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Hello and welcome back to the Classics Podcast and I'm delighted to be joined today by Amanda Dylina Morse,

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who studied at the University of Washington.

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for a degree in ancient history and classical studies, but she's now a social epidemiologist based at Queen's University Belfast.

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So she's here today to tell us all about that journey, which is an unusual and fascinating one.

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Hi, Amanda. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Hiya.

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So let's let's go back to the start. Let's first talk about your first interest and encounter with classics in the ancient world,

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and then we'll track through how you went from there to being a research in epidemiology.

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Yeah. So my first encounter with the ancient world, I had heard some mythology sort of growing up in the way that a lot of children do,

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that someone tells you a story in primary school.

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But I was really fortunate that when I started high school, I went to a really low income high school in the United States,

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but the school district had hired a biologist who had a master's degree in classics, and so he was hired to be a biology teacher.

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But he had convinced the school to also allow him to teach kids Latin.

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someone else we could have had on the podcast, right? Yeah, he's great.

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He's a very unusual person, and I stayed really close with him.

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And until we moved from the United States to Northern Ireland,

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I would go back and I would visit him still every year, like I'm about to have my 20th anniversary graduating.

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And I was still like hauling myself down to the town where I grew up to visit him.

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So I studied Latin with him for four years in high school, and it was such a wonderful experience.

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I had loved learning growing up and I always really liked school,

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but Latin was the first time that I'd really had a subject that I really deeply

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engaged with and that I was so excited about and that I felt really good at.

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And here I think it was the combination of the subject.

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And then also with him being just a really kind teacher who took an interest in me and like no one in my family had

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gone to university and he helped me apply and really encouraged me and was just a really lovely force in my life.

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So lovely to hear.

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I mean, were the particular bits that you remember strongly learning that really grabbed you and that resonated with you from those early studies?

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Absolutely. So we had kind of a a rough starting and that I really liked the subject and I was really engaged with it.

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And then I was ready to move a lot faster than the class was.

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And I, you know, in that way that sometimes 14 year old children do like started to be kind of disruptive.

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It's like I was bored. And so he went to the back of the room and I remember him like pulling this really tattered copy of Wheelock's out of the cupboard.

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And he was like, Right, you can move faster and you're going to move faster.

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Like, I'm going to give this to you.

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And then you just go through it and you ask me questions when you need them, and I'm going to help the rest of the students.

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And so for the first year I studied in Wheelcok's by myself and then the last three years that I check with him,

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he would like bring me texts and then tell me like, you know, read books ten and then tell me what you think.

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And and so as a teenager, I read a lot of Catullus and a lot of Ovid and Catullus, a particular when I was younger,

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I really identified with because he was kind of moody and like wanted to complain about things all the time.

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And I had really big feelings. And when you're a teenager that has really big feelings,

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it's nice to read about someone that like also felt really angsty 2000 years before, and it's such a great way to learn as well.

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When you were given that chance to explore yourself and obviously have the facility to ask questions and and to find out more,

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but to be able to, yeah, lose yourself in those texts and go at your own pace and explore all that stuff.

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That's such a great experience. It was, it was really positive and it set me up very well to then go to university where I was able to sort

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of skip over the the earlier Latin classes and go right into author classes and start taking those.

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And the University of Washington does quarters instead of semesters.

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And so you get these sort of ten week smashes where it's like Roman lyric poetry for ten weeks and then it's Livy for ten weeks and then,

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you know, it's Cicero's Pro Caelio for ten weeks.

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And so you get to cover a lot of ground.

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Yeah, I think many of our UK based listeners might know about the American system of the university and perhaps having majors and minors.

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And so how did that work for you with doing all that you were doing Latin and language and but also history and all the other aspects.

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Yeah. So in the States we don't have A-levels and so a lot of what we call your general education

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requirements are done after you leave to go to university or you go to like a community college,

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which is kind of like a tech for your first two years.

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But rather than just doing modules for your subject, you're also then required to have what we call outside departmental credits,

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where you have to take a maths class and you have to take so many sciences or whatever.

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But then there are just like choice outside departmental credits that you're allowed.

