Beverly Berg, who taught Ancient History for 21 years at Linfield College in McMinnville Oregon, is now living in Tacoma WA. Since retiring in 2008 she has directed travel/study programs for the Vergilian Society in Italy and Egypt, and will be directing a Vergilian program in Sicily Dec 27, 2012-Jan 6, 2013. She taught Ancient Egypt for the Classics department at UPS in fall of 2011.
Catherine Connors published two papers on geographical themes: 'Remembering Tartarus: Apuleius and the Metamorphoses of Aristomenes,' coauthored with Cindy Clendenon, in Trends in Classics 2012, and 'Eratosthenes, Strabo and the Geographer's Gaze' Pacific Coast Philology 46.2 (2011) Special Issue: Literature, Culture, and the Environment, ed. Sabine Wilke. She also lectured at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle on 'Seers and Saints in the work of Gabriel von Max' and presented 'The Lost Scrapbook of Miss Mattie Hansee' at the 2012 CAPN meeting at Willamette University in Salem Oregon. Miss Hansee taught Latin and Greek at the UW in 1881-84 and 1895-1903, during which time she also served as the University's first Dean of Women.
Cathy is also Course Coordinator for the newly inaugurated UW in the High School Latin 103 course. Through the UWHS program, UW departments offer courses for college credit in Washington high schools; high school teachers work closely with the Coordinator to align their coursework with UW standards. This year six Washington high schools are offering UWHS Latin 103. For more information, consult http://www.uwhs.washington.edu/uwhs/ or contact cconnors@uw.edu.
Ruby Blondell spent the past year finishing her book on Helen of Troy (now forthcoming with Oxford University Press), and talking about it to anyone who would listen. In the course of the year she gave presentations on this work at a conference in Mérida on the Pre-Socratic philosophers, Seattle's Holy Names Academy, the University of Calgary, the department's annual conference on on Teaching Classics in the Schools, and the sixth quadrennial conference on Feminism and Classics, held this year in Toronto. Along with Deb Kamen, she also co-organized a Lambda Classical Caucus Round Table for the Feminism and Classics conference. Other projects include a co-authored paper (with Sandra Boehringer) on Lucian's reception of Plato's Symposium, presented at a Plato conference in Paris in March. She remains on the editorial board of the American Journal of Philology and Bryn Mawr Classical Review, and on the American Philological Association's Outreach Prize Committee and Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance. She is still, in addition, the treasurer of the Lambda Classical Caucus, and the email list owner for the Women's Classical Caucus. On campus, much of her time has been occupied with the College of Arts and Sciences College Council. Last but not least, she made her 5-second movie debut in Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines (directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan).
Since assuming duties as Director of the University Honors Program and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Affairs in 2007, Jim Clauss has given two papers at the National Collegiate Honors Council conference and has published two papers on Honors education in the organization's journal. He has not abandoned Classics completely, having given papers on Classical topics at conferences in Lyon, Waterloo, and Albuquerque. Jim and Martine Cuypers recently published a collection of essays under the title A Companion to Hellenistic Literature. Articles on various topics are forthcoming in The Encyclopedia of Ancient History and The Virgil Encyclopedia as are two pieces on the Argonautica and commentary on selections of Nicander's Theriaca. Last year Jim taught a course on myth and folktale while travelling with the women's basketball team in Scandinavia and once again led the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity foreign study program in Rome.
Alain Gowing has kept busy being chair, in which post he was renewed this past year (temporarily!). When not bemoaning the lateness of the Newsletter, he found time to write a couple of articles, one entitled 'Tully's Boat: Cicero in the imperial period', in The Cambridge Companion to Cicero, C. Steel, ed. (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and an Afterword to a conference volume on The Roman Republic in Augustan Poetry, J. Farrell and D. Nelis, edd. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He also continues to serve on the editorial board of Classical Antiquity.
Stephen Hinds made two trips to Britain in 2011-12, one to deliver the plenary lecture on Latin literature at the Triennial Meeting of the Greek and Roman Societies in Cambridge, and one to give the Fourth Housman Lecture at University College London. He has been spending some time lately with Ausonius and Claudian in the 4th Century, and with Marvell and Milton in the 17th. Stephen was recently renewed as Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of the Humanities for 2012-15.
Olga Levaniouk, who was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2009, spent last winter and spring investigating an unfamiliar field of Russian wedding songs to produce her born-digital article 'Sky-Blue Flower: Songs of the Bride in Modern Russia and Ancient Greece,' which was her contribution to Gregory Nagy's Festschrift on occasion of his 70th birthday. The full text has been published online at http://chs.harvard.edu.
