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Spring 2019 Letter from the Chair by Andrew Feldherr

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Spring 2019 Letter from the Chair by Andrew Feldherr Spring 2019 Letter from the Chair by Andrew Feldherr ny of you dropping by East Pyne (and I hope you all will next time you are engulfed by the orange bubble) A will find a very different department. While we will never stop missing our recent retirees, Ted, Brent, Bob, and Christian (not to speak of Nino Luraghi, who left us to become Wykeham Professor at Oxford), the many wonderful new colleagues we have brought to Princeton during the same time period are making their presence felt all the more. This year it has been a special pleasure to welcome three new members of the faculty. Barbara Graziosi and Johannes Haubold have at last settled in East Pyne after their tremendous successes as professors of Greek at Durham, and Caroline Cheung, a scholar of Roman history and material culture, joins us from Berkeley by way of the American Academy in Rome. Each has brought exciting ideas for courses and new intellectual opportunities for us all. More reason for celebration comes from the exceptional honors won this year by our colleague Harriet Flower, who has also ended her time as Head of Mathey College. Last his term as chair of the department. It will be a fantastic spring, Harriet received the university’s highest honor for opportunity for him, and for all of us, as it has been a great achievements in the humanities, the Howard T. Behrman privilege for me to serve in that role. That privilege has been Award, and in case those laurels provided insufficient material a pleasure as well thanks to the wonderful support I received for resting, her most recent book, The Dancing Lares and from all my colleagues in the department and, in particular, the Serpent in the Garden (which really should have been the the incomparable contributions of Nancy Blaustein, our title of a mystery novel!) has just won a Goodwin Award department manager and everyone who works or has worked for Outstanding Publications from the Society for Classical in our office, Jill Arbeiter, Kai Laidlaw, Brittany Masterson, Studies. (Another of this year’s recipients, Amy Richlin, who and Eileen Robinson (with a shout out to Stephanie won for Slave Theater in The Roman Republic, is of course an Lewandowski and Donna Sanclemente, who have gone undergraduate alumna and good friend of the department.) on to other positions in the University). Their energy and One of our undergraduate concentrators received a pretty dedication have made us the envy of the university, and much significant honor as well. Nicolette D’Angelo, not content with of the special atmosphere so familiar to students and faculty of winning a Beinecke Scholarship, was just selected for a Rhodes Classics comes from them. as well, the first in the department since Liz Butterworth in 2011. She is but one member of an extraordinary senior class, many of whom I expect will go on to further study in To make a contribution to the classics. And looking beyond that group, congratulations to Department of Classics, please contact the Jaylin Lugardo, honored with a Mellon Mays Fellowship, Office of Development at 609-258-8972. who appeared this spring in a 60 Minutes on initiatives in affirmative action. (“Why Bill and Melinda Gates Put 20,000 Students Through College,” cbsnews.com) The big news on the graduate front—pausing to welcome our new cohort of six entering students!—was an initiative Inside this issue spearheaded by Michael Flower (enjoying a year’s leave as Faculty News ........................................................ 3 Old Dominion Fellow following an exemplary term as DGS) and Dan-el Padilla Peralta to award an annual pre-doctoral Graduate Student News ........................................ 7 fellowship designed to promote diversity. This fellowship, Faculty Publications ............................................. 8 which, after a year of advanced study, guarantees acceptance Alumni Spotlight .................................................. 9 to our doctoral program, helps establish our department as a leader, both in the field and the university, in increasing access Summer Study in Paris ...................................... 10 and participation in the discipline for members of historically Graduate Dissertations ....................................... 11 underrepresented groups. You can read more about this plan in an interview with Michael and Dan-el published on the Society Undergraduate Award......................................... 12 for Classical Studies blog. (“Diversifying Classics: A New Senior Theses .................................................... 13 Initiative at Princeton,” classicalstudies.org) Course Preview .................................................. 14 The leadership that Michael Flower has shown here and in many other ways brings me to the last piece of good Lectures & Events .............................................. 