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And because I was in the classics department and I was at the history department, I got to sort of get from both sides.

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And we were really fortunate at U Dab that the classics department and the history departments,

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sort of ancient history faculty would work really closely together.

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So your, your courses that you were taking are your modules that you were taking each term would sort of line up.

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And so I had one term where I was taking a Greek philosophy course at the same time that I was taking one on the Peloponnesian War.

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And then there was like another history class that also was sort of happening like in that same time period.

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And it was really lovely, like, line up really beautifully.

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Mm hmm. Yeah. Was it nice as well to be in that environment where there were other people perhaps like you that were as enthusiastic and interested?

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Maybe a bit different from when you'd been at school before? Yeah, it was.

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And two of my best friends are from my undergrad that we studied classics and history together

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and my friend Melissa and I just got back from walking Hadrian's Wall together in August.

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And yeah, somebody else did.

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Also walked and run the length of Hadrian's Wall.

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So it's obviously a trend.

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I know I was listening to that episode and he said that he ran it and it was like, I don't know how you do that in five days.

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And I also don't know how you ran it because I was my worst self every afternoon after about mile 12.

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Well, big up Sam Betley. Oh, that's fantastic.

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So those friends that study classics, what are they doing now? So Melissa is a philanthropist now?

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Yeah. Who did a master's degree in classics after and is brilliant.

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And Amy and has three little children that she's staying home with right now.

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But before that she worked for a public insurer in the United States.

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Yeah, it's just brilliant to hear all the different things that people do after after classics.

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So for yourself, after you done your undergraduate degree, did you then go on to do further study in between?

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Yeah. So I worked for a while after after I did my undergraduate degree,

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and then I got a master's degree in public health in a very long in community oriented public health practice at the University of Washington as well.

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And then I worked as a surveillance epidemiologist for five and a half years at the Washington State Department of Health,

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where I monitored emergency department visits and outpatient clinic visits for a variety of conditions.

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Mostly injury and violence, and now I'm doing a Ph.D. So, you know, it's like in and out of education.

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Once you have that love for learning that, I think you never really want to let it go.

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It's always something that pulls you back, whatever the subject, whatever the topic.

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Yeah, I'm hoping this is the last go. But you like this is the last time that I do it.

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Well, you'll be a doctor soon, you know. So hopefully I lose a bit more than about that switch to doing a public health masters

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and the people advising you guiding me towards the different options available.

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Was it something that you'd heard of before? How did how did that come about?

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It is, you know, on the surface, a very unusual switch from classics in ancient history to to social epidemiology.

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But there is a consistent thread that runs through it. So I did my my undergraduate thesis on ancient reproductive medicine.

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I was pretty obsessed with the wandering womb and what people thought was happening in in bodies with uterus, with the uterus and that.

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And then I thought that I wanted to be a midwife. And I worked very briefly for a for profit health care company doing insurance authorisations.

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And that was really terrible. And so then I was like, Great, I'm going to leave and I'm going to study to be a midwife.

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And I went to Indonesia and was working on a project there with the Indonesian Midwives Association and

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was so taken with the fact that the people who had the most interesting jobs weren't actually midwives,

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they were like public health and policy people who were making sure that the baby in front of them wasn't the only one that had someone to catch them,

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that every baby had the opportunity to have someone catch them.

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And my brother in law had just done his master's degree in public health.

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And I was telling him about how cool population health was.

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And this is amazing. I'd love to learn more about this.

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And he had just done his MPH and sort of like what you should do what you like.

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I did it and it was all right. I came back to the States and rather than going to midwifery school, I went to public school.

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And I'm guessing then at that point that people that were studying public health and wanting

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to go into that sector had all come from different places and different backgrounds.

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Was that the case? Yeah, absolutely. So there are some undergraduate degrees in public health.

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There are definitely more of them now than there were ten years ago.

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But epidemiology in particular is really only so deeply taught at the graduate level.

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So all epidemiologists came from somewhere else,

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and there are definitely ones that did their undergraduate degree in biology or statistics or chemistry or whatever.

