MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE COLLEGES

back to the December 2003 frontpage

Beloit College
GENE MILLER and KOSTA HADAVAS are leading a study-trip to Egypt, December 28-January 13.

Carleton College
The college was glad to have this fall JACK PERADOTTO as Benedict Visiting Professor, while JACKSON BRYCE was on sabbatical in Oxford, and NANCY WILKIE spends the entire academic year on sabbatical in New Mexico.

The faculty of the department has revised the requirements for the major. Instead of writing comprehensive papers, majors will organize a conference around a theme in Classics, issue a call for papers, and propose their own projects within the theme. In this way, the students will be presenting their work to distinguished visitors to the college.

Colorado College
OWEN CRAMER is back from a sabbatical spent in Japan and Germany, but students were in the capable hands of CRAIG DETHOLFF, whose courses on “Violence and the Sacred” and “Tools that Talk” won new converts to the Classics major.

December 29 finds PATRICIA FITZGIBBON in Paris, to speak at the Second International Conference on Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists; on the same day in Athens, LISA HUGHES will be reading a paper on Greek athletics.

Two seniors are busy with hands-on theses: thanks to the college’s Hartwell Prize, Sara Levin will be in Rome and Nemi this January working on the precinct & cult of Diana Nemorensis; Antonio Sandoval is at work studying parallels between Roman sacrificial rituals and the Matanza pig sacrifice in northern New Mexico.

OWEN CRAMER, PATRICIA FITZGIBBON, and poet DAVID MASON have started a new course in the first-year program,"Reinvention of the Greeks". This course covers Greek life from Homer to Zorba the Greek & Louis the Greek (the latter died in 1914 in Colorado’s Ludlow Massacre).

Cornell College
The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is presenting a major exhibition, Art in Roman Life: Villa to Grave, running now through August 2005. Seven galleries are devoted to over 200 objects of sculpture, decorative arts, and architectural elements. The installation includes an exterior courtyard & interior rooms of a Roman villa, allowing visitors to understand the works in their original context. Museums lending artifacts include the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. More can be found at the exhibition’s website.

Denison University
The Classics program is being restructured, and, to accompany this, GARRET JACCOBSEN promises to unveil in the next few weeks a new departmental webpage.

DePauw University
REBECCA SCHINDLER and PEDAR FOSS are participating in the planning for a workshop on Turkey, coordinated by Teresa Wise of the Associated Colleges of the South.

SCHINDLER & FOSS will be making the conference circuit in spring 2004 to talk about the recently-established CGMA project at DePauw, the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archeology. In March, they will make the presentation at the meeting of the Amercian Asssocation of Geographers.

Busy with the finishing touches is CARL HUFFMAN, whose book on Archytas of Tarentum will appear late in 2004 from Cambridge University Press.

The Ambrosian Library of Milan has given SHAWN O’BRYHIM permission to use digital photography on its Plautine palimpsest. The manuscript was studied in the early nineteenth century with the aid of a chemical reagent; Shawn hopes that the new technology, already successfully used on the Archimedes palimpsest and the Dead Sea Scrolls, can raise a clear text of Plautus.

Earlham College
Beginning Latin class is overflowing with students: is this a trend seen at other colleges? (note: the answer is “yes,” to judge by reports from Knox College)

STEVE HEINY & SUSAN WISE will lead 20 students on a study-trip to Greece in May.

Grinnell College
Spending a sabbatical in Athens is JERRY LALONDE, who is hard at work on several projects, including a book on a shrine to Zeus.

Enrollments are especially strong this year in Beginning Greek, Intermediate & Advanced Latin, and Roman History.

Gustavus Adolphus College
Richard Thomas (Harvard) and John Peradotto, Benedict Visiting Professor at Carleton, spoke on campus this fall.
STEWART FLORY will give a public lecture in the spring on the Olympics.

The Department will undergo its ten-year review in April, with the help of LESLIE DAY (Wabash) and David Porter.

Hope College
Continuing a recent trend, the Theatre Department mounted an ancient-themed play. In September it was Iphigenia and Other Daughters, a postmodern look at the women of the House of Atreus.

JEFF VEENSTRA, sabbatical replacement for KELLY OSBORNE, shared his work on inscriptions pertaining to Semitic religions in a public lecture on October 21: “The Orontes Flooding the Tiber: Dushara, Baal, and Heliopolitan Jupiter in Central Italy”.

Joining the French Section of the Language Department is ISABELLE CHAPUIS-ALVAREZ, who is finishing a Sorbonne doctorate in modern Greek with a study of the symbol of Athena’s owl from antiquity to contemporary times.

Illinois State University
Check out JANICE SIEGEL’s article in this fall’s issue of Amphora on the development of her website, Dr. J.'s Illustrated Guide to the Classical World.

Illinois Wesleyan University
Field-trips brought students to see the ancient holdings at the University of Illinois’ Spurlock and Krannert Museums.

NANCY SULTAN led a convoy of three vans to Chicago’s Oriental Institute to see the newly-remodeled Mesopotamian Gallery. On January 26, the IWU Classics Club will sponsor the visit to campus of McGuire Gibson, the Oriental Institute’s Professor of Mesopotamian Archeology. He is slated to speak on “Iraqi Culture in Danger: The Problem Continues”.

The IWU Classics Club will organize a spring film series on “Correcting Inaccuracies in Films with Classical Themes.” And JASON MORALEE promises to put together a Lupercalia celebration: keep an eye out this February for news coverage of indecent exposure and assault on a Midwestern campus.

Kenyon College
PAOLO ASSO's article "Human Divinity: Hercules in the Punica" appeared in the Italian journal Vichiana, 4th Series, 5th year (February 2003).

