Volume30 Number 2 February 2000
NB: The material contained in the WWW version of the CAPN Bulletin is identical to the hardcopy with the exception of a few advertisements (which have been omitted)
CONTENTS:
THE 2000 JOINT CAPN/CACW MEETING IN VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA
(March 10-11, 2000)
Please note that full information about the Conference -- including registration forms, program, lodging information, etc. -- is available online at
For the convenience of webless CAPN members, much of the requisite information is printed here.
A registration form for the conference may be found on p. 21 at the end of this Bulletin. Please note that the due date for the conference registration form is February 10.
Accommodations are available at the Laurel Point Inn in Victoria, where all sessions of the meeting will be held. A lodging reservation form, together with prices, may be found on p. 19 at the end of this Bulletin. Please note that reservations should be made by or before February 10.
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS RECEIVES MAJOR GIFT
[Editor's note: Attentive readers of the fall Bulletin may have noticed that UW news was cryptically omitted, with a promise of special news in this issue. We reprint with his permission chair Stephen Hind's announcement of a major bequest to the Department of Classics in the fall 1999 departmental newsletter.]
The special purpose of this year’s Newsletter is to commemorate and celebrate an extraordinary benefactor and friend of the Department of Classics. Back in May 1999 Meg Greenfield passed away, after a distinguished career which culminated in twenty years as editorial page editor of the Washington Post. Dan Harmon offers an obituary below, adding a departmental tribute to the many seen and heard in the national media last spring. As our readers know, Meg’s great generosity had already for several years made possible our program of Jim Greenfield Scholarships. Nothing could have prepared us, however, for the news which first reached us confidentially in June, and which can only now, in this column, be made public.
In one of the largest gifts ever received by an individual unit in UW’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Classics has been named the major beneficiary of Meg Greenfield’s estate. In a dramatic expansion of the Jim Greenfield Scholarships, Meg has posthumously established an endowment of approximately $2 million to fund ‘student scholars in the Classics’ at the University. A gift on this scale is truly transformative. We anticipate that the endowment will enable the Department to enhance substantially the year-long full-tuition scholarships open to undergraduate majors, to make a real start on a program of competitive graduate fellowships, and in the longer term to explore other creative ways of rewarding student excellence and initiative at every level.
The biggest surprise in Meg’s will, however, is that she has also left to the Department her waterfront summer home on Bainbridge Island, along with a request that the house, which opens onto spectacular views of Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula, be used as a place of retreat and study. In Meg’s lifetime, as Dan notes in his obituary [in the departmental newsletter], some of the nation’s and region’s most prominent figures in politics, business and journalism gathered under this roof to enjoy her hospitality, to exchange ideas, and to unwind. The implicit challenge to the Department is clear: to create a social and intellectual space worthy both of Meg’s own Bainbridge conversations, and of the ancient Greek and Roman marketplaces of ideas which constitute the bond of interest between Meg, our students, and ourselves.
University of Washington
We mentioned in our earlier, all too brief contribution to the fall version of this blurb only that we had welcomed to the faculty Paul Scotton and Mark Buchan, who have in a very short time contributed a good deal to the department. But the other members of the faculty have not been idle. Larry Bliquez continues as President of the Society for Ancient Medicine, and has recent and forthcoming articles on surgical tools. Ruby Blondell was a Royalty Research Fund Scholar for Winter 1999. In Spring 1999 she ran a Plato seminar as a Teaching Fellow in our Humanities Center. Her speaking engagements spanned the country from Binghamton to Tucson. Jim Clauss continues as chair of the APA Committee on Minority Scholarships. Internationally, he lectured on myth and film at Guelph, and on Apollonius at the Università di Firenze. At present he is serving as acting chair, for Stephen Hinds who is enjoying a well-deserved leave as Royalty Research Fund Scholar this winter and as a Humanities Center Scholar in the spring. Stephen was Visiting Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, for March 1999. In a Cambridge volume honoring E.J. Kenney, he published a paper on the exiled Ovid’s poetry to his wife. Sheila Colwell is serving a term on the Faculty Senate. In Spring 1999 she devised the evening of conviviality (see below) which brought together Homer, Greg Nagy, faculty, students and area alumni. Joy Connolly was a Humanities Center Scholar for 1998-99, and is in Stanford for 1999-2000 as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She has an article on Roman erotic elegy forthcoming in the next Arethusa. Together with Cathy Connors, Joy organized a conference in May 1999 on Rhetoric in Practice: Perspectives from Antiquity and the Renaissance, with contributing support from other units on campus. Anthony Corbeill (Kansas), Josiah Ober (Princeton), and Patricia Parker (Stanford, English) joined Joy and Alain Gowing on the speakers’ rostrum. Cathy Connors introduced Petronius to his medieval successor ‘Petronius Redivivus’ for an article in Latin Fiction, ed. H. Hofmann (Routledge 1999). Alain Gowing was summoned to Wales to participate in a conference on Sextus Pompey. Meanwhile a previous trip to Britain yielded an article on Cassius Dio’s Cicero in Papers of the Leeds Latin Seminar. Michael Halleran continues as the College’s Divisional Dean of Arts and Humanities. He has kept his hand in the department, however, and taught a graduate course on Greek tragedy in 1999. Daniel Harmon again served as Co-Director of the University’s Rome Center, and also led our own 1999 Classical Seminar in Rome. This past year’s undergraduate and graduate cohort enjoyed trips to the Naples region, to Verona, Mantova and Bologna. Merle Langdon is now in Athens as Mellon Professor at the American School. Susan Lape is deep into her second year in the department. Her paper ‘Reproducing the body politic: New Comedy and the ideology of Athenian democratic citizenship’ has been accepted for an issue of European Studies Journal entitled ‘Performing the politics of European comic drama.’ She will also be a respondent at a conference on MENANDER'S ATHENS 320-290 BC sponsored by the University of Chicago and Northwestern in April. Our EMERITI Professors John McDiarmid, Paul Pascal and Pierre MacKay are all thriving. Pierre teaches two quarters each year; Paul was profiled in the UW magazine Columns in a feature called ‘Class Acts’, in which former students recalled their favorite professors.