If you happen to hear Canadian folk music alongside ancient Greek and Latin issuing from the top floor of Kendall Hall, it’s probably one of the two new assistant classics professors, Dalton Sala ’20 or Stephen Hill.
Sala, who plays guitar, says his love for music helped him develop a love for literature.
“Music is a lot like literature,” Sala said. “You can’t see, feel, or taste it, but you can hear it. You can think about its rationality and beauty, and have it inspire you.”
Hill said he also enjoys music, having played the piano off and on for most of his life.
“I think there are some extraordinarily well-written songs in country music between, say, the 1940s through the 1980s,” Hill said. “It would be really fun to have a class on that period and genre, and just treat the songs as poetry.”
Eric Hutchinson, chairman and associate professor of classics, said while Sala is primarily a Latinist who enjoys Cicero and Augustine, Hill is a classicist who focuses on Greek literature during the time of the Roman Empire.
“They’re young and energetic, and I think will bring a lot of good things to our department and to campus at large,” Hutchinson said.
Sala, originally from Colorado, said he came to Hillsdale as an undergraduate in order to pursue the kind of education he wanted.
“Colorado has mountains, and that’s great,” Sala said. “I love mountains, but Hillsdale has something much better, which is the pursuit of learning in the liberal arts.”
Sala majored in Latin during his undergraduate years, since it was the language that had touched him the most in high school. Besides that, however, Sala said he speaks some Ancient Greek, loves listening to German music, and enjoys trying to read French poetry.
After graduating from Hillsdale, Sala attended Bryn Mawr College for his master’s degree and Ph.D. in classics. His current research interests revolve around philosophy in the early Christian church.
“Cicero was, as he claimed, a skeptic, so he didn’t think we could know truth fully,” Sala said. “Augustine tweaks that and says, ‘You’re right, Cicero, we can’t know truth fully because God is ultimately above our understanding.’ It’s not meant to make you despair. It’s meant to make you awestruck by God’s infinite greatness, and pursue him further.”
Before coming back to Hillsdale, Sala taught at a Catholic seminary, and said he loved the work because of the seminarians’ concern with their moral and spiritual formation, but believed he would find similar qualities in students at Hillsdale.
“Hillsdale is really good at encouraging the moral formation of students without mandating it,” Sala said. “I feel that undergraduates here understand that, and they pursue it.”
In his spare time, Sala enjoys playing guitar. He especially admires Canadian folk artist Stan Rogers, who sings about maritime provinces in Canada around the Great Lakes.
“I would love to teach a CSP seminar on the music of Stan Rogers,” Sala said. “This would be an opportunity for me to, as professors love to do, intellectualize one of my interests.”
This semester, Sala is teaching Beginning Latin I, Intermediate Latin, and a seminar class on Augustine’s “Confessions.”
Meanwhile, Hill took a self-described “circuitous” route to becoming a professor in classics.
Originally from Florida, Hill attended Bryan College in Tennessee, majoring in English and studying Greek and Spanish. Afterward, he got a master’s in teaching English as a foreign language at the University of Illinois.
“While I was at Illinois, I had also started teaching Greek for an organization based in Jerusalem that did summer courses in Rome,” Hill said. “That made me think, ‘Wow, teaching English as a second language is great, but teaching Greek is even better.’”
Hill went back to school to get a second master’s degree in classics at the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. in classics at the University of Virginia. After teaching at Wyoming Catholic College for a few years, he joined the Hillsdale faculty.
This fall, Hill is teaching Beginning Greek I, Literature of the Roman Republic, focusing on Cicero’s “Pro Archia Poeta,” and an upper-level seminar called Greek Historiography, focusing on book seven of Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War.”
Hill said his heavily laden bookshelves include languages he can read and languages he’s started learning but never quite got around to — the former including Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, Italian, and German, to varying degrees of fluency.
“I was drawn to Hillsdale because it was a really wonderful visit when I came in February,” Hill said. “I’m excited to see what it’s like to be on the inside, become part of the community.”
