck was awarded the American Philological Association Award for Outreach.
Support for Antigone in Wisconsin
Antigone in Wisconsin was an initiative of the UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities, supported by the UW-Madison Libraries; The Evjue Foundation; the departments of Theatre and Drama, Classics, and Comparative Literature; Global Studies; Integrated Liberal Studies; Wisconsin Humanities Council; Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction; and the Anonymous Fund of the College of Letters & Science.