From the Chair at the Edge of the Middle
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STANFORD UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS Autumn 2014 • Newsletter From the Chair Faculty and Staff . 2 Classics in the Digital Age . 3 EACHING CLASSICS at Stanford Our current students have been no less Faculty News . 4 must be more popular than ever. enterprising. The third issue of Aisthesis, Why else would we have entered our undergraduate journal of Classics, was Visiting Professors & Scholars . 10 Tthis academic year without even a single published this spring. Several of our cur - In Memoriam . 11 one of my colleagues away on leave? It is rent and former graduate students organ - Undergraduate Adventures . 12 not just popular but also well-recognized: ized two international academic confer - Featured Story . 16 A few months ago our colleague Rush ences, one in March on Roman literary and Rehm received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel material appropriative practices and the Alumni News . 19 Award for Outstanding Service to Under - other on texts and monuments in Augus - Graduate News . 20 graduate Education, a much deserved tan Rome, held in Rome in July. In true Events . 26 honor for the classicist in charge of Stan - Stanford fashion, both of them erased con- Eitner Lectures . 27 ford’s Repertory Theater. On a sadder note, ventional divides between textual and Professor emeritus Mike Wigodsky pass - visual perspectives and between literary SCIT . 28 ed away in May. A member of our depart - and archaeological material. On the Conferences . .28 ment since 1962 and retired lighter side, this year’s Stan - Commencement . 30 since 1998, he remained deeply ford Classics in Theater troupe immersed in the study of Epi - delighted audiences on cam - tage, a curean and Stoic philosophy pus and at Humanities West eri nd h m until the very end, persevering in San Francisco with a (very) y, a g r under trying circumstances. updated version of Plautus’ o i l t Casina . i o m e An exceptionally strong cohort e a of Classics majors and minors This year we paid our respects l h i c graduated this spring. Mean - to two centenaries. In April, f r e while, one of our former majors, WALTER SCHEIDEL Alessandro Barchiesi gave the a At the Edge Marden Nichols (Class of 2004), one-of-a-kind Sather Centen - gained a tenure-track position teaching nial Lecture, marking the beginning of the of the a Latin Literature and Roman Archaeology second century of that venerable Berke - l y at Georgetown. Our graduate students ley institution, and this fall Richard Mar - o Middle il n PAGE 16 ic were also moving on, and up. Pride of tin had the great honor of becoming the g s th of place must go to Sarah Levin-Richardson, hundredth Sather Professor to deliver a e coast who not only secured her second tenure- series of lectures. * A very different cen - track position, this time at the University tenary was addressed by Suzanne Marc - htt p://classics.stanford.edu of Washington, but won a Rome Prize as hand in her Lorenz Eitner lecture on Clas - htt p://www.facebook.com /stanfordclassics well. Hans Wietzke is now teaching at sics and the Great War, which offered a classic [email protected] Carleton College. Our newly minted PhD timely reminder of the many connections Dan-el Padilla Peralta joined the Columbia between antiquity, modern history, and Classics Department Society of Fellows and Melissa Bailey now the present. Hers was already this year’s Main Quad, Building 110 teaches at the University of Maryland. Stanford, CA 94305-2145 CONTINUED ON – PAGE 2 (650) 723-0479 FROM THE CHAIR —CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 second lecture in the Eitner series, pre - thing, it is that there is always more to And no, that’s not just a cliché. This year ceded by Oliver Taplin’s engaging pursuit learn about the many things that are going we set up a joint major in Classics and of “Medea’s swerving flight through art on around here, and so I want to encour - Computer Science, to infuse classical and literature.” As always we appreciate age our alums and friends to find out learning with the zest of Silicon Valley. A the generous sponsorship of Peter and more: send us a line, drop by, stay in Classics startup, anyone? Lindsay Joost that allows us to introduce touch! With Stanford Classics, you can be a wider audience to classical themes. sure that the best is yet to come. Walter Scheidel I am writing this in the final year of my sec - Walter Scheidel, Chair ond stint as the chair of our department, and next time it will be someone else’s turn * Holding the 101th Sather professorship overall as the 99th scholar to be appointed. to welcome you on this page. It has been Things can get a bit messy over time . a great privilege to help develop one of the world’s leading centers for the study of classical civilization, and in doing so I have accumulated a huge debt of grati - tude to our current graduate and under - NEW CLASSICS WEBSITE graduate directors, Grant Parker and Gio - vanna Ceserani, who somehow ended up Visit our new departmental website