Our Mission and Expected Project Outcomes

The project’s mission is to contribute to critical rethinking of how we use this potential for the advancement of Classical Studies at the levels of new theoretical ideas, scholarship, curriculum, and methods of teaching.

Our main concern is to explain the character of the Greek and Roman legacy and the way in which it was passed on to posterity even in times of a biggest shift in taste and attitude. The question, what the modern world understands by 'classical tradition', is actual again. What we need, is a critical review of previous scholarship and a presentation of our own evaluation of the evidence. The term 'humanism' used to betoken the kind of cultural values that one would derive from the so-called liberal education, needs a critical review, too.

Among the expected project outcomes are:

• Improvement of participants’ qualification through instructive and inspiring exchange of expertise, and through encouraging rigorous self-development;
• Providing young academics with fresh insights and ideas in order to help them upgrade their course syllabi and/or design new ones introducing their newly acquired knowledge and experience into their home institutional environments;
• Renewal of the educational methods and content of the discipline and introducing into the traditional academic curricula innovative topics and thematic areas, dealing with modern political theories and new trends in the development of social sciences;
• Facilitating the scholarly activity of young academics by promoting comparative approach and applying interdisciplinary methodology; development of the participants' capacity for interdisciplinary and critical research, binding Classics to contemporary social environment;
• Encouraging the application of new technologies and of different (not just textual) sources of information (visual materials, on-line resources, etc.) in the teaching process in order to open the field of Classics to other academic areas;
• Transcending the intellectual and geo-political division by constituting a network of scholars willing to initiate research and other scholarly projects based on interdisciplinary approaches;
• Achieving a long-term effect through promoting meaningful co-operation among scholars at regional and international level, and creating an intellectual community dedicated to excellence in teaching as well as in research in Bulgaria and the neighbouring countries;
• Opening a wide debate on the state of the art in the discipline and starting a process of a far-reaching reform in teaching Classics in the target region, involving a shift from traditional methods and focal points to more contemporary-oriented approaches.