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Petition to Reinstate Classics Graduate Program at Pitt
From Mark Possanza:
On April 5, 2012 the Dean of the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at Pitt announced the suspension, effective immediately, of the graduate programs in Classics, German and Religious Studies. We would like the Dean to know that there is a collective voice of support for our graduate program.
http://www.change.org/petitions/dean-of-graduate-studies-the-university-of-pittsburgh-reinstate-the-department-of-classics-graduate-program
APA Member in the News: Greg Crane Appointed as Humboldt Professor
From Informationsdienst Wissenschaft:
Universität Leipzig erhält hochkarätige Humboldt-Professur
Susann Huster
Die Universität Leipzig hat eine mit fünf Millionen Euro ausgestattete Professur der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung erhalten, um den renommierten Altphilologen und Informatiker Prof. Dr. Gregory Ralph Crane von der Tufts University in Medford/Boston, USA, zu berufen.
Crane gilt als führender Pionier der eHumanities, der Entwicklung von Computerprogrammen für die Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Er kombiniert in einem innovativen Ansatz Altphilologie und Informatik. So wendet er Methoden der Informatik zur Systematisierung der kulturellen Entwicklung des Menschen an. Seine Reputation als Pionier der Digital Humanities, der digitalen Geisteswissenschaften, verdankt er der Entwicklung der Perseus Digital Library, einer umfangreichen und frei zugänglichen Online-Bibliothek für antike Quellen. Als einer der innovativsten Forscher in seinem Gebiet ist er wie kein Zweiter in den Geisteswissenschaften und der Angewandten Informatik bewandert.
In Leipzig wird er mit einem Informatiklehrstuhl für Digital Humanities dazu beitragen, die Verbindung der Informatik mit den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften als einen zentralen Schwerpunkt voranzubringen. Das Institut für Informatik soll so zu einem international sichtbaren Zentrum der Digital Humanities ausgebaut werden. "Durch ein hochrangig besetztes Gutachtergremium wird damit das besondere Potenzial der im Freistaat einzigen geistes-,
sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlich geprägten klassischen Volluniversität für eine derart innovative Profilentwicklung nicht nur anerkannt, sondern auch nachhaltig unterstützt", sagt Prof. Dr. Matthias Schwarz, Prorektor für Forschung und Nachwuchsförderung an der Universität Leipzig.
In seinem Fach hat Crane grundlegende Beiträge zum Aufbau digitaler Bibliotheken und der Anwendung moderner Text Mining Verfahren in den Geisteswissenschaften geleistet.
Dank seiner langjährigen Erfahrung in der interdisziplinären Lehre wird er eine wechselseitige Befruchtung der Geisteswissenschaften und der Informatik befördern. Der Wissenschaftler ist weltweit als Vordenker in den eHumanities gefragt und bringt internationale Kooperationen mit, so mit Google Books und der Mellon Foundation.
Der international höchst angesehene Preis für Forschung in Deutschland wird von der Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in einem strengen Wettbewerbsverfahren vergeben, um deutsche Hochschulen in die Lage zu versetzen, weltweit führende, im Ausland tätige Forscher zu berufen und ihnen international konkurrenzfähige Bedingungen für zukunftsweisende Forschung zu bieten. Das Preisgeld ist für die Finanzierung der ersten fünf Jahre in Deutschland gedacht.
Weitere Informationen zur Person:
Prof. Dr. Gregory Ralph Crane, geboren 1957, ist derzeit Lehrstuhlinhaber am Department of Computer Science der Tufts University, Medford/Boston, USA. Seine Promotion legte er im Bereich klassische Altertumswissenschaften an der Harvard University 1985 vor, danach war er dort Assistant Professor. Seit 1985 war er als Co-Director an den Planungen zum Perseus-Projekt beteiligt, seit 1992 als Assistant Professor tätig, dann als Associate Professor an der Tufts University. Seit 1998 ist er Inhaber des Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship. Für seine Leistungen wurde er unter anderem mit dem Google Digital Humanities Award 2010 ausgezeichnet.
