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Alumna to Discuss Percy Jackson Series from Classical Perspective

CONWAY, Ark. (March 3, 2013) - Hendrix alumna Sarah Jacobson will present "Heroes Abandoned: Parent-Child Relationships from Homer to Riordan" Thursday, March 7, at 7:30 p.m. in Reves Recital Hall. The program is part of the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language 2012-2013 event series.   

Jacobson, a 2004 Hendrix graduate and President's Medal recipient, will discuss the classical influences on the popular Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, focusing specifically on parent-child relationships.

A reception in Trieschmann Gallery will follow. The event, sponsored by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and Language, is free and open to the public. This event is. For more information, contact Henryetta Vanaman at 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu.

Currently teaching Latin in the Upper School at Nichols, an independent day school in Buffalo, New York, as well as working to complete her Ph.D. in classics at SUNY Buffalo, Jacobson also earned a master's degree in classics from the University of Arizona in 2007. Her research interests center on the practice of allusion in both ancient and modern literature.

At SUNY Buffalo, Jacobson works with the Tesserae Project, a free online tool for detecting allusions in Latin poetry (and soon in Greek, English, and across other languages). She is the co-author of several papers on humanities computing and its uses in detecting allusions in Latin poetry, including a piece published in the Transactions of the American Philological Association this winter, entitled "Intertextuality in the Digital Age," and a 2011 piece in Literary and Linguistic Computing, entitled "Evidence of Intertextuality:  Investigating Paul the Deacon's Angustae Vitae.  Her dissertation focuses on the application of digital humanities to the study of the Roman poet Catullus.

Jacobson received teaching awards both at SUNY, Buffalo and the University of Arizona.  In 2004, she won a Watson Fellowship to explore the role archaeological remains play in the formation of ethnic and national identities in Spain, Portugal, England, Mexico, and Peru.

Founded in 1876, Hendrix College is a national leader in engaged liberal arts and sciences education. For the fifth consecutive year, Hendrix was named one of the country's "Up and Coming" liberal arts colleges by U.S. News and World Report. Hendrix is featured in the 2012 edition of the Princeton Review as one of the country's best 377 colleges, the latest edition of Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges, Forbes magazine's annual list of America's Top 650 Colleges, and the 2013 edition of the Fiske Guide to Colleges. Hendrix has been affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884. For more information, visit www.hendrix.edu.