Classical Studies Department

Faculty News

 

Professor Oakley at the Sofia InstituteJohn Oakley (pictured above) 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.

 

          Describing Greece

 

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

 

 

 

 


 

Hilary Becker co-organized the conference "Unveiling Etruscan Ritual" which was held at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on November 17, 2007. Click here for more information on the conference. In January 2008, she will give a paper titled, "Family identity and heraldic signs in Etruria" at the Annual Meeting of the AIA in Chicago; this paper is part of her continued research into the role of the Etruscan clan and the Etruscan army. She is  teaching a seminar in Etruscan archaeology this fall.

 

 

Jeffrey Becker comes to us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he completed his Ph.D. in Classical archaeology and, during 2006-2007, served as Acting Director of the Ancient World Mapping Center. A field archaeologist, his research includes ongoing investigations of early villa architecture in Central Italy as well as work on first millennium BC urbanism. In pursuit of the latter, Becker is the co-director of a new, multi-institution project that aims to survey and excavate the important Latin city of Gabii. This work got underway in summer 2007 with a magnetometry survey of a portion of the site, to be followed by more survey and mapping in 2008 and excavation in 2009 or 2010.

 

 

 

John Donahue has an article coming out in Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik on a Latin inscription that is part of our antiquities collection in the Department Library and he is continuing to work on a larger project, a social and economic study of the Tiber River in Roman history.  He was also recently named to the advisory board of the Mediterranean Center for Arts and Sciences in Siracusa, Sicily.  

 

Georgia Irby-Massie spent her semester leave productively, developing some ideas in early Greek science, astrology,  and medicine, finishing the Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural
Scientists and writing several scientific articles for a forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Greece and Rome.  Her review of GER Lloyd's recent collection is online: "Review of Principles and Practices in Ancient Greek and Chinese Science. By G.E.R. Lloyd. Aldershot, Hampshire/Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing
Limited, 2006." Aestimatio 4 (2007) 13-28. Click HERE to read it!She was invited to deliver a talk, "Mapping the World: Greek Initiatives," at the 16th Kenneth Nebenzahl, Jr. Lectures in the History of Cartography, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL on November 9, 2007.  Her talk was well received.  She also delivered a paper at the Cincinatti meeting of the Classical Association of the MiddleWest and South: "Alopekia: Mangy as a Fox," in April 2007.  Last spring she developed a new freshman seminar: Geography and Travel in the Ancient World. The class enjoyed a field trip to the Mariner's Museum in Newport News to hear a lecture on celestial cartography, composed their own Greek-style travel accounts of Williamsburg or their hometowns.  She was featured in the Fall 2007 issue of Ideation:  Research and Scholarship at William and Mary.  A link to the story will be posted soon.

 

Naama Zahavi-Ely gave two lectures at the national conference of the Society for Biblical Literature in November 2007:  "The Poetics of Vocabulary and Morphology in Biblical Hebrew poetry" and "Teaching the Biblical Hebrew
Verb."  She is continuing her research on literary techniques of 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 published two articles, "Sexuality and Ritual: Catullus' Wedding Poems" in A Companion to Catullus (Blackwell: Oxford) and "Threat and Hope: Women's Rituals and Civil War in Roman Epic" in Finding Persephone: Women's Rituals in Greece and Rome (University of Indiana Press). Her book, Greek Tragedy in Vergil's Aeneid: Ritual, Empire, and Intertext, is forthcoming by Cambridge University Press. During the summer, she worked on her next book project, Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women's Rituals in Roman Literature, thanks to a Summer Research Award granted by William and Mary. Last spring she gave a talk, "Funeral Games, Lessons in Mourning: Creating a New Nation in Vergil's Aeneid 5" at the invitation of the Department of Classics at the University of Virginia.  She also attended the Mellon Faculty Grant Writing Workshop here at the College, where she was delighted to meet and share her ongoing research with colleagues from other deparments.

 

Bill Hutton is spending the year on sabbatical at
the American School of Classical Studies in
Athens working on his project on ancient ravelers, work funded in part by a grant from the NEH.  In the past  year he has delivered lectures about his research in Athens and  Wales, and Lisbon is on tap for next year.   His book
continues to get good reviews.  Bill's work on
the Suda On Line  project was recently featured in the Daily Press. Click HERE to read the story.

John Oakley is in his last year as Mellon Professor at the American School
of Classical Studies at Athens. This year he gave the keynote speech at
conferences in Israel and Switzerland, and co-organized and ran a three-day
international conference on ancient Athenian pottery in Athens (Athenian
Potters and Painters II). He published several articles, including one about
a depiction of the departure of the Argonauts in Hesperia and another about
imitations of Roman sarcophagi. He continues to work on his volume for the
German corpus of Roman sarcophagi.

 

Barbette Spaeth taught a new seminar this past year on Magic and the Supernatural in the Ancient World, which was well-received by students, so she will be repeating it again this year.  The course covered such diverse topics as magicians, witches, amulets, voodoo dolls, demons, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, zombies, miracles, divination, astrology, theurgy, and alchemy in Greco-Roman culture.  She continued her own research on the representation of witches in the ancient world and had one article accepted for publication:  "The Terror that Comes in the Night":  The Night Hag and Supernatural Assault in Latin Literature," which will be forthcoming in Sub Imagine Somni:  Nighttime Phenomena in Greco-Roman Culture, edited by Emma Scioli and Christina Walde (Edizioni ETS:  Pisa, Italy).  She gave two professional papers dealing with her research on the cults of Roman Corinth:  "The Cult of Ceres and Cultural Identity in Roman Corinth," at the  Symposium Cumanum  in Cuma, Italy, at the invitation of the Vergilian Society and with the assistance of a grant from the Reves Center for International Studies  at the College; and "Pilgrimage in the Greco-Roman World:  The Case of Upper Peirene in Roman Corinth" at the Tenth Annual National Gathering of Pilgrims in Williamsburg. She also was a respondent at the conference “Corinth in Context:  Comparative Perspectives on Religion and Society,” sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin.