Editor's note: As CAPN members know, every fall we print in this space
reports on the activities of member departments and units. If your program or
department (high school, college, etc.) is not represented here -- and you
would like it to be -- please send the Editor the name and address of a contact
person who would be willing to write such a report.
While filling in as chair in the History Department for the1996-97 academic
year, David Madsen turned the first year Latin courses over to Alan
Rawn who swiftly moved the students through Wheelock (thank God for an
edition edited by a competent Latinist). In the 1997-98 year Madsen has been
named Director of the University's Honors Program; while he hopes to continue
teaching the introductory courses in Latin language and literature, the
responsibilities of the Program may necessitate an outside hire for 1998-99.
The Department of Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies (to give it its
current name) at the University of British Columbia started a new year in 1997
with a tighter budget than ever, and with its office space in the Buchanan
Building rearranged so that the physical layout of the department now reflects
the merger between Classics and Religious Studies which took place a couple
years ago. Department members have been busy. Anthony Podlecki's new
book, Perikles and His Circle (Routledge) will be published next
January. Ann Dusing will take early retirement at the end of 1997.
Robert Todd gave a paper in March at the University of Ottawa, titled
"Aspects of the History of Classical Scholarship" and at the annual meeting of
the Classical Association of Canada at Memorial University, St. John's,
Newfoundland, he presented another titled "Genesis of E. R. Dodds' The
Greeks and the Irrational". Prof. Todd has been doing archival research in
the papers of E. R. Dodds at Oxford. Allan Evans, who retired from UBC
in 1996, was a visiting professor of history at the University of Washington
for the winter and spring terms of 1997 and in 1998-9 will be Whitehead
professor at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. For the
spring trimester of 1998, he will teach a course in the Humanities Program at
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C. Hector Williams, who is on
sabbatical 1997-8, excavated at Stymphalos in Arcadia in the summer of 1997 and
returned to Lesbos, his previous excavation site, for a few weeks in Sept.-Oct.
1997.
Professor Lorina Quartarone has completed her Ph.D. from the University
of Washington and is now officially Dr. Quartarone.
Dr. Quartarone is also the recently elected President of the Walla Walla
Chapter of the AIA and she has set up a full and varied schedule of speakers
for this year.
Whitman College now has a newly created department of Classics. Courses had
been taught within a department of Foreign Languages, but we now have our own
department, and expansion is proceeding apace.
Our best news this year is that we have succeeded in starting a Portland
chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America; we expect to be officially
chartered at the meetings in Chicago this December! We expect to have several
lectures this year, to which you are all invited. Ancient History classes this
year have been increasingly concerned with interdisciplinary cooperation. The
Greek Civilization cluster within the University Studies program continues,
with participation from the departments of History, Philosophy, Art History,
Mathematics, Speech, and English, and the World Wide Web site on Greek
Civilization (http://www-adm.pdx.edu/user/sinq/greekciv/carr.html) continues to
draw a good number of visitors throughout the world. An expansion of the World
Wide Web site to include Roman civilization is scheduled for Winter term 1998.
In addition, a new Archaeology cluster also includes ancient history courses,
as well as courses from Anthropology, Geography, Geology, Art History and Black
Studies. Unfortunately the funds to start Greek again have so far not
materialized, though we came closer this year than usual. We will, on the
other hand, have the funds to hire George Armantrout, a University of
Michigan PhD, to teach two courses in Greek history in the winter and spring
terms. Karen Carr spent the summer in France and Tunisia: in Tunisia,
she was working on pottery analysis at the site of Leptiminus (with a PSU
student as her assistant), and in France she was pursuing the rural settlement
pattern analysis she began in Spain. She also presented a paper on the Roman
and Islamic road systems in Spain at the Congress on Medieval Studies in
Kalamazoo, Michigan, and one on the concept of Romanitas in Visigothic Spain to
the Society for Late Antiquity in Columbia, SC last March. She will be
returning to Tunisia next summer to work on the survey finewares from
Leptiminus, again bringing with her several PSU students for course credit.
Sylvia Kaplan, one of Portland State's MA's, continues to teach classics
courses at Marylhurst College and Western Civilization at local community
colleges.
The Department's Web site address is http://www-adm.pdx.edu/user/hist/
We are very pleased to welcome to our faculty Joy Connolly, who recently
completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on
Vile Eloquence: The Presence of Women in Greco-Roman Rhetoric. Joy adds
to our already diverse interests special expertise in ancient rhetoric,
feminist theory and imperial literature. For other members of the Department,
this has been a busy year. Larry Bliquez delivered a number of talks
this year, among them one at the Seattle Art Museum. His chief scholarly
project is A Handbook of Greco-Roman Surgery and Surgical Tools.
