September 16, Simon Fraser University celebrated the inauguration of its new Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies, made possible by a $7 million grant from the foundation. It will enable expanded academic programming on Greece and its cultural legacy.
Owen Ewald gave an all-campus lecture, “Augustine's Spiritual Journey” on February 15th. He has also begun to work with untranslated shorter works from newly digitized versions of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca. His creative translation of John Chrysostom's Stichoi Parainetikoi will appear in the journal Christianity and Literature this fall under the title “Glimpsing the Light.” At CAPN 2011, his student and advisee Matt Versdahl presented a paper, “John Chrysostom and the Transformation of Classical Greek,” which referred to an untranslated sermon.
WSU History Department has seen its ancient historian (Richard S. Williams) retire, only keeping his distance degree Roman history course. Due to budget cuts, his medieval and ancient courses on campus will be taught by an adjunct professor who has only a Masters. While a year of Latin remains on the books and a year of Greek is listed as taught by the University of Idaho, neither appear on the fall 2011 schedule of classes. This is a bleak period for the departments in question and WSU in general.
Last year was a busy one for the Classical Civilizations (CLAS) Department at Gonzaga University. First, there was the arrival of a new colleague, Dave Oosterhuis (PhD from University of Minneapolis, 2007), the first tenure-track Classics professor hired at Gonzaga in roughly 40 years. Dave’s arrival is part of a rejuvenation of GU’s CLAS program, which now has over 20 majors and record numbers of Latin students. Second, the department had the opportunity to introduce Dave when it hosted its first CAPN conference in many years, on March 11-12, 2011. It was delightful to welcome so many regional colleagues and students to the campus in order to celebrate the 40th annual meeting as well as the 100th anniversary of CAPN’s foundation. The conference featured 28 speakers, with a keynote address on archaeological discoveries in Cilicia (Turkey) by CAPN’s own Jim Russell and a brief presentation on CAPN’s early history by Reed College’s Nigel Nicholson. Finally, in tandem with the CAPN conference, Gonzaga faculty and students produced a public exhibit in the university’s Foley Library Rare Book Room entitled “Collegium Gonzagaeum: Celebrating the Classics at Gonzaga.” The show, which ran between March 1 and May 31, focused on the history of Classical instruction at Gonzaga, with displays composed of rare books from the library collection, objects from the Jundt Art Museum collection, and Classics-related materials from the Gonzaga Archives.
Seattle's Roosevelt High School continues to offer four years of Latin to students! Roosevelt is the only school in Seattle to have offered Latin since the school opened in the 1920's. The courses culminate in AP Vergil, but that will change, of course, in 2012-2013 when Julius Caesar is added to the Advanced Placement curriculum.
What makes our program unique is that students form a "Latin community" early in their foreign language experience. For example, to set the stage for several community events ( the Annual Reed College Latin Forum Conference, the Washington/British Columbia State Junior Classical League Convention, Roosevelt in Rome (tour of Italy), the National Latin Exam, and the National Junior Classical League Convention), students meet on week-ends in September for both St. Demetrios' Greek Festival and the Annual Italian Festival. We often fund-raise for our local events. This will be necessary for the current school year, since Roosevelt High School will host the 65th Annual WA/BC State JCL convention for approximately 450 students and sponsors.
Magistra MacDonald will lead her 6th Roosevelt in Rome Tour ( and her 14th trip to Europe with students) in February of 2012. Students will stay next door to the campus of the University of Washington Rome Center. Itineraries are annually tailored to the group of travelers. This year's group will focus on sites around Cuma and the Bay of Naples.
Dr. Charles Odahl, long time Professor for Ancient & Medieval History and Classical & Patristic Latin at BSU (1975-2010), retired to Emeritus status in January of 2011. He stayed on part time through the spring and early summer to help his last undergraduates and graduates finish their programs and theses, and then moved to an ocean front condo on the central Oregon coast in mid July of 2011. He now writes part time on Roman and early Christian History in his condo on a cliff above Agate Beach in Newport, teaches part time in Roman and Byzantine History at Oregon State University in nearby Corvallis, and beachcombs and surfs as much as possible along the Pacific coast. Karen Wadley, a recent MA graduate in Ancient & Medieval Church History and Classical & Patristic Latin at BSU, has been hired to replace Dr. Odahl in Latin, and will continue the six Latin classes and Latin Minor he pioneered at BSU, and will take over supervision of the Concurrent Enrollment Program of first year College Latin he started in southern Idaho high schools. Katherine Huntley, a recent Ph.D in Ancient History & Archaeology at the University of Leicester in Britain, has been hired to replace Dr. Odahl in Ancient and Medieval Mediterranean History.
Dr. Gary Ferngren, long time Professor for Ancient History at OSU (1972-2011), recently enjoyed the publication of his book Medicine & Health Care in Early Christianity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2009). He is on leave for research this fall term of 2011.
