Elton joined The Open University in July 2009 excited by the commitment openness
and keen to contribute to engaging those audiences traditional universities cannot
reach. Having attended a state comprehensive school, where there was no
offering of Classical Studies, his first encounter with the ancient Greek and
Roman worlds was via BBC Children's television and the Jackanory special, Odysseus:
the Greatest Hero of them all. Yes, Elton pins the blame for his life-long entanglement
with ancient Greek culture and the stories told about it on Blackadder’s
Baldrick (Tony Robinson).
Fascinated by Homer's Troy story life-and-death struggles of
war (the Iliad) and rollercoaster voyages of discovery (the Odyssey),
Elton studied Classical Civilisation at the University of Leeds, followed by an
MA in Greek Civilisation and a further MA to learn Greek and Latin at Ohio
State (in the US), before embarking on a PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge. There
he also discovered a surprising flair for teaching Greek literature, which took
him on a journey from Cambridge, via the universities of Bristol, Nottingham,
and Reading, as well as Christ Church, Oxford, to the OU.
As Professor of Greek Literature and Culture, Elton's day
job is reading Homer's epics, on which he has published a Beginner’s Guide(OneWorld, 2013) with
Joel Christensen, along with tragedy, the histories of Herodotus and
Thucydides, and Pausanias. Yet, for the past decade or so, he has also
been researching the use of digital methods and tools for exploring the
cultural geography of the ancient world. Places mean much more than dots on a
map: they fall and rise; they belong to various kinds of networks; each has a
life history bound up in the stories told about it. To enable these stories to
be told requires combining different online resources from literary texts to material
objects. Fortunately, you don’t have to be an IT expert to work with digital technology.
Elton works as part of a global network called Pelagios,
where people from academia, cultural heritage, and the creative industries each
bring different skills to the mix. Collaboration is the name of the game. Best
of all, this endeavour is all about making information more open and accessible
to all, which perfectly aligns with the core ethos of the OU.
Elton's primary goal remains bringing the ancient Greek
world to life, making learning fun, and helping people to think for themselves.
The classical world might seem self-contained, but the more you learn about it,
the more you see how much it still has to offer on questions of individual
identity, social relations, strategies of persuasion, political agency, and embedded
structures of power.
Elton Barker's activities
Browse 4 OpenLearn items Elton Barker has worked on