Mary Whitlock Blundell gave a wide variety of talks this year, including
"Barbecue at Colonus?" at the Reason and Religion in Fifth-Century Greece
conference at Austin and "Can't We All Get Along? Politics, Pedagogy, and the
Future of Gender Studies" at Princeton's Feminism and Classics conference.
Jim Clauss was promoted to the rank of Professor. Medea: Essays on
Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art, which he co-edited with
Sarah Iles Johnston, appeared in December. Despite a broken foot, he still led
the EOP program to Rome in the Spring. Five recent participants in this
program won EOP awards, including the President's Medal this Spring. Sheila
Colwell gave a paper ("Language, Violence and Power in Plautus Pseudolus")
at the annual CAPN meeting in April. This fall she is enjoying a mentoring
grant from the College to pursue various scholarly projects. Catherine
Connors was promoted, with tenure, to the rank of Associate Professor. Her
essay "Field and Forum: Culture and Agriculture in Roman Rhetoric" has just
appeared in Routledge's volume Roman Eloquence. Alain Gowing
returned from leave in the fall to teach a Humanities Center seminar on 'Empire
and Memory', which drew students from many departments in the College. At the
APA meeting in New York, he presented a paper on "Memory and Silence in
Cicero's Brutus". Michael Halleran returned to his alma mater,
Kenyon College, to give two talks, "Making Tragedy: Mythological Adaptation and
Intertextuality in Greek Tragedy" and "Decision Making in Early Greek
Literature". Locally he presented a talk on "Temporary Like Achilles: the
Value of Being Mortal". Daniel Harmon jumped into the breach in the
Spring, taking over the Rome program for eight weeks, after Jim Clauss broke
his foot. Dan was also in Rome during Winter Quarter, supervising the remodel
of the first floor of the Palazzo Pio, our facility in Rome, which now offers
living accommodations for our students. Stephen Hinds presented a
number of papers this year, at Columbia, Leeds, Stanford, Princeton and, most
recently, participated in the Craven Conference on Perspectives on Ovid's
Metamorphoses in Cambridge. He is currently acting Chair of the Department.
While on sabbatical in Athens, Merle Langdon discovered ninety-one
archaic inscriptions. He just presented, with Aleydis Van de Moortel, a
paper on some of these inscriptions ("Newly Discovered Greek Boat Engravings
from Attica") at the Eighth International Symposium on Boat and Ship
Archaeology in Gdansk. The three emeritus members of the Department continue
to be active in various ways. Pierre MacKay taught both for us and for
Near East and ran a very helpful Greek sight reading group. John
McDiarmid composed several sections of his much-awaited history of the
Department, and Paul Pascal gave several professional and public talks,
including "Latin in China" and "Modern Latin Inscriptions in Rome".
The University of Puget Sound proudly announces that it has been given a new
position in Classics. We are currently advertising and will be interviewing at
the APA meetings.
Ili Nagy has just completed her third, and last, year as director of the
Classical Summer School at the American Academy in Rome. It was an exhilarating
and exhausting experience. Next year she will serve as Professor-in-Charge at
the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. Meanwhile, she has
an article in press (on early Greek Archaic seated figures) in a volume
dedicated to Brunilde S. Ridgway which should be out by December in order to
celebrate with Professor Ridgway at the APA/AIA meetings. Currently she is
trying to finish a volume of the Corpus of Etruscan mirrors.
Dr. Charles Odahl, Professor of Ancient History and Director of
Classical Languages, continues to review books on Roman and Early Christian
history for several professional journals. In 1997, his reviews of Ambrose
of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts by Daniel Williams, and
Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus by Gregory Shaw
have been published in Church History; and his reviews of The Antonines--The
Roman Empire in Transition and Art in the Roman Empire, both by
Michael Grant, have been published in The Ancient World. He continues
to be an active participant in a number of professional associations, and is
currently serving on the national Membership Committee of The American Society
of Church History.
In the spring of 1997 Odahl signed a contract for and started work writing his
own book on Constantine and the Christian Empire, which will be
published in the "Imperial Biography Series" of Routledge Publishers, London
and New York, in early 1999. In May of 1998, Professor Odahl will lead and
guide another of his popular "Classical and Christian Study Tours" to Rome and
Pompeii in Italy, and Constantinople and Nicaea in Turkey.