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But there are also epis who come from other really unusual backgrounds,

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and I definitely had the most unusual background and my grad school cohort and in my office, like other epidemiologists.

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But I feel like it really enriches the way that I practice.

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epi That I come from this space, that it's so ingrained in you to be a good writer and a good communicator,

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and to be able to read and ingest all of this information and bring it together and synthesise it and form a coherent

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argument and then have people come along with you based on the decision that you're saying is the best one?

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I think that's a huge part of what it means to be trained in the humanities.

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Exactly. And so much of it is we're studying the past, but we're studying people mostly in places,

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and we're studying things like understanding how health works, how health care worked in the ancient world,

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what medicine there was and wasn't, and how we're looking at those big societal shifts,

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which actually you often can only look at in hindsight and analyse in that in that way.

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Yeah, I and so I'm writing my my Ph.D. dissertation now,

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and there is a tiny section of it where I've translated a letter from Cicero to his friend Atticus,

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and he's he's talking about how he has sort of all of these worries, and he calls them sharp stones and thorns of domestic troubles.

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And he's sort of lamenting to Atticus that, you know, all he really needs in order to alleviate this is an hour of Atticus,

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his ear beside him and the sort of the prising of intimate male friendship.

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And the importance of it for men's mental health is a huge component of my Ph.D. and I in my dissertation,

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I was making this argument that, you know, it's not in the biological nature of men to be unable to share emotional vulnerabilities with each other,

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that it's a it's a social choice that we're making together, as I as a community, to to say that it's not acceptable for men to do that.

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But that's not who men have always been.

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And we could choose to be different again and to have structures like that where men speak really openly of how much they love and need each other.

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And perhaps we shouldn't be so dismissive sometimes of Cicero when he does go on a little bit in some of his letters.

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I think it's a really good point. And he writes, doesn't he, very specifically on friendship.

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And he says something, those emotions and those interactions that stand the test of time for sure.

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To what extent have you by doing your studies, also then thought more about what public health itself was like in the ancient world?

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Is that something you thought about? Yeah, definitely.

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So there are sort of low hanging fruit with that.

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Things like people will often say things like, Oh, you know,

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like people only lived into their thirties until the modern era and like, I would never want to live then.

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And then it's like a population health scientist.

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I get to say things like, Well, if we actually exclude under-five mortality and people lived until basically what they do now that you know,

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it's not that everyone was dying into their thirties and only very wealthy people were living into their eighties.

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If you made it to your fifth birthday, you have a very good chance of surviving.

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Your chances of making it to your fifth birthday were quite low. But if you made it to that,

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it was pretty smooth sailing and those sorts of things can still give us answers

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to questions that people have been investigating and arguing about for centuries.

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Right. In terms of actually having sort of the third and fourth centuries.

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C.E. And what happened with the collapse of the Roman Empire.

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And obviously there's so many political factors and war, but also potentially things like climate change and public health as well.

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Yeah. And so I teach public health at the University of Washington and my undergrads.

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I have a couple of lectures where I talk about sort of how public health interventions have changed over time.

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And we'll talk about things like the fact that isolation and quarantine words that everyone became a lot more familiar with during the pandemic,

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those are not new ideas and that we have tons of evidence from ancient sources of people not necessarily understanding what was causing disease,

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but really actively trying to prevent the spread of it based on the knowledge that they had.

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And thinking about how, you know, if it's my miasma that's causing it, what can we do to prevent that?

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And understanding enough to note that sometimes you had to keep people separated?

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Indeed. And what was your own experience of these conversations and perhaps working within the sector,

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but also teaching about public health during the pandemic? It's such an extraordinary time to have lived through, particularly for you.

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Yeah. So my my lab where I worked found the first case of COVID in the United States.

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And so I was on the incident management team from January of 2020 until I left my job in October of 2021 and started my Ph.D.

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And it like I did feel really empowered as someone who had training as a historian and as an ancient historian to to speak,

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and also is an epidemiologist who was working on it to talk about how, you know,

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these things that were really scary and that maybe the general public had never heard of

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had a really long history of being shown as highly effective public health interventions.