In June of 2012 Olga accompanied three of our undergraduates—Molly Ostheller, Devin Gleeson, and Edward Nolan (now off to graduate school at Vanderbilt) -- to the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, to take part in an inter-collegiate summer seminar. The two-week seminar was devoted to the Homer Multitext project housed at the Center: students learned about oral and textual transmission of Homer, acquired basic training in editing texts using open source technology, and began working on a digital diplomatic edition of Venetus A, the main manuscript of the Iliad. The work now continues at the UW: the students have organized a Homer Multitext Club and meet weekly for editing sessions.
In July Olga presented at the first international conference on 'Athletic and Interstate Political Rivalries at the Olympics and Beyond' in Ancient Olympia, where she spoke on '????
Alex Hollmann was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2011. In the spring of 2012, Alex managed to decipher most of the 109-line Greek amulet he has been working on for a year. The amulet, which protects a woman named Malkhe (a name which means 'Ruler' or 'Queen' in Semitic languages) against magical attacks, evil, and especially against epilepsy, consists of tiny Greek writing inscribed on a thin sheet of silver (perhaps gold?), and would have been worn rolled up in a small container around Malkhe's neck. In June Prof. Hollmann took the amulet with him to Dumbarton Oaks in Washington D.C, where it is being considered for acquisition by the Museum. He will publish it in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik and also in a collection of magical texts in Greek that he is editing with Prof. Robert Daniel, Custos of the Institut für Altertumskunde at the University of Cologne. From DC Prof. Hollmann flew to Greece, where he read a paper ('Agônes at Antioch') at the same conference in Olympia that Olga Levaniouk has written about. While in Europe, he went to Cologne to meet Robert Daniel and began work on an unidentified and unpublished curse tablet in the collection there. Back in Seattle, he has spent the fall on sabbatical working on a book review, the curse tablet project, and on a chapter ('Solon in Herodotus') he has been invited to contribute to a book on Solon, the great Athenian lawgiver. In the winter and spring of 2013 he will teach courses on Plato's Apology, three authors of the Second Sophistic (Philostratus, Dio Chrysostom, Lucian), and Greek and Roman religion. He plans to travel to Cologne again in the summer.
This year Deborah Kamen's book Status in Classical Athens was accepted for publication by Princeton University Press (forthcoming 2013). She also saw the publication of her article 'Naturalized Desires and the Metamorphosis of Iphis' (Helios 39 [2012] 21-36), her chapter 'Manumission, Social Rebirth, and Healing Gods in Ancient Greece' (in D. Geary and S. Hodkinson, eds., Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil [Newcastle upon Tyne 2012] 174-194), and a review of K. L. Wrenhaven, Reconstructing the Slave: The Image of the Slave in Ancient Greece (BMCR 2012.09.09). In May, she attended the Feminism and Classics VI conference at Brock University, where she delivered a paper on 'Fictive Sale and the Manumission of Prostitutes in Ancient Greece,' and co-organized with Ruby Blondell the first-ever Lambda Classical Caucus (LCC) roundtable at a Feminism and Classics conference. She continues to serve as Co-Chair of the LCC.
Last winter, Sarah Stroup was awarded a $4,000 course development grant for her new class, 'War Games: Greek Athletes, Roman Gladiators, the Modern Olympics, and College football,' which allowed her to travel to Greece at the end of the Rome Program, in order to visit (and photograph!) the sites of the ancient stephanetic games as well was several important museum collections.
Stroup is also working on a new course, CLAS 360, 'Jews, Greeks and Romans in the Ancient World,' to be offered jointly by Classics and by the Jewish Studies program. The course, a version of which Stroup taught through Honors in Winter 2012, will debut in the 2013-14 school year — stay tuned.
In early November, Stroup participated in the Stroum Jewish Studies Program's inaugural 'JewDub Talks,' held at the UW Tower. These talks are a new project inspired by the 'TED Talks' format, consisting of 'pocket-sized' (12 minute!) lectures on areas of scholarly interest. Stroup's talk 'The Myth of Tradition' examined Jewish cultural adaptability through the persons of Judah Maccabee, Alexander the Great, and Ezekiel, the 2nd century BCE 'tragic poet of the Jews,' who wrote Greek tragedies—on Jewish themes. Other speakers included professors Devin Naar, Barbara Henry, and Shalom Sabar, visiting this year from Hebrew University.
