Professor Ryan Platte celebrates 10 years as Northwestern Classics faculty.
August 26, 2026
Professor Ryan Platte’s fascination for the evolution of thought over time has been the north star of his research interests throughout his studies and the greatest delight in his now 10-year teaching career. He enjoys investigating this evolution through the verbal art (written or oral) of ancient and modern cultures and witnessing it in the questions and observations of his students.
In high school, Platte was primarily interested in English literature, and he saw learning about Classics as a means to supplement his literature studies. Knowing that English authors were well-versed in ancient languages, and curious about the language itself, he wanted to learn Latin to engage more deeply with their works and “because it sounded really fun and interesting!” Although his school did not offer Latin as a class, his English teacher knew the language well enough to teach off the books and created an opportunity for Platte to informally-formally study Latin through regular meetings.
As an undergraduate, Platte studied English and Classics as a double major, still with the ultimate goal of pursuing a PhD in English. When he studied Greek, as with Latin, it was initially to acquire a tool to understand authors like Milton and Chaucer. However, he found that he did not want to quit studying Classics. Moreover, “using literature as a window to study a culture,” he realized, “was something I could do in Classics just as well,” but with a particular linguistic approach that he could more clearly picture himself doing with Classical languages. He therefore decided to pursue doctoral study in Classics with a focus on Latin and Greek linguistics and added Sanskrit to his repertoire to support his work with Indo-European linguistics. For quite some time, his research focused on oral poetry: Homeric and more general early archaic poetry. He found the poetry beautiful and fascinating and material for which linguistic tools were especially powerful means of learning about the cultures that produced them.
His interest in oral poetry also encompasses English language folk song, which led to his first work in reception studies, a paper on the Cohen brothers’ use of English and Greek song culture in their adaptation of the Odyssey, called Oh Brother Where Art Thou. Now, he is working on a Classical reception research project based in Chicago: a study of The Forum in Bronzeville, which was not long ago saved from demolition. Upon seeing a news article about the building, Platte wrote to its owner asking to visit it in person and was promptly recruited to a team of researchers working on The Forum, with Platte handling its Classical reception. This fall, he will publish his resulting paper which addresses questions like, “Why is there a building called The Forum? Why is the art inside Classically inspired? What was happening at that moment that motivated those decisions?” While his project has been expanding to consider Classical reception in 19th/20th-century Bronzeville more broadly, Platte’s upcoming paper focuses on the ideas of the building’s founder, William Kent, a Chicago alderman and eventual congressman for California. Through reading Kent’s writings in archives at Yale, Platte traced how Kent developed his ideas for the future of America based on how he understood ancient Greece and Rome as well as how Kent’s endeavors in Chicago motivated by these ideas formed a basis for what he tried to accomplish at a national scale when elected to congress. Keep an eye out for Platte’s paper in the fall!
In addition to his research, Platte’s interest in the evolution of thoughts over time also manifests in his passion for and meticulous approach to pedagogy. There is a lot of invisible work that goes into teaching, namely, making decisions regarding the organization and pacing that create the conditions in which students learn. “In what order do you explain things? How many things do you introduce now, how many things do you introduce later? How should your tests reflect the things that you've been studying? All these nuts and bolts are the core of what makes good teaching.” One piece of feedback that Platte receives from students regularly is how well organized his classes are, which he considers very meaningful because he spends an immense amount of time thinking about it.
The most fulfilling aspect of teaching for Platte is witnessing the change in how students think about the material, talking with them and watching their engagement with it become more sophisticated. “That means you’re doing your job,” Platte says, grinning. This change in students reflects their acquisition of important transferable skills. “They’ve developed a more sophisticated way to think about history, culture, and texts, which changes a person in a powerful way that is hard to quantify but lives on beyond the material you learned it through. You may learn those skills through a close analysis of Homer, but those skills will still be with you, even after that passage itself has faded into the back of your mind.” For Platte, who has always known that he wanted to teach, that growth is incredibly rewarding to see happen right in front of him.
Throughout his time at Northwestern, Platte has been the director of the Greek program here (and directed NU’s Summer Athens program!), and he has been thrilled to watch it succeed in bringing students from not knowing any Greek to having read Plato, the New Testament, and the Iliad. Two things Platte emphasized while reflecting on this is that he wants students to know 1) how doable that is, and 2) how powerful that is. Gaining the skills to engage with texts in their original language allows students to ask those more sophisticated questions that he sees develop over time, and those refined questioning habits and critical thinking skills carry over into other spaces. “It also leads to a love of the language that allows you to make it a part of yourself, that drives you in developing those intellectual skills, those transferable skills, and the ability to do real criticism.”
Thank you, Professor Platte, for 10 years of teaching!
NB: Some quotes have been edited for clarity.