Brian O'Grady has joined the History and Classical Language faculty at
BSU this fall as an Adjunct Instructor. This year he is teaching the two
semester course on Ancient Greek Language & Literature; and next fall he
will teach the Ancient Greece History course. He received a BA in Linguistics
and Classics from the University of Oregon; and an MDiv from Southern Methodist
University before serving as a Methodist minister for several years. He
recently converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, and was ordained this fall as a Deacon
in the Antiochan Orthodox Church. He teaches Greek part-time in the mornings
at BSU, and Latin part-time in the afternoons at a local high school; and leads
a new Orthodox Christian congregation on the weekends. We are delighted to
have his services at Boise State University.
STUDENTS, STUDENTS EVERYWHERE!
Enrollments are higher than ever in Classics at UM. Jim Scott and
Linda Gillison have 80+ students in two sections of Latin 101 at the
time of this report, and second-year Latin enrollment remains high, at 17.
Greek 211 (Xenophon) has 7 students and 5 Greek 300 students are reading
Prometheus Bound and other Aeschylean tragedy with Hayden Ausland. (A
random sample indicates that--surprise!--they think it's challenging stuff but
are glad not to be translating Agamemnon.) John Hay is reading
Lucretius with 11 students. Thirty-one students have declared majors in the
Classics section: Latin, Classics, or Classics/Classical Civilization.
RETIREMENT ANNOUNCED
After thirty years of teaching at the Missoula campus, John G. Hay is
retiring from the Classics faculty. John came to Montana from graduate study
at the University of Minnesota, in 1968, and never left. (Is this where, in
the authorized biography, they will insert that story of his "riding west" from
the Twin Cities on some nag? Perhaps not.)
Since his arrival, John has been a strong champion of the Classics at UM, and
his tireless teaching and dedication to students has maintained the Classics
section on a firm footing. His only colleague on arrival was Marguerite
Ephron, and upon her retirement several years later, he was joined by
John Madden. John Hay has taught everything in the curriculum many
times over. Students without number who have studied Latin and Greek with him
at all levels consider Classics and Hay synonymous, and he has built interest
in the field especially through his Classical Mythology course, which regularly
draws more than 200 students, and through his participation in the Liberal
Studies curriculum.
For the next three years, John will maintain a one-third-time commitment to the
university. This fall he is teaching Lucretius and a preparatory course for
students who will accompany him to Rome during the January, 1998,
intersession.
People around here are wondering whether that old nag of John's is still in
riding condition. In any case, for the next three autumns we have him at
Classics, but springtime will find him elsewhere. He wants to travel and read
some of those books that have been stacking up around him through the years.
We all wish him well and will miss him.
"NEW" TO THE CLASSICS SECTIONS
John Hay's retirement brought an old-new colleague on-board in the Classics
section. Linda W. Rutland Gillison was hired at the Associate rank to
replace John and will take on his mammoth teaching duties. (We all have them
at UM. Don't you??) For the past five years, while teaching in Classics
whenever we needed her and her schedule allowed, Linda has co-directed the
English Composition program, taught in the Liberal Studies program, and served
for two years as Faculty Advisor at The Davidson Honors College. She directed
the semester-long Italy Study program in 1996 and will direct the Rome program
during the January intersession, 1999.
AUSLAND'S PROGRESS
Associate professor Hayden Ausland was awarded tenure this summer and
has been busy during the year. At summer's end, he traveled to Kos to
participate in the Ninth International Conference on Greek Philosophy, the
theme of which was "Philosophy and Medicine." Hayden's paper considered the
matter of decorum in Plato's Hippias Minor and in fifth-century
medicine. In late October he again took Socrates on the road, this time to
Binghamton, NY, and a meeting of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies,
where he addressed "Conventional Origins of Socratic Arguments." Meanwhile,
AJP recently published his article, "On Reading Plato Mimetically."
A new tenure-track position in Classics was created this year at Willamette
University in Salem, Oregon to initiate a new program in Classical Studies.
Prior to this time Latin and Greek had been offered at Willamette as an
independent study by faculty in English and Religion. The new Classics
program, centered on the ancient languages, continues to draw upon the
strengths of colleagues from other departments (Religion, Philosophy, Rhetoric
and Media Studies, History, English, Comparative Literature), though it has its
own profile and its own major and minor. Student interest in the new program is
strong, as is administrative support.