Dr. Charles Odahl (formerly History and Latin Professor at BSU) has been hired as a Visiting Adjunct Professor for Roman and Byzantine History at OSU. He is filling in for Dr. Ferngren this fall (teaching the Roman Republic in the fall quarter) and will teach beside him in subsequent terms (the Roman Empire in the winter quarter) to expand the ancient history offerings at Oregon State. Dr. Odahl's book on Cicero and the Catilinarian Conspiracy (New York: Routledge, 2010 Hb) was released in paperback this August of 2011; and his book on Constantine and the Christian Empire, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010 Hb and e-book) is being prepared for paperback release in early 2012 in conjunction with the seventeen-hundredth anniversary of Constantine's conversion.
Eric Orlin was enormously pleased (and relieved) to see his book Foreign Cults in Rome: Creating a ‘Roman’ Empire published by Oxford in 2010. He is now serving as general Editor for the Cambridge Dictionary of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, which is intended to provide a single-volume reference work of all aspects of ancient religions in the Mediterranean world, ranging from prehistoric antiquity (e.g. Sumer and Akkad) through the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE. In 2010 Eric was awarded a Max Planck International Research Grant as part of the Memoria Romana project and is working on a study of the area around the Porticus Octavia in the Augustan period. On the teaching front, Eric introduced a new course on Athenian democracy utilizing the ‘Reacting to the Past’ curriculum; last year the students decided that Socrates should in fact be given free meals for life in the prytaneion!
Aislinn Melchior has seen several articles appear in print since we last reported news. They are: "What Would Pompey Do? Exempla and Pompeian Failure in the Bellum Africum," CJ 104.3 (2009) 241-257; "Citizen as Enemy in the Bellum Catilinae" in Valuing Others in Classical Antiquity, R. Rosen & I. Sluiter eds., Brill, 2010; “Caesar in Vietnam: Did soldiers in pre-modern wars suffer PTSD?” G&R 58.2 (2011) 1-15; “The ABC Method of Reinforcing the Meaning of Declensional Endings,” CW 104.4 (2011) 501-502.
In addition to her upcoming talk at the APA Meeting in Philadelphia (“Apologetic Allusion and Generic Repurposing in the Exhortations at Pharsalus”), she has given a talk at the Playful Plutarch Conference at Oxford this July (“Whose dog are you? Metabiography and Named Slaves in Plutarch’s Roman Lives”), an earlier version of which she delivered at the 2010 CAPN Meeting in Seattle. And in October of 2010 she delivered the annual Kimball Lecture at Whitman College: “Destructive Heroism and the Roman Civil Wars.”
David Lupher saw three publications appear in mid-2011, all from Oxford University Press. The long-term project was Alberico Gentili, The Wars of the Romans: A Critical Edition and Translation of De armis Romanis. This was done in collaboration with two historians of international law, Benjamin Straumann and Benedict Kingsbury. The other two publications were papers in edited volumes: “The De armis Romanis and the Exemplum of Roman Imperialism” (in Kingsbury and Straumann eds., The Roman Foundations of International Law: Alberico Gentili and the Justice of Empire, a companion volume to the edition and translation of the Gentili work) and, in collaboration with Elizabeth Vandiver of Whitman College, “Yankee She-Men and Octoroon Electra: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve on Slavery, Race, and Abolition,” in Ancient Slavery and Abolition, edited by Edith Hall, Richard Alston, and Justine McConnell (in Oxford’s “Classical Presences” series, in which Elizabeth’s excellent book Stand in the Trench, Achilles appeared last year).
This last year, while on sabbatical leave, Lupher began a project on classical reception in the first years of English settlement in New England. Also, the Lupher-Vandiver team is at work on a “sequel” to the Gildersleeve article, a study of the recent “reception” of this great but troubling American classicist.
Department: There is quite a lot to report. We had a bumper crop of students graduate from the department in May, 2011 -- 12 in total. Of these, one is now off to get his Ph.D. in Classics at Princeton, and another is on a Fulbright in Turkey. Two other recent alumni are also starting graduate work in Classics this fall at the University of Chicago, and another is starting an MAT at the University of Georgia. This academic year Nigel Nicholson is on sabbatical, and we are pleased to welcome Michael Brumbaugh, a recent graduate from the Classics Department of UCLA, to our department. Finally, our department is having its first external review this fall.
Michael Brumbaugh is teaching Freshman Humanities, the first semester of intro Latin, and Advanced Greek (Sophokles) this year. He is visiting in the department this year after having completed his PhD at UCLA this last spring. He is currently working on a book project that investigates the politics and poetics of kingship ideology in Kallimachos' Hymns. He gave papers last spring at CAMWS (Grand Rapids, MI) and at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (Vancouver, BC). He will be giving a talk at Reed in November on Kallimachos' Apolline geographies and one at the APA on Kallimachos and the Euphrates.