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And it's a really about sort of getting to to marry those experiences together.

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In my course evaluations that I got back from my students at the end of that winter term and then the spring term of 2020.

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A lot of them specifically mentioned in their evaluations that having that class at that

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time was really helpful for them to be able to then go and talk to their own families and

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their friends about why it's not just the first time that people have ever told us to stay

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home or it's not the first time that people have ever been told to cover their face.

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Like we're actually told this pretty regularly. Yeah.

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By breaking down some of that strangeness and mystery, it becomes less scary as well, doesn't it?

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It does, yeah, because in a in a public health emergency like that,

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a lot of what causes the fear is uncertainty that you don't know what's happening and

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you're getting lots of information from different faces and there are lots of words

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that seem kind of interchangeable and you've got different sort of voices telling you

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different things at different times that are sometimes in contrast with each other. So having a clear message can be really powerful.

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It must have been really stressful and as you say,

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interesting time for that very first case being found and all of the different public health, social political ramifications that that has.

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It was. Yeah. And one of the one of the largest challenges of the pandemic was that it wasn't just the pandemic that we were dealing with.

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We had our regular jobs that we had to keep doing, too. And so I had to also keep monitoring the overdoses that I was in charge of

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monitoring and the firearm injuries and the domestic violence and the car crashes.

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And some of those things went down like there were fewer car crashes during lockdown, fewer people were driving.

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But we did see some increases in things like overdoses and people presenting to the emergency

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department with very high levels of alcohol intoxication and needed to have their stomach pumped.

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And we saw increased rates of domestic violence. But it was sometimes really difficult to then be able to move people into shelters.

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So there were sort of other effects and we had to keep sort of responding to those too.

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We couldn't just be working on COVID. We had to also be doing our regular jobs since then.

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You've obviously moved now on to doing a Ph.D. and also the lecturing teaching that you've mentioned,

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which must then seem like yet another sort of stage in your whole different type of life and all of these things that you've done.

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What's your day to day life like at the moment, and what are the parts you enjoy most?

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Yeah, so I work for a research institute within Queens called Queens Communities and Place for we do.

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I engaged research with communities, so we co-design research projects together.

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And then based on the findings of it, we co-design interventions to help address the challenges that are presented in it.

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And so I work for QUcap doing public health research and intervention stuff.

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So a lot around substance use right now and substance use prevention programs in

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a neighbourhood called the Market and in inner south Belfast.

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And then I also work at my Ph.D.,

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which is an exploration of the role of social connection as a protective factor against suicide in young men here in Belfast.

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Wow. And the cultural differences as well with that,

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studying that within the Belfast context compared to back in the States, obviously the family connections as well.

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But that must be, you know, such a particular context that comes with it when studying.

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Yeah, the conflict here in Northern Ireland, the Troubles,

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even though we're now 25 years on from the Good Friday Agreement, is still a really important part of the boys lives.

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And a lot of them themselves have high levels of trauma and they come from sometimes highly traumatised families.

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I had one boy and I was asking him sort of normal questions about his

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relationships with other men in his family and who would be a role model for him.

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And he just very calmly said like there are no men and they were all killed in the.

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Troubles. And I was like, All right, so no uncles that are, you know, setting an example for you.

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I moved on, but some of the experiences that they share are are so shaped by that conflict.

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And there are parallels in the States.

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So indigenous communities and I worked really closely with most of the 29 federated tribes that live in what's now Washington State,

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as well as a couple of the ones that don't have federal recognition and are still fighting for that.

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And I've worked with Alaska Native Communities and some other urban Indian and indigenous communities in other states as well.

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And there are definitely some parallels with intergenerational trauma and social deprivation and how those are shaping people's experiences.

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So it's not like a complete turn over. I think it would be much more challenging for me if I didn't come from a family that is from here.

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And so, you know, when boys say to me something about the neighbourhood where they live,

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I can say, like I understand what you are saying when you when you tell me that.

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Yeah. And you have those points of reference has it was interesting to see how the ancient world was perceived in both the states and in Ireland and in the UK.