Mark Usher (PhD University of Chicago, '97), the first classicist on
campus since the 1940s, is building this new program, amid research projects on
the reception of Homer in later antiquity. Homeric Stitchings, a book
about the Homeric Centos, will appear in 1998 in the series Greek Studies:
Interdisciplinary Approaches (Rowman and Littlefield), and a critical edition
of the poem, Homerocentones Eudociae Augustae, is forthcoming from
Teubner.
Enrollments remain healthy in both languages at all levels, including a record
34 students in first year Greek. Richard Tron is Chair of the Classics
Department. He is teaching a section of the first year Greek class, second year
Latin, and advanced Latin (Eclogues and Georgics). Walter
Englert completed two years chairing Humanities 110, Reed's year long
Introductory Humanities Course which is required of all first year students and
focuses on Greece, Rome, Judaism, Christianity, and Late Antiquity. He also
was the coordinator of the ninth annual Reed Latin Forum for Oregon high school
Latin teachers and students in November, 1996, and was on the steering
committee of the Classic Greek Theater company that produced a professional
production of Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris (in English) at the Reed
College amphitheater in September, 1997. Finally, four short articles he wrote
(on Lucretius, Herillus, Metrodorus of Stratonicea, and Monimus) appeared in
the Encyclopedia of Classical Philosophy, ed. D. Zeyl (Greenwood Press, 1997).
David Silverman has continued to be active at Reed College in the
development of electronic resources for pedagogical and research purposes. He
has chaired, along with Walter Englert, a Reed faculty group which
developed electronic web pages for Reed's Hum 110 course with the help of a
Mellon grant. He also has received a Culpepper grant to establish a Virtual
Discussion Space to supplement Reed's Humanities 110 discussion conferences.
Nigel Nicholson gave a talk at the 1996 APA in New York and at the
University of Oregon, Eugene, in April, 1997 entitled, "Pederastic Poets and
Adult Patrons: Maintaining Authority in Commissioned Poetry." He will be
giving a talk this year at the APA meeting in Chicago, "The Engue: A Case Study
in the Contestation of Aristocratic Ideology in Pindar's Epinicians." His
article "The Truth of Pederasty: A Supplement to Foucault's Genealogy of the
Relation between Truth and Desire in Ancient Greece," will appear in
Intertexts 2.1 (1998). His present projects are focused on Pindar,
including articles on colonialist puns, the reading of Nemean 4.57-58, and the
role of the charioteer Nichomachus in Isthmian 2.
Rochelle Snee has a forthcoming article "Gregory Nazianzen's Anastasia Church:
Arianism, the Goths, and Hagiography," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998).
She is also pleased to announce that we are (finally!) advertising a second
full-time tenure-track position in Classics starting Sept. 98. Eric
Nelson continues as Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics this year. He
has designed a course for our recently revised honors program. This past
summer he attended a "Seminar on Rhetoric and Composition" at Millikan
University in Illinois, and was a panel member at the Foreign Language
Education and Technology conference at the University of Victoria. Pacific
Lutheran's new Language Resource Center is in its second year, and
Perseus has proved a favorite of students in intermediate and advanced
Greek, mythology, and Greek civilization.
Kathryn E. Meyer was given the "Honors Faculty Award" for outstanding teaching
and service to the Honors Program at WSU at the annual Honors Banquet, Spring,
1997. This is her second teaching award.
Richard S. Williams was asked to give a talk at the Cheney Cowles Museum
on "Our Roman Heritage: Electoral Scandal, Bribery and Corruption," as part of
a lecture series that accompanied the museum's exhibit "Treasures of Antiquity."
UVic now has a web site constructed by Laurel Bowman
(http://web.uvic.ca/grs), with a section on current events that might be of
interest to CAPN members.
Ingrid Holmberg published "The Sign of METIS" in Arethusa in the
spring, and has an article on sequelization in the book Part Two: Defining
the Sequel forthcoming, in addition to her on-going work on gender and
metis. We have two new grad. students, Travis Feldman from St. John's
College via a post-bacc. at U. Penn., and Fanny Dolansky from Trent--the latter
is winner of the Silver Medal from Trent for the top undergraduate, and the
recipient of our University Fellowship. Peter Smith is retiring at the
end of this year after many years of stellar service to both the department and
the university. John G. Fitch has taken over the Chair's
responsibilities, and will also be delivering a paper at the conference
"Crossing the Stage" in Saskatchewan.