Walter Englert is teaching Freshman Humanities, the second semester of beginning Greek, and Advanced Latin (Horace) this year. During the past year he gave talks on "Cicero and the Creation of Roman Philosophy" at St. John's College in Sante Fe, NM (March 2011) and "Burning the Books of Numa: Rome's Changing Relationship to Greek Philosophy in the Early Second Century BCE" at the CAPN Meeting at Gonzaga University (March 2011). At the end of last year his article on "Cicero the Philosopher" appeared in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Cicero and Philosophy at Rome. He also was the coordinator of the twenty-third annual Reed Latin Forum for Oregon and Washington high school Latin teachers and students in November 2010.
Ellen Millender will teach Greek History, Intermediate Greek (Lysias), Advanced Greek (Herodotus), Intermediate Latin (Virgil), and Beginning Latin at Reed this year. During the 2010-2011 academic year she gave talks on “Herodotean Accounts of Spartan Naval Activity” at the CAPN Meeting at Gonzaga University (March 2011) and "Arms Do Not Make the Man: Wealth, War, and Political Power in Classical Sparta" at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Ancient Historians at Mercyhurst College (May 2011). She recently completed a chapter on “Spartan ‘Friendship’ and Xenophon’s Crafting of the Anabasis,” forthcoming in F. Hobden and C. J. Tuplin (eds.), Xenophon: Historical Enquiry and Ethical Principles (Brill, 2012). She is also currently completing two chapters for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Sparta, the first on Spartan women and the second on the Spartan dyarchy. Ellen is also working on two other book chapters, one on women and sport for the Blackwell Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity and one on the Spartan battlefield for a forthcoming volume, The Topography of Ancient Greek and Roman Violence.
Among his courses last year, Nigel Nicholson particularly enjoyed giving a Martial class a second time out and joining the staff of the new improved freshman humanities program. An essay on Camarina, "Pindar's Olympian 4, Psaumis and Camarina after the Deinomenids," came out in CPh 106 (2011): 93-114, and he has essays forthcoming in two volumes on athletics, one on equestrian contests, in The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, and one on literature and sport in the Blackwell Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity. He was elected to the APA Education Committee for 2011-15. He is currently on sabbatical working on the relationship between athlete legends and epinician.
Sonia Sabnis will teach a new course in translation, Animals in Greek and Roman Literature, in spring 2012. This fall she is teaching Humanity in Perspective, the adult course in Greek and American Humanities that Reed co-sponsors with Oregon Humanities. Her article, titled "Lucian's Lychnopolis and the Problems of Surveillance," appeared in AJP this summer, to be followed by a companion piece on Apuleian lamps in Arethusa this winter. Last March she delivered an invited lecture on Apuleius and India (a paper that has its roots in a CAPN presentation) at The College of Wooster.
The Whitman College Department of Classics is delighted to welcome Professor Kathleen Shea, Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities/Classics. This is a new tenure-track position and, we believe, the first such joint appointment in the US. Professor Shea comes to us from Rutgers University, where she completed her doctorate in Classics in July 2011. She has a BA from the University of Oregon and, as a recurrent member of CAPN, is very pleased to return to the Pacific Northwest. Her research interests include the interaction of urban and rural environments in Roman visual culture and in Augustan love elegy. Her teaching at Whitman will include courses on “Concepts of Nature in Greek and Roman Thought,” “Landscape and Cityscape in Ancient Rome,” and “Classical Foundations of the Nature Writing Tradition,” as well as courses in both ancient languages.
Last fall, 2010, the University of Oregon hosted a conference on Culture and Consumption in the Ancient World. This was a great success and we were glad that so many CAPN members were able to attend. As for this academic year, Mary Jaeger reports that she is enjoying her sabbatical and that her 2010 CAPN paper, "Demystifying Mushrooms in Latin Literature," will appear in the fall issue of Ramus. Chris Eckerman reports that he is well and enjoying teaching in Eugene. He has had a few articles appear recently on documentary papyrology (BASP), Pindar (RhM), and Archilochus (ZPE). He recently visited Sao Paulo, Brazil where he gave a lecture to the classics department at the University of Sao Paulo. He is enjoying his new found hobby of cycling around the Willamette valley. Lowell Bowditch was promoted to full professor in the spring and has had articles appear this past year in Arethusa and Classical World. Brian Walters, who received his Ph.D. in Classics from UCLA last spring, is a visiting assistant professor this year. He is working on a translation of Lucan that will be published by Hackett sometime next year and he has an essay, "Reading, Death and the Senses in Lucan and Lucretius," forthcoming in Butler, S. and A. Purves, eds. The Other Senses: Antiquity Beyond the Visual Paradigm. In September Malcolm Wilson gave a paper entitled "Teleology and Order in Aristotle's Meteorologica i-iii and its Implications for the Physical Pragmateia" at the von Humboldt University in Berlin during a conference on Aristotle's Scientific Method. He continues to work on his book on Aristotle's Meteorologica.
