Faculty News

John Oakley is back after three years as Mellon Professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He presented on May 9th the Eugene Schuyler Lecture celebrating the inauguration of the new building of the American Research Center in Sofia, Bulgaria. The title of his talk was "Children in Wartime: Ancient Athens and Modern Europe." Attendees included the US Ambassador to Bulgaria.

CONGRATULATIONS to our very own Bill Hutton, recipient of the 2008 Classical Association of the Middle West and South Outstanding Publication Award for his book Describing Greece: Landscape and Literature in the Periegesis of Pausanias.

In August Bill returned from two years in Greece working on a study of travel in Greece in the time of Hadrian. In the past year he has given lectures on his research in Athens and Lisbon and in Williamsburg for the local chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America.

John Donahue delivered a talk in November on ancient dining customs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada and he continues to work on a sourcebook on food and drink in the Graeco-Roman world to be published by Continuum Press in 2012.

Georgia Irby-Massie produced a DVD of Greek tragedy adaptations with her Greek and Roman Tragedy students and, with her intermediate Greek students, a music CD of translations and adaptations of popular songs into Attic Greek. She delivered a paper on her Greek lyrics at CAMWS in Tucson and organized a panel on foot lore in antiquity for CAMWS-Southern Section in Asheville, NC. Her Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists (with Paul T. Keyser) is now in print.

Naama Zahavi-Ely gave two talks at the national Society for Biblical Literature conference in 2008: “Knowledge of God in the Book of Judges” and “Literary Use of Dialect in the Hebrew Bible.” Her paper “Teaching the Biblical Hebrew Verb” was published on-line by the SBL in May 2008. She is researching literary techniques in Biblical Hebrew Poetry.

John Chesley will defend his dissertation at the University of Washington this Spring. He gave a paper titled "Fatalis Dux: Livy's
Depiction of Scipio" at the 2007 meeting of CAMWS.

Vassiliki (Lily) Panoussi's book, Greek Tragedy in Vergil's Aeneid: Ritual, Empire, and Intertext (Cambridge University Press) is now in print. She completed an article on Aeneas' leadership for A Companion to Virgil with Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, and continued work on her next book, Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women's Rituals in Roman Literature thanks to a Suzann Mathews Summer Award. She gave a talk on Harry Potter and the Mythology Class at the 2008 CAMWS meeting in Tucson and participated in a workshop at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) on integrating A Companion to Catullus into Secondary and College Classrooms. She continues working with European Studies and Women’s Studies and she is currently participating in the University Teaching Project.

Barbette Spaeth, Chair of the Department, gave six professional talks in 2008 on the cults of Roman Corinth at the meetings of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South; the Working Conference on "Ways of Seeing in Late Antique Material Religion" at the University of Kentucky; the Richmond Society of the Archaeological Institute of America; the Symposium Cumanum of the Vergilian Society in Cuma, Italy; and the Society of Biblical Literature. She co-founded and organized the new Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions (SAMR), which brings together scholars working on the different ancient religions of the Mediterranean world in archaeology, art, literature, and epigraphy. is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Mediterranean Religions, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Maria (Molly) Swetnam-Burland gave a lecture in spring 2009 at the San Antonio Museum of Art (which has a wonderful collection!) and in fall 2009 she is travelling to Berlin to attend the conference of the Fédération internationale des associations d'études classiques and to present a paper, titled 'Egyptian art, made in Italy: authenticity and ethnicity.'  She recently published an article in the July 2009 issue of the American Journal of Archaeology, 'Egypt Embodied: the Vatican Nile.'   She is also continuing her work on  Imagining Egypt: Roman Art and the Invention of the Foreign, a book that deals with the ‘reinvention’ of Egyptian antiquities in Roman contexts and their appeal to Roman audiences in the Augustan period and beyond.