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And you know, do you notice differences in how that studied taught and the access to those subjects,

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but also in just people's conceptions of the past? Yeah,

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and I do sometimes feel like kind of funny when I tell people that I studied classics

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and ancient history because in the UK and in Ireland there is a real sort of class,

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a divide in who has access to those subjects.

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And so people who study classics are sometimes perceived as like, Oh, they must be very posh, like they must have gone to private school.

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And so I feel like I have to justify that, like, no, no, no. Like I went to a state school.

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It was like really poorly performing state school.

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And also like people who study classics are like they tend to be more religious than like being wealthy.

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But there's just a different connotation. But like in the United States, studying Latin is typically more associated with people who are Catholic,

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and studying Greek would be more associate people who are like an evangelical Protestant.

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And here that is like not the case. And we don't have very many private schools in Northern Ireland anyway.

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And you can't take Latin or Greek or classics classes, either Ulster University or Queen's.

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So you have to go to the south or you have to go to to Britain if you want to study at university level here.

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And it's such a shame because classics is and an ancient history, everyone can benefit from them and therefore everyone.

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I think this idea that, you know, you, you have to be so clever or you have to be so, so posh to be able to read Homer or to be able to, you know,

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to read Horace or something or to to want to read through Thucydides. it's a real shame because, you know,

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the the lives that people were living then are just as interesting as the lives that people live now.

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And it's so fascinating not just to read what's left, but to also think about what we've lost and what's missing.

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Because, you know, just this tiny percentage of of writing that has survived us and this tiny percentage of people's lives that have come down.

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And so thinking about who is missing in those stories and who would have been there and

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what would they have said and what would that have been like is is so fascinating.

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And I find it a really rich experience to think about that.

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Like, I loved it walking Hadrian's Wall, sort of going through not just the forts which are fascinating,

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but also like at Vindolanda when you're sort of in in the vicus when you're in the village and there's a moment.

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So you're Steve the interpreter there. We saw him at three different sites and I was delighted every time I saw him.

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And he was the best interpretor I've been with. And he was sort of walking us through.

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And I think, does anyone have a good guess at what this shop would have been?

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And there's this sort of why shape that comes down. And my uncle was a butcher, so I was like, I love the butcher shop.

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It's for the drainage.

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And it felt like, you know, like, you know, whoever it was that lived here, like he was a butcher, just like my uncle was a butcher.

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And, you know, there's that, like, sweet connection that you got.

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Like, I wish that more people did have access to it because I come from a working class

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background and I come from an immigrant family and I would not ordinarily have.

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Have been provided with the opportunity to study classics and to study ancient history.

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And I do think that in lots of ways it changed my life and it's really shaped who

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I am and how I think about things and how I approach my scientific practice.

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It's now changed the way that I interact with spaces.

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My son is 12 and we went to Greece last year and he's always had a mum that could like,

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you know, read Greek and could read Latin, but he's never been particularly interested in it.

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And then we went to Athens and we went to Crete and we'd be walking around and it was

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on the go and this monument is for this and people would have used it in this way.

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And then it changed during this period and I was like, How do you know all of this?

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So I like I studied it, I read books about it and he is obsessed with Percy Jackson now.

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And we're like, sometimes come downstairs after reading.

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He's like, Do you know the story of like this monster or do you know, like, who this person is that just came in the book?

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And I was like, Oh, yes, you know, do you want spoilers?

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And so it's really wonderful Classics has also brought this space for my son and I can engage in something together.

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And I don't know if I would have had that if I hadn't been a 14 year old who had the opportunity to take Latin.

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Classics can be such a joy as you describing.

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here with your son. It's something that can appeal on every level, at every age and I think at every point in your life as well.

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Is there something that you wish you'd known any earlier in your and your life and

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your career about the path that you've taken or the role classics had to play in it?

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Um, I don't know. I wish that, if I could wish for anything.

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It would be that when I was studying my master's degree that I hadn't been so,

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so cautious about pushing back at people when they would say things like, Oh, well, it's such a shame that you wasted all that time studying Latin.

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It's such a shame that you, you know, you did your degree in history and now you don't use it at all or,

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you know, all that time reading Greek philosophy.

