MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE COLLEGES

back to the June 2003 frontpage

Carleton College
CLARA HARDY received promotion to the rank of full Professor, and MATT SEMANOFF, himself an alum of Carleton, will remain on the faculty for a second year as Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow.

Colorado College
The Summer Latin Institute, which includes a Masters of Arts in Teaching program, is thriving under the leadership of PATRICIA FITZGIBBON. Trish is preparing to teach a course in the fall, “Olympics and the Olympians: Sports in the Ancient and Modern World, and is working on a paper, “Literary Caricatures of Epicureans in Athenaeus,” that she’ll present at the Athenaeus II conference in Paris in December.

Since receiving her second doctorate in Clinical Psychology in 1998, MARCIA D-S. DOBSON has been teaching a course entitled “Discovering the Unconscious: Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.” On her fall sabbatical in Chicago, she plans to integrate more deliberately her two disciplines by researching the relationship between ancient Greek drama & philosophy and recent theories in psychoanalysis proposed by neo-Jungians such as James Hillman. Out of this work will come a course for the spring called “Sources of the Self: Re-visioning Psychology.”

A senior minoring in Classics and majoring in Theatre, Jonathan Kirk Mortensen, staged a performance of Oedipus Tyrannos. The set was a combination of labyrinth & Asclepion. Helping to set the mood at the beginning & end was a tape recording of Greek students reciting the text.

Before a spring sabbatical, OWEN CRAMER will pilot a new course that he developed with a colleague, “The Re-invention of Modern Greece.”

Cornell College
On April 28, the Latin 205 class of JOHN GRUBER-MILLER gave a public performance of Plautus’ Aulularia. Since Plautus’ original ending has been lost, the class wrote its own.

DePauw University
DAVE GUINEE received tenure, and will be spending a year’s sabbatical in Rome. Returning from sabbatical are CARL HUFFMAN, PEDAR FOSS & REBECCA SCHINDLER.

SHAWN O’BRYHIM received a summer grant from the college to facilitate work on “subversive characters” in Plautus.

Grinnell College
Jointly with History, the department sponsored the February 6th return to campus of Craig Martin, a 1995 alumnus who holds a Ph.D.in the History of Science, for his lecture “Humanist Translations of Aristotelian Scientific Vocabulary and the Renaissance Commentary Tradition.”

At the invitation of the Classics Department of the University of Iowa & the Iowa Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, JERRY LALONDE presented “Horos Dios: An Athenian Shrine and Cult of Zeus” in Iowa City on April 15. Jerry dates this stone marker on the east spur of the Hill of the Nymphs to the end of the 6th century BC, and proposes that it marked an ancient & elaborate shrine to Zeus (probably Zeus Meilichios).

Both of this year’s graduating Classics majors have received fellowships to graduate school (University of Cincinnati & University of Michigan).

Gustavus Adolphus College
Eleven Classics majors graduated this year, the most ever and more than in any other language except for Spanish, which had twelve.

Hope College
The Theatre Department in April staged Aristophanes’ Birds on a post-apocalyptic set, and featuring hip-hop music. Maybe it’s just an accident that fall enrollments in beginning Greek are up?

It’s become a tradition at Hope (in homage to the legendary play-readings sponsored by Gareth Morgan of the University of Texas) for Classics students to join faculty in “performances” of their own every semester. This term the Section was especially pleased to have classicist & man-of-the-theatre Mark Damen (Utah State) come & take the lead in Plautus’ Rudens.

Illinois Wesleyan University
Patrice Rankine of Purdue University presented a talk & colloquium on Ralph Ellison’s use of Greco-Roman myth in the novels The Invisible Man and Juneteenth.

The program had a lively co-curricular calendar, with a fieldtrip to the new Greek & Roman galleries at the Spurlock Museum (University of Illinois), and an April banquet complete with a Latin poetry recitation & contest for best costume.

The first two majors graduated this May! Elizabeth Myers wrote her senior paper on “The Effect of UNESCO on Museum Policies Regarding the Deaccessioning of Antiquities”; she begins a graduate program in materials science at MIT. Brekke-Kroutil Mueller’s senior paper was “Truth or Fiction? Alexander the Great in Modern Media”, with special focus on Reign, the Japanese anime series. She hopes to land a job in the film industry.

Kalamazoo College
The featured presenter at the spring meeting of the Michigan Classical Conference was ANNE HAECKL, who spoke on recent work at the site of Berenike, the Red Sea port of Ptolemaic & Roman Egypt.

Kenyon College
CLIFF WEBER’s article, “The Dionysus in Aeneas,” is set to appear in the October 2002 (yes, that’s the date) issue of Classical Philology.

In the spirit of consortial solidarity, JON BRUSS of St. Olaf College served as “outside examiner” for a Kenyon senior’s thesis on Greek epitaphs, including those in the new Posidippus papyrus. Now it’s on to graduate school, with generous stipend, for this outstanding student!

Lawrence University
Missing pasta & pastries & vino rosso is DAN TAYLOR, back home after a spring semester spent as Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Linguistics at the Università di Trieste. He’s back in time to serve on Lawrence’s presidential search committee. Check out the position announcement in the June 6 Chronicle of Higher Education, and pass along your nominations of qualified candidates to him.

RANDALL MCNEILL should be basking in the success of his Horace: Image, Identity, and Audience (Johns Hopkins, 2001) – see, for example, the BMCR review of June 7. Instead, word has it he will take a pre-tenure sabbatical this fall and serve as Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago, where he intends to complete some articles on Catullus.

CAROL LAWTON and JERE WICKENS are both in Greece this summer. Carol has been there since Christmas on a Kress Foundation grant, working on her volume in the Agora Excavation series (with some side-research on the depiction of children on Attic votive reliefs). Jere is working on the publication of a survey of ancient sites & land routes east of Karystos in southern Euboia. He’ll be back in the fall to teach Intensive Elementary Greek.