She has several articles forthcoming, including 'When I read my Cato, it is as if Cato speaks: The Evolution of Cicero's Dialogic Voice,' in The Author's Voice in Classical and Late Antiquity, edited by A. Marmadoro and J. Hill (Oxford University Press) and 'Without Patronage: Fetishization, Representation, and the Circulation of Gift-Texts in the Late Roman Republic,' in The Gift in Antiquity, edited by M. Satlow (Wiley-Blackwell), as well as a few reviews.
And she is once again serving on the Faculty Senate! Sarah also took over this year as Graduate Program Coordinator (from Cathy Connors, who served in that capacity with great distinction from 2006-12).Kate Topper spent the fall of 2011 at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, where she was a junior fellow. While at the Center, she researched and wrote an article entitled 'Dionysos Comes to Thrace: The Metaphor of Corrupted Sacrifice and the Establishment of Dionysian Cult in Images of Lykourgos' Madness,' which will be published in Arethusa, and which is part of a larger project that reexamines Athenian artists' approaches to representing the foreign. More recently, her chapter 'Approaches to Reading Attic Vases' appeared in A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (eds. S. Dillon and S. L. James, Wiley-Blackwell 2012), and she has published book reviews in the New England Classical Journal, the Journal of Hellenic Studies, and caa.reviews. Her book, The Imagery of the Athenian Symposium, was published in the fall of 2012 by Cambridge University Press. She continues to serve on the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and as the secretary of the Seattle Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America.
The spring of 2012 saw the founding member of our department, David Lupher, taken out behind the wood shed and – after due contemplation of his age, decrepitude, and worthy service -- the lead was handed off to Elizabeth Vandiver. (It was a melancholy time when we thought we would have to put him out of his misery, but our loss is Whitman's gain as he is currently covering Dana Burgess' sabbatical.) The spring was filled with goodbyes and a great number of our alumni returned for the spring Cena to thank David and celebrate his career. We miss him and remain in grateful awe of the energy and talent he expended to build this department from the ground up.
While never a replacement, we are delighted with our new colleague, Brett Rogers who joins us after having taught at the University of Georgia and Gettysburg College. Since his arrival in July, Brett has been working steadily on a volume on Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (under contract, OUP) co-edited with his fellow Reed alum Benjamin Stevens. (For a preview, see their recent review essay in May's issue of Classical Reception Journal.) He has also delivered papers on Greek drama and on the use of Aeschylus in the Harry Potter series, as well as given lectures for the Sunoikisis Homeric Poetry Seminar and for the Ancient Greeks / Modern Lives program at the Multnomah Public Library branches in Gresham and Hillsdale.
Bill Barry is on sabbatical leave this year and after traveling to Greece and Turkey earlier this year, is taking a slight detour into Hesiod's Works and Days before returning to his beloved urban mobs.
Our students have very much benefited from the knowledge and thoughtful teaching of Lindsay Morse who is with us this year as a visiting professor. She is currently revising a number of papers she has presented for publication as articles. The first is "The Famed Earth-shaker: Poseidon as Analogue to Achilles in Homer's Iliad" which she presented at CAPN at the University of Washington in Seattle in 2010. The other is "Like a Shadow or a Dream: Pindar Pythian 8 and the Homeric Afterlife," from the CAPN meeting at Willamette University earlier this year. Her next project will be a revision of her very first CAPN paper from 2006, "Beware of Dog: Curiositas and Platonic Guardians in Apuleius' Metamorphoses".
Eric Orlin's big adventure this fall was hosting the first Redford Conference in Archaeology, on the topic of digital archaeology, on campus in October. We were able to invite Dr. Norbert Zimmerman from the Vienna Academy of Sciences to lecture on his recent result using a 3-D scanner to map the catacombs of Domatilla in Rome. Sebastian Heath (NYU), Nick Eiteljorg (CSA) and Chris Mundigler (Victoria) also provided keynote addresses. Apart from that activity, Eric has kept busy collaborating with colleagues in religion, organizing a panel at the recent SBL meeting in Chicago as well as delivering a paper in another session. Eric has several articles in the works relating to these topics, as well as an article that should appear in a volume that Karl Galinsky is putting together on Roman memory. He will be presenting part of that work at the upcoming AIA meeting in Seattle.