Just completing major projects are MICHAEL BARICH (translation of Valerius Maximus' Argonautica) and ADAM SERFASS (on Gregory the Great & slavery).

Kenyon will be interviewing for a two-year sabbatical replacement position.

Knox College
In a determined effort to raise public discourse in this time of war, STEPHEN FINEBERG this spring will be centering two courses-in-translation around the theme of public imperial ambition (what William Arrowsmith referred to as “civilized barbarity”): Greek Drama & Greek Historians. In the meantime, building a house (half way there!) remains an adventure and welcome distraction from events in Iraq.

Enrollment is strong in all the language courses. Especially encouraging is that 7 students are taking advanced Greek, and advanced Latin has hit double-digits.

Lawrence University
DAN TAYLOR has enjoyed his stint on the college’s Presidential Search Committee.

Macalester College
The Department graduated 10 majors last fall, and this fall 15 sophomores, a bumper crop, have signed on to the program. Macalester students founded this year a chapter of the Senior Classical League, and promptly celebrated with a pizza-party & screening of Spartacus.

Andrew Riggsby (Texas) visited this fall to speak on Roman conceptions of time. In the spring, the college will hear from Marilyn Skinner of the University of Arizona.

BETH SEVERY-HOVEN and NANETTE SCOTT GOLDMAN will again lead a dozen students on a January term in Rome. And three juniors are currently studying abroad.

MIREILLE LEE taught a new course in the fall entitled “Dress and Gender in the Mediterranean.” In the spring she will be co-organizing a student symposium in conjunction with the exhibit of a collection of Greco-Roman portrait sculpture at the Minneapolis Museum of Art. And her course on “Ancient Sculpture” will broadly prepare Macalester students to participate in the events at the MIA.

Monmouth College
BERNICE LEE FOX died on December 11, at age 92. She served 34 years on the faculty of Monmouth and was awarded an honorary degree from the college. Since 1985, she has also been honored by an annual Classics lecture in her name. For more details of her extraordinary life and service to Classics, see this tribute.

TOM SIENKEWICZ & his Latin students were featured in a 10/24/03 Chicago Tribune article (subsequently picked up by other papers) on the use of Latinized Dr. Seuss in the classroom.

Oberlin College
The department’s great mainstay, JIM HELM, retired after the 2001-2 academic year, having completed 34 years of teaching and service to the college. Jim’s careful guidance and bad puns are missed, and there is considerable doubt as to whether department faculty will truly devote sufficient time and energy to the explanation of the aspect of Greek verbs. At almost the same time, JENNY LYNN left Oberlin after 5 years of successful teaching to take on a new position teaching at the Berkeley Carroll school in Brooklyn. Jim's and Jenny’s positions have been taken over by KIRK ORMAND and BEN LEE. Kirk comes to Oberlin after a varied career with interests in Greek theater and ancient sexuality. Ben is a recent Ph.D. from Penn, and is publishing a book on Apuleius’ Florida. His interests include ancient rhetoric, modern critical theory, and the second sophistic.

A huge success in the classroom has been JEREMY HARTNETT, at Oberlin for two years as a Mellon post-Doctoral fellow. Jeremy is a specialist in Roman Archaeology, with a particular emphasis on the sociology of the Roman street.

Many outstanding speakers have visited in the last years. Gregory Nagy of Harvard served a smorgasbord of learning and erudition last spring as the Martin lecturer, speaking on “Masterpieces of Classical Metonymy.” Other speakers include Mark Buchan (Princeton), Carolyn Dewald (USC), recent Winkler prize winners Tamara Chin (UC-Berkeley) and Mary Frances Brown (UC-Berkeley), Denise McCoskey (Miami-Ohio), and Karen Johnson (U-Mich). This year’s Martin lecturer, Michael C.J. Putnam (Brown), will be speaking on “Poetic Interplay: Catullus and Horace,” March 8-12. Also visiting in the spring are prominent philosopher Jean-Michel Rabaté (U-Penn) and Ann Ellis Hanson (Yale).

Ohio Wesleyan University
Barnes & Noble will publish in 2004 DONALD LATEINER’s revision of Macauley’s translation of Herodotus; Don has also outfitted the text with introduction, notes, exploratory essays, etc. He is also reviewing a book on medieval gesture for the International Journal of the Classical Tradition.

BRAD COOK is planning a spring marathon-reading of the Odyssey.

Saint Olaf College
John J. Peradotto, Benedict Visiting Professor at Carleton, came across town in October to give the lecture “The Greek Revolutionize the Alphabet.”

Wabash College
The Department welcomed on October 2 Phi Beta Kappa lecturer Alan Shapiro of Johns Hopkins. His talk was “Heroine or Whore? Helen of Troy’s Changing Image in Ancient Greece.” In the spring, John Bodel (Brown) will visit campus to talk about the elements of a Roman funeral.

Wabash will be looking at APA/AIA for a replacement for the retiring JOHN FISCHER.

College of Wooster
NEIL BERNSTEIN’s article “Ancestors, Status, and Self-Presentation in Statius’ Thebaid” appeared in the December issue of TAPA. Neil also did his part to increase media exposure of the Classics, writing a column “A Closer Look at Classics” for The Daily Record (Wooster, OH -- 12/08/03) and recording a segment on Classical Studies for the college’s Office of Public Information. On October 29, on the lead-in to Halloween, he also was quoted in a Dallas Morning News article on artificially-created beings; he weighed in on Pygmalion’s statue and the Golem.

November 2 saw Martha Malamud (SUNY-Buffalo) speaking on “Brides, Virgins, and Martyrs: Competing Models for Women in Late Antitquity.” Then on December 3 Edith Hall of the University of Durham (England) presented “Why Has There Been So Much Greek Tragedy on Public Stages Since 1969?”