A faculty highlight of Kathryn Jasper (Ph.D. 2012, University of California, Berkeley, in History and Medieval Studies), Assistant Professor of History, core faculty of European Studies, and Latin instructor at Illinois State.
Jasper teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of History, and Latin in Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. Jasper contributed significantly to the development of the Classical studies minor and the European studies major and minor at ISU. She is the co-leader of the Latin section.
When teaching, Jasper likes to facilitate connections between her students and the material by taking them out of the classroom. She believes that learning about history on-site makes for better, more dedicated readers. She has taken students to the Art Institute and the Newberry Library and manuscript archive in Chicago to experience Latin texts and Roman and medieval artifacts first hand. In addition, Jasper established a four-week study abroad to Orvieto, Italy with Assistant Professor of Art History Lea Cline.
Jasper has served as a faculty floor mentor for the residence halls, as an adviser to the RSO High Rise, and co-adviser for Latin Club. She regularly mentors several graduate and undergraduate students in research projects and independent studies.
In 2015 Jasper received the CAS Excellence Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Pre-Tenured Faculty Member, and she has been named an Influential and Inspirational Teacher three times by graduating seniors in the History department. In 2016 Jasper was awarded the University’s Teaching Effectiveness Award. In her research, Jasper studies how people communicated and disseminated ideas about land management, which was fundamental to the Romans as well as to their medieval successors. She is currently completing a book on the eleventh-century monastic congregation of Fonte Avellana, located in the Italian Marches, entitled Mapping a Monastic Network: Peter Damian and Fonte Avellana in the Eleventh Century.
