Dr. Sophie J.V. Mills
UNC Asheville
During her seventeen-year career at UNC Asheville, Dr. Sophie J.V. Mills, Professor and Chair, Department of Classics has inspired students. Her teaching philosophy conveys her commitment to both her students and the discipline she has "been in love with since the age of 14." She "shares with students the fascination and beauty of material that is up to 2700 years distant from them chronologically, and shows how these texts can help them make sense of their world."
An Oxford-educated classicist and prolific scholar, Dr. Mills' recent book titles include A Companion to Euripides' Bacchae (Duckworth 2006), A Companion to Euripedes' Hippolytus (Duckworth 2002; 2003) and Theseus, Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (Oxford 1997). She has written dozens of scholarly articles and presents frequently at national and international conferences. She received the Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities (2003), the Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievement (2006), and the Ruth and Leon Feldman Professorship (2006-2007) - given for outstanding achievement in scholarship and service.
As co-director of a study abroad program in Turkey and Greece, Dr. Mills works tirelessly to design and provide life-changing learning opportunities of the highest caliber. Some of Dr. Mill's most accomplished students have entered the teaching profession and they praise her energetic style. Her extensive teaching experience includes elementary and intermediate Greek and Latin and advanced courses such as Attic Tragedy, Greek Comedy, Hellenic Historians, Thucydides, Plato, Cicero, and Roman Love Poetry. Her students who have pursued doctoral studies credit her for their excellent preparation and for sharing "the flavor of the scholarly excellence and passion she experienced at Oxford." One student fondly remembers Dr. Mills bringing a tiny, tattered copy of The Iliad reading the first lines "in melodious metered Greek."
Dr. Mills combines kindness and rigor in her pedagogy. She makes Classics pertinent and accessible in such diverse courses as Ancient Sexuality and Ancient and Modern, which considers works such as Euripides Medea, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Billie Holiday's Strange Fruit. As one student reports, "she strives to ensure that we understand the essence of the literature," and she "makes formidable material palatable with clarity, good humor and kindness." Truly, she transcends "the narrower confines of specialist research and reaches out to the broader community." She mentors undergraduate research, supervises senior thesis projects, teaches interdisciplinary humanities courses, lectures about Greek Literature, meets with students in a campus coffee house to translate Orestes, and visits a sixth-grade class to help young students pronounce some of Homer's Odyssey in ancient Greek.
Students remark: she "infected me with a great passion for Classics," "taught me to analyze texts with a careful eye and to write with concrete direct prose," "saw where I could go, not where I was," and "I'll never forget the gifts I received from her mentorship. " Indeed, Dr. Sophie Mills' embodies UNC Asheville's liberal arts mission.