Aislinn Melchior is acting as chair this year and doesn't hate it as much as she thought she would. She also presented a paper at a fabulous conference on Caesar at Amherst College this fall. At the upcoming APA she will be leading a round table discussion with Jen Ebbeler from the University of Texas at Austin. Our goal is to help graduate students who are facing the job market for the first time get a sense of the similarities and differences of a professor's life at a large state school vs. a small liberal arts college.
The Classical Civilizations (CLAS) Dept. at Gonzaga University is continuing to expand its curriculum and activities, having slowly rebuilt the program over the past five years. The recent Spring and Summer 2012 semesters saw a great many new activities take place in and outside of the classroom, as we move into the 125th anniversary of Gonzaga's foundation. We've documented all of these activities in a new departmental newsletter, a PDF of which we provide here for anyone who would like to download it.
We're looking for a zippy, attractive name, so if you can think of one for us, we'd love to hear it. It is part of our growing campaign of educational and departmental outreach to students, faculty and the university community, and we've gotten some very positive feedback from those groups as well as from alumni, to whom we have emailed copies (with apologies to the U.S. Postal Service; sorry, but we're on a tight budget). Inn any case, if you've been thinking of doing something similar, we highly endorse the idea. Color photos can be easily reproduced, students can get involved in writing articles, and it does a wonderful job documenting a department's history. We're late on the bandwagon, sure, but if you haven't thought of doing this, the feedback has been terrific and very positive. Regards, Andy Goldman (Chair, CLAS Dept., Gonzaga U.)
Charles Odahl, Professor Emeritus for Ancient History and Classical Languages at BSU, relates that the 2nd edition expanded paperback of his academic best seller on the first Christian emperor was published in Britain and the USA on 28 August 2012: Constantine and the Christian Empire, 2nd ed. (London & New York: Routledge "Roman Imperial Biographies," 2013, 442 pp., L23.99 = $38.95) ISBN 978-0-415-64514-0. He also relates that a leading Serbian house has bought the rights to publish it in a Serbian translation next year (it is already out in a Romanian translation). Dr. Odahl now resides on the Oregon coast, writes part time in his ocean front condo above Agate Beach in Newport, and lectures at churches and universities nearby. His main e-mail address is still: codahl@boisestate.edu.
Several of Dr. Odahl's recent BSU students are advancing up the academic ladder in graduate programs: Matthew Recla has just completed his doctorate in Ancient History and Religion with Hal Drake at UCSB (fall, 2012); Shawn Ragan has just begun a Ph.D program in Ancient and Byzantine History with Michele Salzman at UCR (fall, 2012); Kasey Reed has completed an MA in Classics at Oxford University (spring, 2012); Chris Browne is studying for an M.St. in Classical & Christian Studies with Peter Leithart at the New Saint Andrews College in Moscow (2011-13); Ben Brandon just completed an MA thesis he had begun with Dr. Odahl at BSU (fall, 2012), and Charles Westerberg has just started an MA program in Roman History at BSU (fall, 2012) - all these students studied Roman, Early Christian and Byzantine History, and got Latin Minors under Dr. Odahl between 2002-2011.
Walter Englert is teaching Freshman Humanities, the second semester of beginning Greek, and Advanced Latin (Ovid's Metamorphoses) this year. During the past year he gave a talk on "Was Caesar an Epicurean?" at the American Classical League Institute, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, June 29, 2012. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Cicero and Philosophy at Rome, and recently submitted an article for publication (based on part of the book project) entitled, "Fanum Becomes Philosophy: Cicero and the Death of Tullia in the Consolatio, Letters to Atticus, and the Tusculan Disputations." He also was the coordinator of the twenty-fifth annual Reed Latin Forum for Oregon and Washington high school Latin teachers and students in November 2012.
Ellen Millender is teaching Freshman Humanities, Roman history, and the second semester of beginning Latin this academic year. 2012 was a very busy and productive year, commencing with eight lectures in New Zealand on various aspects of Spartan history in March plus the chance to see some amazing scenery! Later in the year her article on "Spartan 'Friendship' and Xenophon's Crafting of the Anabasis" appeared in F. Hobden and C. J. Tuplin, eds., Xenophon: Historical Enquiry and Ethical Principles, 377-425 (Leiden: Brill). This past year she also completed two long chapters, entitled "Spartan Women" and "Kingship: The History, Power, and Prerogatives of Sparta's 'Divine' Dyarchy," for the forthcoming Blackwell's Companion to Sparta, edited by Anton Powell. Another article, entitled "The Greek Battlefield: Classical Sparta and the Spectacle of Hoplite Warfare" will appear in a forthcoming volume on the topography of ancient Greek and Roman violence edited by Garrett Fagan and Werner Reiss. This coming spring Ellen is completing a study of the Spartans' humiliation of the helots for a volume on terrorism in the ancient world as well as a paper on fifth-century Athenian constructions of Spartan political development for a conference in Cambridge in July, 2013.
