Dumbarton Oaks & HMML Coptic Summer Program

From 8 July to 2 August 2019 I attended the Coptic language course hosted at the Hill Manuscript Museum and Library at St John’s University, Minnesota. The course was generously supported by Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. While they have offered a Syriac summer language program for several years now, the inclusion of a second language course is relatively new.

The Coptic course was jointly taught by Prof Victor Ghica and Dr Alin Suciu. Meeting over four weeks, Victor covered an intensive introduction to the grammar in the mornings, while in the afternoon Alin provided broader introduction to Coptic studies. This notably included practical labs introducing key online resources including the Coptic Scriptorium and the Corpus dei Manoscritti Copti Letterari. Other practical labs focused on reading and transcribing palaeography, during which we had the opportunity to take a hands-on look at some of the HMML’s physical collections.

St John’s and HMML were great host institutions for this long-running program. Summer on a quiet college campus provides a nice retreat for full-time language learning, and the library’s resources of microfilmed and digitised manuscripts are a real treasure. Special thanks to the programming director at HMML, Tim Ternes, who hosted us and kept our breaks full of coffee, tea, and snacks. The executive director of HMML, Father Columba Stewart, who will give the 2019 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities. There is a great interview in the NEH Magazine, where he talks about the library’s works and his own path in life.

August 5th, 2019 by DC Whalin