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And instead that I had to I had to like pushed back a bit harder earlier on and said things like, No, I use it every day,

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actually, perhaps not in the ways that you would think that someone would use their degrees, but I use it all the time.

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There's skills that I have and that knowledge that I have, it absolutely shapes what I do as an epidemiologist.

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Now we ask everybody that comes on the podcast about the person or place idea concept that resonates with them the most.

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I feel you've already you've mentioned a couple already, but is there one in particular that still stands out to you?

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I think because of my Ph.D., I've been reading a lot more Cicero right now, reading his letters in particular.

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And so this answer would be different at different times.

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But right now it's Cicero. Okay, that's perfectly fine.

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That at one point in your life, it would have been Catullus, perhaps?

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Oh, absolutely. From age 14 until probably about age 17, it was absolutely Catullus.

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There was no one else for me. Wonderful.

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I'll have a couple. Just a final quickfire questions.

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There are episodes. So would you prefer to meet Sappho or Cleopatra?

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I think Cleopatra, even though I think that Sappho is perhaps like a more interesting person on a personal level.

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And I'd be very interested in how Cleopatra navigated a very politically tricky environment and how she was structuring her own identity.

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Hmm. That's not rocket fire. Sorry, but this would be quite something, wouldn't it?

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Yeah. Since you're such a fan of Cicero and his letters, then, are you.

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Do you prefer the ones to Quintus or the ones to Atticus?

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Atticus? The emotional rawness to Atticus really speaks to my heart right now.

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If you could meet one person, it's not allowed to be Cicero or Rutgers.

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It could be one person in the world. Who would you want to meet? I would like to meet one of the women from Vindolanda.

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I want to know where they were staying. Are they allowed to stay in the fort?

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Do they have to stay in the village? Oh, excellent.

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Great answer. We have a snog, marry and avoid situation.

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So you need to decide between. All right. Hector.

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Mm hmm. Theseus and Artemis.

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Snog, marry, avoid definitely going to avoid Theseus.

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And you cannot rely on that man. He's going to leave you on a beach while you're sleeping.

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I don't think I'd want to marry Hector because he also, despite your warnings, will leave you.

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But he seems like he'd be good for a shift. So definitely snog and I do not even remember.

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My third option was Artemis. So it's Artemis?

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Absolutely. I think. Yeah, I think you've ordered that brilliantly.

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Yeah. Finally, if you were going to a classically themed fancy dress party here, would you dress up as.

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It's such a good question. I think Livia.

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Oh, yeah. So she you know, she's like quite modestly dressed in her in her portraiture.

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But she, like, enjoyed a very splashy, expensive painting.

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And so I'm going to guess that when she dressed up for a party, that she knew how to be very glittery.

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Well, actually, that's made me of have more questions now. Would you rather continue to experience a Roman banquet?

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Maybe not quite Trimalchio style or a Greek symposium.

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You can be there as an observer. You don't have to be there. As we know how some females were perhaps treated at those events.

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You know, you can guess, be whoever you want to be. Yeah.

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I also am very concerned about, like food hygiene situations.

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I'm not sure that all that meat has been stored at the appropriate temperature and spoken by the public.

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Health officials don't know what the storage situation was.

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I don't know that anyone use a meat thermometer.

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And so but I think I think the symposium, you know, like the Romans were very sort of jockeying about like who is going to give the wittiest answer.

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And I feel like that would get a bit tiring after the first ten or so minutes, you know?

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Mm hmm. And would you rather find out the secrets of the Eleusinian mysteries or the cult of Mithras?

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Well, so ordinarily, I think I would say, Eleusis, but I just went to Brock.

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Alicia and the temple of Mithras is there.

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I wish that I knew more about this because, you know, it was very important to people.

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And I like I don't know as much as I would like about what I'm looking at.

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And even if you had been inducted and found out more now, you wouldn't tell me, So we wouldn't know it.

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So I wouldn't tell you so wouldn't hurt.

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Thank you so much, Amanda, for your time. Absolutely Had a blast.

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It's been so enjoyable. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.