When Patricia Craig decided against attending Hillsdale College at the age of 18 and went to the University of Dallas instead, she did not expect to return more than a decade later as an assistant professor of classics at the college. 

Craig, a Hillsdale Academy graduate and the daughter of Professor of Politics Mickey Craig, joined the classics department this semester to teach first semester Latin and advanced Greek and Latin. Earning her master’s and doctorate in Greek and Latin from the Catholic University of America, Craig taught at CUA, George Washington University, and Christendom College before coming to Hillsdale.

“I didn’t know that I would come back to Hillsdale,” Craig said. “But it’s my hometown, and so it’s really nice personally for me to be here. Hillsdale is well known for having a great student body and hard working students. It’s such a treat for teachers to have good students because then you’re challenged to become a better teacher, and that’s something I realized would be a great opportunity here.”

Although she later fell in love with Greek and majored in classical philology, Craig began her undergraduate studies at the University of Dallas as an English major and a Latin minor.

Her classes in English trivium and a project on the British-American poet W. H. Auden during her junior year helped turn Craig toward classics.

“I read all the works of W.H. Auden and then read a lot of secondary literature about him,” Craig said. “I saw in his poetry a real love for the classics, and he clearly had been formed by studying classics. So, my favorite English poet seemed steeped in classical poetry and literature.”

Studying ancient philosophy, Craig said she had a hard time understanding Greek philosophers because she was not reading the texts in their original language. 

“At a certain point, I realized I wanted to read Aristotle and Plato in the original Greek, and I had no Greek,” Craig said.

Increasingly interested in grammar, Latin poetry, and Greek philosophy, Craig decided during her junior year to step away from her English classes to learn Greek and pursue the study of philosophy and poetry through classics.

“I became really interested in the conversation among philosophers and poets that had really sprung up with the Greeks, since we don’t really have much writing that existed before classical Greece,” Craig said. “And then I became really interested in the way that the Romans picked up on themes in Greek literature, so I wanted to keep delving into that.”

During her graduate studies, Craig wrote her dissertation on the Roman stoic philosopher and playwright Seneca. Craig said that she put Seneca’s tragedies and philosophical works in conversation to explore the philosopher’s portrayal of exemplary virtue and virtuous death in his tragedies.

Her background in Roman poetry and philosophy made Craig a great fit for the classics department at Hillsdale, Associate Professor of Classics Carl Young said.

“Her particular research specialty fit well with our department,” Young said. “It gave us something that we didn’t have before, someone who could do Roman philosophy but also Latin poetry. That was something we really needed.”

Craig said she has a strong interest in spoken Greek and Latin and incorporates speaking as well as reading and translation into her classes. 

“I think the more input in a language you receive, the more quickly you progress in a language,” Craig said. “I studied Latin for nine years without any speaking, and then when I was 25, I went to one week of immersion. I couldn’t really speak any Latin in the beginning, and then by the end of the week I was speaking quite well, and I noticed that I was reading more quickly and with more enjoyment than I ever had before.”

In the past two years, Craig has run a number of conferences at the University of Kentucky and Christendom College for spoken Greek and Latin. While preparing for these conferences, she met her current fiance, Aloysius Aeschliman, with whom she would meet to practice speaking Latin.

Young said Craig’s teaching approach makes her a good candidate for Hillsdale’s classics department.

“It involves a lot of speaking, a lot of reading out loud, a lot of memorizing passages and reciting them out loud, imitating great writers from Greek and Roman antiquity,” Young said. “It’s a different method than I use and most of my colleagues use when we teach Latin and Greek. But it’s one that’s becoming increasingly popular. Students were asking for this sort of natural language method, spoken Latin.”

According to sophomore Cecilia Jansen, a student taking Intro to Latin Literature, Craig’s use of spoken Latin was jarring at first but is proving helpful in learning both vocabulary and the content of the texts.

“It was definitely a hard transition, just because it’s something that I’m not really used to,” Jansen said. “She asks us comprehension questions on the readings in Latin. So we have to know what’s going on in the story but also how to answer those questions in the language that the story is written in, which I appreciate because there are so many things that you can take from the language rather than just translating it into English.”