One of my favorite hobbies is studying the Latin language and the literature written in that language over the past two millennia. I am fascinated by the vast range of the human experience that has been expressed in this medium. Latin literature includes tragedy, comedy, mysteries, history, philosophy, music, mythology, folk tales, ghost stories, and much more. I truly believe there is something for everyone here.
A few Latin-related projects that I am proud of, in no particular order:
- From 2015-2024 I volunteered for the Cascadia Junior Classical League, a nonprofit that organizes a yearly convention in Washington State for students interested in Greco-Roman culture. In 2024, I gave a “Colloquium” (informal talk) on tautograms (epic poetry written in Latin in which every word begins with the same letter), entitled “Placentius’ Pugna Porcorum, Plus Additional Alliterative Amusements and Delightfully Desultory Digressions”. The text of that talk is here (PDF), and the slides are here (PDF).
- In April 2017 I spent a week interviewing Fr. Reginald Foster in Latin about his life and teaching. Those videos are now all on YouTube with subtitles in both English and Latin, here.
- When I was in college I found it useful to be able to type ancient Greek (with diacritic marks) in Emacs and wrote a script in Racket and Emacs Lisp to help with that task. That code is on GitHub, here.
- I spent part of Summer 2016 compiling an idiosyncratic florilegium of parallel Latin/English texts. That collection is shared via Google Drive, here. A ZIP file of that project in PDF format can be downloaded here.
Matthew Martinez-Dirks 