Macalester College
The department’s Omrit excavation was featured in the March/April issue of Biblical Archeology Review.

The theme of the college’s International Week was “The Ancient Mediterranean.” For four days at the end of February events occurred which highlighted some of the region’s cultural/intellectual heritage, trends in contemporary scholarship, and the role of Classics in the curriculum of liberal arts colleges. The keynote presentation was delivered by Josiah Ober of Princeton University.

On March 7 some students publicly read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, part of the international “Lysistrata project” to protest the looming war against Iraq.

Monmouth College
Last October, the department for the first time ever hosted the Illinois Classical Conference. TOM SIENKEWICZ gave the keynote address at the Saturday banquet; his talk was titled “Lingua Latina in A.D. MMII.” Tom is also finishing up his sixth, and last, year as chair of the CAMWS Committee for the Promotion of Latin; a highlight of this year’s work was helping to organize the first National Latin Teacher Recruitment Week.

In April, Monmouth teamed with Knox College in hosting Stanley Lombardo (University of Kansas), who gave readings from his translations of the Odyssey and Iliad.

Nine Monmouth students earned recognition in the 2003 National Latin exam. Not many colleges participate in the exam: is there any ACM/GLCA school out there that would dare to challenge Monmouth next year?

A record number – four – Classics majors graduated this spring. One will attend grad school in the disciple, and another has accepted a post teaching Latin & Spanish at a middle school in suburban Chicago.

Oberlin College
The department has been authorized to expand from three faculty to four. The search will begin next fall for an ancient social historian.

The annual all-night Bardic Reading was devoted to the Odyssey. 30 students & a few faculty members read until 2 AM on February 9-10.

Ohio Wesleyan University
Discussion is underway that could give the department of Humanities-Classics another tenure line, a move that would result in taking over the ancient history courses from History. Already Humanities-Classics offers an archaeology course once a year.

BRAD COOK recently published an article on “Legetai in Plutarch” in GRBS. This summer he will attend an NEH Seminar at UC Berkeley led by David Cohen & David Johnson on “Law, State, and Individual in Ancient Greece, Rome, and China.”

Next school year, DONALD LATEINER will be especially busy, as he travels to lecture at Centre College in Kentucky and, as the Burnett Lecturer, at San Diego State University. His essay on a character from Apuleius, “Tlepolemus the Spectral Spouse”, just appeared in the third ICAN (Gröningen) volume, published by Brill. His review of two books on Herodotus can be found in the latest volume of CPh. Another review, of Brian Krostenko’s book on Cicero & Catullus, is in the most recent Semiotica. In addition, expect to find his chapter – “The Plot of the Iliad “ -- as the very first one in R. Fowler, ed., Cambridge Companion to Homer.

New graduate Jennifer Lewton, whose receipt of the Manson Scholarship from CAMWS was reported in the last Erato, is participating in a summer session of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (courtesy, in part, from the Dwight N. Robinson prize offered by the department), before beginning advanced work in Classics at Brown.

Saint Olaf College
The major scholarly achievement belonged to Provost JIM MAY, with the publication by Brill of his Companion to Cicero: Oratory and Rhetoric.

Welcomed to campus was Chris Faraone (University of Chicago) for the paper “Female Stereotypes in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.” In February, Dan Hooley (University of Missouri) spoke on “Dryden’s Original Sin: Misreading Classical Satire.”

The annual January term to Greece was successful, despite the closure of nearly every major museum in the country. There will be no study-term there next January; that will have to wait until the 2004 Olympics are a memory.

March saw the 13th biennial production of a Roman comedy. This year, a cast of 19 students performed a bilingual version of Plautus’ Rudens at St. Olaf and five other colleges & schools in southeastern Minnesota. New traditions may have been started as well. A breakfast devoted to conversational Latin was held at the crack of dawn on Friday mornings. And a game of “Classical Ultimate Frisbee” was organized.

Latin enrollments continue to swell, with almost 70 students enrolled in Beginning Latin, and nearly 50 at the Intermediate level. Similarly, the cap on the students in the courses-in-translation was doubled (to 60), but nonetheless the courses filled up quickly.

Three students won prizes in the Eta Sigma Phi translation contests, and still another was awarded an honorable mention.

The Class of ’03 included 7 majors, plus a medievalist. One of the Classics majors will spend a year at the University of Basel (yes, Switzerland) before undertaking the graduate program at the University of Texas.

Wabash College
The department’s senior capstone course for the upcoming year has been redesigned. Its theme will be “Amor, Philia and Amicitia,”and combine primary texts with secondary reading. The culminating project for each student is a research paper.

The meeting of the Indiana Classical Conference featured interesting discussion on the state of Latin in the state of Indiana, including thoughts on recruitment of new Latin teachers for the schools and how to convince administrators of the value of the language. Anyone from other states have ideas to contribute? [Editor’s note: speak up; it could be a theme for a forthcoming Erato!] The meeting also saw the complete triumph of Wabash College, as alumnus Jeremy Walker (1992) was honored as High School Teacher of the Year, JOHN FISCHER received acclaim as College Teacher of the Year (and nonetheless reports he’s a year away from retirement), and alumnus Tom Davis (1983) was elected President of the Conference.

College of Wooster
RACHEL HALL STERNBERG teamed with a colleague in the Art Department to teach “Greek Archaeology and Art”.

The local chapter of Eta Sigma Phi had a full slate of activities this spring, including a bowling night, a reading of selections from the Aeneid, and an end-of-year picnic/hike.

5 majors graduated from the department, four in Classical Civilization and one in Classical Languages.