King’s Academy faculty member George Morganis was recently awarded the Fowler Merle-Smith Scholarship to attend the summer 2023 session at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a six-week program of study of Greece and its major monuments, and to deepen understanding of the country’s landscape, history, material culture, and literature from antiquity to the present.

Morganis, who teaches humanities at King’s Academy, was also the recipient of the Gulamerian Scholarship in 2022, which provided funding to attend the Classical Summer School at the American Academy in Rome, a program designed to provide a well-founded understanding of the growth and development of the city of Rome through a careful study of material remains and literary sources. In 2015, he also took part in excavations of the Athenian Agora, the public marketplace of ancient Athens.

“I’ve long been interested in the ancient world and challenging our students to put themselves in the shoes (or sandals) of ancient peoples,” said Morganis. “That interest began over a decade ago in a college classroom, where my professor asked me a single question: ‘Pompey Magnus, how shall you vote?’”

In this gamified, semester-long course on the Roman Republic, each student was assigned a famous Roman and given certain powers and characteristics based on their historical auctoritas (authority or prestige), gravitas (dignity), and pietas (religious devotion), Morganis explained. Every week, elections were held, and the class voted on two consuls. The ‘Roman’ with the most consulships at the end of the semester was awarded 15 points on the final exam.

“Though my senatorial colleagues (the floormates of my freshman dorm) and I figured out that the secret to this game was to form a faction, control the elections, and find a way to tie and split the extra points, we were tragically betrayed by a friend, who was aptly named ‘Julius Caesar’,” said Morganis.

Morganis has successfully introduced gamification and historical roleplay to classrooms at King’s Academy, inspiring his students to develop a keen interest in and understanding of the subjects he teaches in Grade 7 and 8 Humanities, and the Grade 9 survey course of the ancient world (HRS 301: A History of the Ancient and Classical Worlds).