Mary Bachvarova participated in two international conferences: "Nostoi: Indigenous Culture, Migration and Integration in the Aegean Islands and Western Anatolia during the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages," March 31-April 3, 2011, Koç University, Istanbul, and "Luwian Identities: Language and Religion between Anatolia and the Aegean," June 10-11, 2011, at University of Reading, UK. Cambridge University Press has accepted her book manuscript, From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background to Ancient Greek Epic, and it is anticipated to come out in 2012.
Rob Chenault was blessed with a one-semester research leave that he spent in Ann Arbor, MI. He completed an article on honorific statues of senators in Rome in late antiquity, and was invited to give a talk on this subject at nearby Hillsdale College. He also continued working on his book manuscript, Rome Without Emperors: The Revival of a Senatorial City in the Fourth Century A.D.
Ortwin Knorr currently chairs Willamette University's Classical Studies Department. He has a chapter on Terence's Hecyra in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion on Terence, ed. by Anthony Augustakis, John Thorburn, and Ariana Traill. A note on Horace's Satires 1.5 is forthcoming with Classical Quarterly. As Director of Willamette's Center for Ancient Studies and Archaeology, Ortwin is involved in the preparations for the March 2012 CAPN meeting on our campus and is looking forward to hosting his fellow CAPN members in Oregon's capital, Salem.
David McCreery had planned to spend the summer of 2011 in Jordan conducting research leading to the final publication of the Tell Nimrin Excavation. Instead, he was asked to relocate the archaeology lab and spent the summer packing and moving. This fall, seven student volunteers are assisting him in unpacking and reorganizing the lab in its new, smaller space.
Ann Nicgorski currently chairs Willamette University's Department of Art History. She has an article forthcoming in F. De Angelis (ed.),
Regionalism and Globalism in Antiquity
(Brill) entitled “Apollo akersekomas and the Magic Knot of Herakles.” Ann is also a Faculty Curator in Willamette's Hallie Ford Museum of Art where she has recently curated two exhibits on Ethiopian Christian Art and on George's Rouault's Miserery et Guerre print series. She has also prepared a new display of Roman lamps on long-term loan to the museum from PSU, which will be on view by the end of October, together with a recently donated Corinthian alabastron.
This fall, Ann is teaching a first-year seminar on controversial crucifixion iconography, her survey of Roman Art and Architecture, and a new enrichment course entitled "Cafe Imago: Conversations in the Humanities for Art Historians" where she is currently enjoying riotous discussions of Ovid's Metamorphoses. As President of CAPN, Ann heads the team that is preparing the March 2012 CAPN meeting on Willamette University's campus in Salem, Oregon.
This past year Scott Pike continued his research in the use and trade of marble in the Aegean. His studies include (1) research of Leptis Magna in the Forum of the emperor Septimius Severus, (2) sourcing the Pentelic quarries that supplied marble for the Stoa of Attalos in Athens, and (3) determining the origin or origins of the curious red pigments found coating the marbles of the Parthenon. This past summer Scott directed Willamette's first archaeological field school session at the Ness of Brodgar in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Scott is also the Chair of the Wiener Laboratory Committee of the American School of Classical Studies and President of the Salem Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Donann Warren has been teaching at Willamette University and at Portland State, and liking both. The department is excited that we were able to hire her full-time for 2011-12. Apart from her usual Latin classes, Donann is teaching a course on Roman women this fall; next spring, she will offer a new course on Ancient Medicine.
Karen Carr has finally officially resigned her position in the History Department in order to devote more attention to her online children's encyclopedia, Kidipede - History and Science for Kids. Kidipede is now being read by more than a million children a month. She has been awarded the title of Associate Professor Emerita and will continue to serve as president of the Archaeological Institute of America's Portland Society. She has two chapters, "The Pottery from the Rural Survey" and "Gazetteer of sites in and catalogue of pottery from the rural survey" (co-authored with David Stone) in the third volume of the Leptiminus reports, just out as a supplement to the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
As a consequence of Karen Carr's resignation, Portland State has hired a new Assistant Professor of History of the Ancient Mediterranean World, Dr. Brian Turner. Professor Turner comes to us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote his dissertation on Roman war monuments and has been working with the Ancient World Mapping Center. George Armantrout will continue to teach full-time in the History and Art departments as well, and Laurie Cosgriff and David Thompson continue to provide us with Greek and Latin language classes.