Nigel Nicholson enjoyed leave last year, and is close to completing a book on "Athletes, Epinician and Oral Tradition in the Greek West." He has an article coming out on the methodology of this project in AJPh, "Cultural Studies, Oral Tradition, & the Promise of Intertextuality," and has also completed two articles with Reed students, both in Nikephoros, "Doctors, Trainers and Athletes in Bacchylides Ode 1 ," Nikephoros 25 (2012), with Arien Gutierrez, and "Aging, Athletics and Epinician ," Nikephoros 23 (2010), 105-38, with Elizabeth Heintges. He enjoyed a trip to Italy and Sicily last summer, and to the UK Classical Association in the Spring. His reintroduction to teaching has been gentle, with first- and second-year Latin, and he will get to offer two of his favorite classes in the Spring, Pindar for upper-level Greek, and a general class on Literary Theory. Finally, Portland has been lucky to host a traveling exhibit from the British Museum on the Classical Body, and Nigel got to lecture to the patrons of the Portland Art Museum on the body of the Greek athlete.
Sonia Sabnis is enjoying her first academic year as a tenured professor, Teaching duties continue apace together with new and concomitant administrative tasks. Over the summer she collaborated not only with a student, on a summer research project on Animals in Apuleius but also with a colleague, Walter Englert, on an essay for the 50th anniversary volume for the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. She recently gave a paper on the Greek Alexander Romance at the meetings of PAMLA and the APA.
Brian Turner completed his first year as Assistant Professor of the Ancient Mediterranean World. He presented papers at the XXII International Limes Congress in Ruse, Bulgaria ("Limitless Empire: Soldiers' Origins on the Roman Funerary Altar at Adamclisi"), and at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Canadian West ("Envisioning Empire: The Roman World of Velleius Paterculus"). He also organized a panel at the annual meeting of the Association of Ancient Historians on the uses of Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) for the study of ancient history.
George Armantrout continues to teach courses in Greek History and Art History, while Laurie Cosgriff and Tim Nidever teach Greek and Latin language classes.
Karen Carr, Associate Professor Emerita, continues to expand the online children's encyclopedia, Kidipede: History and Science for Kids, and serve as president of the Archaeological Institute of America's Portland Society. She is concentrating this year on expanding Kidipede into the Renaissance and modern periods, starting with the Ottoman and Safavid empires.
Lowell Bowditch's commentary on Propertius for the Bolchazy-Carducci Latin authors series is forthcoming. Chris Eckerman is happy to report that he has a few new publications since last year. Those of you who suffered through his highly philological CAPN talk last year can find the official version as "Was Epinician Poetry Performed at Panhellenic Sanctuaries?" Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 52: 338-360. His forthcoming publications are on Pindar, the iconography of Panathenaic vases (from his previous year's CAPN talk), and an edition of a papyrus fragment: "Pindar's Delphi," in Place, Space, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, ed. Kate Gilhuly and Nancy Worman (Cambridge University Press); "Cockfighting and the Iconography of Panathenaic Amphorae," Illinois Classical Studies 37; "On the Performance of Pindar's Nemean 3," Mnemosyne; "A Temple Declaration from Roman Egypt," The Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists. On a personal note, he is happy to report that he is beginning to enjoy cross-country skiing in the Cascades, which, last winter, he thought he would never want to do again, given how hard cross-country skiing is. He finds that level terrain suits him well.
Jeffery Hurwit's essay "Boularchos, the Chigi Painter, and the Interdependence of free-painting and vase-painting in the Seventh Century," has recently been published in in E. Mugione, ed., L'Olpe Chigi: Storia di un Agalma. Università di Salerno/Pandemos (2012), 103-110. His article "Marker of Death: The Swastika in Late Geometric Art," will appear in the next edition of BABesch.
Mary Jaeger presented an expanded version of her CAPN cheese paper at the APA meeting in Seattle. Malcolm Wilson's book Structure and Method in Aristotle's Meteorologica: A More Disorderly Nature has been accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press. He is working on a paper concerning the sea in ps.-Aristotle's Problems for a collection edited by Robert Mayhew.