15 news I have to share. Starting July 1st, Michael will begin 2 Faculty News Yelena Baraz Najman, a workshop entitled Philological areas and the transition between a I devoted most of last year Reflections to take place in Princeton in dolium-centered storage system to one to completing a book April, and co-editing, with Christopher featuring the barrel, and an article traces manuscript on Roman Moore of Penn State, a Cambridge development in dolium repairs and pride. From a very small Companion to the Sophists (to feature a technology transfer. I co-presented a paper seed—a sense of unease chapter of our own Andrew Ford). Finally, in an AIA/SCS panel I co-organized, about our assumption that it has been a pleasure and an inspiration “Systems of Knowledge and Strategic we knew what Horace to return to the East Jersey State Prison Planning in Ancient Industries,” at the meant when he asked his Muse to ‘take this fall for a class on “Justice in the Epic Annual Meeting to pursue my interests pride’ in Odes 3.30—it has grown into Tradition” headed by our own Tom Davies in craft production and workshops. a study of this emotional concept in and Teddy Fassberg. I’ve also been working on a paper that the Roman world that argues for an explores cabbage as a moral compass in overwhelmingly negative meaning of Emmanuel C. Bourbouhakis Latin literature and editions for papyri from Tebtunis and Oxyrhynchus. I’ve pride in republican discourse and traces After recent forays into had many wonderful experiences this a small, but influential strand of positive such subjects as Byzantine academic year. I taught Latin courses on redefinition in Augustan poetry, with funerary laments for Augustus, Livy, and Virgil, and a seminar a patchy, but distinctive afterlife in the deceased children, a on Pompeii. During Fall Break, I led tours Flavians and in late antique poetry, Byzantine treatise on the especially panegyric. As wonderful as it (de)formative role of through Pompeii, the Roman Forum, the was to have a year to write, I was delighted insincerity and Colosseum, and several museums for the to come back to teaching in the fall. I dissembling on social life, and the links Humanities Sequence trip to Rome—one have enjoyed teaching a graduate seminar between historiography and medieval highlight was an ancient Roman dinner on the Latin pastoral tradition that took political identity, I am resuming work over (with togas and stolas!) in a replica us from Vergil’s Eclogues through ‘non- the next year on Byzantine letter-writing Pompeian house. pastoral’ Augustan texts that engage of the 10th–12th c. for a planned monograph with the genre all the way to late antique on medieval Greek epistolary culture. Marc Domingo Gygax Christian experiments. The conversations This upcoming year will see publication During the last months I in the course will stay with me as I go of articles on: the reciprocal ties between have been working on four back to working on Calpurnius Siculus verse and prose during the ‘long twelfth book chapters for edited and the pastoral tradition. A paper on century’ in Byzantium, following a highly volumes: a piece dealing bucolic competition, with a focus on successful conference on the subject last with the status, foundation its disintegration in Calpurnius’ sixth summer hosted by the Austrian Academy and evolution of a eclogue, just out in a Brill volume Eris and of Sciences; and the place of friendship Seleucid military colony in Aemulatio, is part of my continuing work as an enabling feature of letter-writing Hellenistic Lycia, based on a paper on this understudied corpus. between socially unequal correspondents in presented at a conference on ancient medieval Byzantium. Finally, this Spring, Greek mercenaries celebrated in Kyoto; Joshua Billings I will teach a graduate seminar titled a contribution exploring the role of “Beyond Transmission: the Reception of Readers of this newsletter euergetism in the embedded economy Ancient Greek Literature in the Middle will be unsurprised to of the Greek polis for a volume on Ages,” as part of an ongoing collaborative know that I am (still) extramercantile economies of Greece project on medieval classicism, a subject working on a book on and Rome; an essay on the reception which a number of colleagues and I are drama and philosophy in of Thucydides in contemporary preparing to take up at a round table of the fifth-century BCE Athens, historiography after the Linguistic Turn International Byzantine Studies Congress which explores the for a collective book on Thucydides in Istanbul in 2021. consequences of placing drama at the and historiography; and a paper on the center of classical Greek intellectual relationship between benefactions and history. The chapters trace the ways that Caroline Cheung leadership in the ancient Greek world particular scenic forms shape, solicit, and After two years for a volume on leadership in the ancient enable structured conceptual thought— researching and writing Mediterranean and the Near East. My creating, I argue, something like a method my dissertation in Rome, projects for the rest of the academic year parallel to the methods being developed I joined the department in include an article on Livy’s version of the by those we anachronistically call September 2018.
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