for the latest news, events doing most of the hard work, and to our and publications: indefatigable administrative troika of http://classics.stanford.edu Valerie Kiszka, Lori Lynn Taniguchi and Lydia Hailu, who did all the really hard Easily viewable on any cellphone, tablet, or desktop computer. work. If these years have taught me any - Classics Department Faculty and Staff ASSOCIATE PROFESSORS: LECTURERS: Giovanna Ceserani Maud Gleason EMERITI: PROFESSORS: Christopher B. Krebs John Klopacz Mark Edwards Alessandro Barchiesi Jody Maxmin Marsh McCall, Jr. Andrew Devine Grant Parker RESEARCH SCHOLAR: (Recalled for 2014-15) Richard P. Martin Jennifer Trimble Adrienne Mayor Susan Treggiari Ian Morris Reviel Netz ASSISTANT PROFESSOR: ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF: CHAIR: Andrea Nightingale Justin Leidwanger Valerie Kiszka Walter Scheidel Josiah Ober (Department Manager) Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi COURTESY PROFESSORS: Lori Lynn Taniguchi DIRECTOR OF Rush Rehm Fabio Barry (Student Services Officer) GRADUATE STUDIES: Richard Saller (Dean, Chris Bobonich Lydia Hailu Grant Parker Humanities & Sciences) Alan Code (Administrative Walter Scheidel Charlotte Fonrobert Coordinator) DIRECTOR OF Michael Shanks Ian Hodder UNDERGRADUATE STUDIES: Susan Stephens Bissera Pentcheva Giovanna Ceserani Caroline Winterer Yiqun Zhou STANFORD UNIVERSITY 2 Classics in the Digital Age CLASSGEN 339: Workshop on Teaching Classics in the Digital Age An excerpt from Tom Winterbottom’s article in the Stanford Report (December 13, 2013) A scholar of ancient Greek literature, [Stanford Classics Professor Susan Stephens] says the ability to use digital tools is helpful for graduate students who are looking for teaching positions. “Technology is here and here to stay. There is a lot of inter - est at Stanford in helping people do pedagogy better, and digital pedagogy is critical. This is where we are going and The catchment areas of Mediolanum (Milan) and Constantinople we have to embrace it,” she said. (Istanbul), by time distance Stephens saw a need to offer a formal workshop that would address the needs of graduate students as the next ORBIS 2.0 generation of teachers. “We wanted a workshop in which by Walter Scheidel and Elijah Meeks graduate students could experiment with different sorts of digital tools and resources.” Two years after the launch of “ORBIS: The Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World” in May 2012 (still available at orbis. The result was a weekly workshop, offered to graduate stanford.edu/orbis2012 ), Walter Scheidel and Elijah Meeks com - students, which focused on harnessing the most useful dig - pleted an updated version that offers additional functionality ital resources in the classroom to enhance the undergradu - (orbis.stanford.edu ). Among other innovations, users are now able ate learning experience. A small grant from the Stanford Vice to re-map the Roman Empire according to the speed or price of Provost for Undergraduate Education’s Center for Teaching travel and to customize the simulation by creating secondary clus - and Learning supported the workshop. ters within the overall network, as shown in the picture. Oddgeir Tveiten Humanities + Design Visiting Scholar Professor Giovanna Ceserani was named faculty director of the Oddgeir Tveiten is Professor of Media Studies and Jour - Humanities + Design research lab, which is part of the Center for nalism at the University of Agder and NLA University College Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). in Norway. One of his many goals during the year is to work with our faculty as well as colleagues at the d.school (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford) to look at the future New Joint Major in Classics of online education in the humanities. He is the project leader of the Future and Computer Science Learning Lab— http://futurelearning lab.com —which looks at the global - An experiment in learning, known informally as “CS+X”, is ization of education. Shortly after aimed at integrating the humanities and computer science while arriving at Stanford, he held a four-day providing students with unique educational experiences. Stanford workshop with an international group will begin offering undergraduates the opportunity to pursue a of innovators and researchers. new Joint Major in computer science and a number of humanities disciplines, starting in fall 2014. Our goal is to give Stanford stu - TVEITEN dents the chance to become a new type of engineer and a new type of humanist. DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS 3 ALESSANDRO BARCHIESI – One of the two (or three) high - because there is always a chance to meet people from other walks lights of my academic year was being able to give a lecture on of intellectual life. My lecture was preceded by a seminar by Aeneid VI near the Sibyl’s cave, thanks to the Vergil Society of Walter Scheidel about comparing the Roman and the Chinese the US and to our own Bill Gladhill (PhD 2008) who was (smoothly) Empires, a believable sample of what new research in Classics organizing.