Site: Gnomon in English
From now on, the Gnomon Bibliographic Database will also be available in an English version (http://www.englisch.gnomon-online.de/), including a comprehensive English thesaurus. The database contains around 500,000 entries, with monthly updates comprising the latest reviews, monograph studies, anthologies, and articles in periodicals.
APA Member in the News: Alexandra Pappas
From the San Francisco State University News:
Alexandra Pappas has been selected by the Department of Classics to be the first endowed Raoul Bertrand Chair in Classics. Currently a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., Pappas will join SF State this fall as an assistant professor.
Pappas will teach courses in Greek and Latin language, Greek art and archaeology and courses on Greek and Roman culture.
"Dr. Pappas is a dynamic teacher who is sure to attract new students to study ancient Greece, Rome and the broader Mediterranean," said classics Chair David Leitao. "Her exciting interdisciplinary research will help keep the classics department at the cutting edge of humanities in the 21st century."
Pappas has an extensive background in Greek poetry, art and archaeology as well as word and image studies. Although currently in residence at the Center for Hellenic Studies, she has also been an assistant professor in ancient Greek at the University of Arkansas since 2006 and is completing a book titled "Graphic Art: Alphabetic Images in Ancient Greece." She was previously a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph.D. in classics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her bachelor's degree in classics from the University of Oregon.
Having grown up on the West Coast and with family in the Bay Area, Pappas praised SF State for its diverse student body, its enthusiastic faculty, its history of promoting social justice and the reputation of its graduates. "I've been looking forward to a homecoming like this for a long time," Pappas said.
The endowed chair is named after the late Raoul Bertrand, who taught classics at SF State from 1958 to 1999. Following his death in 2007, Bertrand's estate donated $1.41 million to the University, 80 percent of which will fund the endowed chair in classics. The remainder will fund scholarships and other department expenses.
CFP: Panel: Afro-Latino and Afro-Hispanic Literature and Classics
American Philological Association January 2014
“…I am a man and in that sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass…” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skins White Masks)
Classica Africana has produced a rich body of scholarship on African and African American receptions of classical ideas, images, and texts; the study of classical receptions in Latin America is also growing. The proposed panel would infuse these already fruitful areas with Afro-Latin and Afro-Hispanic receptions. An estimated 25% of the population of Latin America has African roots, and the demographic changes in the U.S. make such study timely.
Classical artistic and discursive traditions were appropriated by different Eurocentric colonial powers in the interest of European expansion. Greek and Roman epistemologies formed models for imperial governance and aesthetics. Even after independence, governing elites of the new nations in Spanish and Portuguese Africa and Latin America resorted to classical ideologies as they created national imaginaries, repeatedly disfranchising large parts of the population. Yet from the margins, writers, artists and philosophers from Spanish and Portuguese speaking Latin America and Africa have had recourse to classical themes in order to advance messages of liberation for their communities. Examples of these are Manuel Zapata Olivella’s use of Greco-Roman tropes in Changó el Gran Putas and reformulations of classical theatre such as Trinidad Morgades’ Antigona.
The panel will examine Afro-Latin receptions of ideas and images traditionally considered Greco-Roman. Rejecting the claim that “Greco-Roman” themes are dominant or hegemonic, we rather shall read critically the use of classical tropes in mainstream literatures that represent Africa and Africans, and shall study the use of classical themes along with Afro-centric tropes in literature, art and philosophy presented by Africans and Afro-descendants.
Proposals related, but not limited, to the following topics, are invited:
- Studies of individual writers who infuse, or individual works which infuse Afrocentric epistemologies with ideas, mythistoric or historic individuals, or historical events of the Greco-Roman past
- Studies of how Afro-Latin American and Afro-Hispanic writers map the ancient world as one where Africa is as central and essential as Greece and Rome (e.g. Juan Tomas Avila Laurel’s ancient world compared with Cavafy’s)
- Studies of those national or regional literatures which recognize or employ African, local, and classical imaginaries
- The use of classical traditions in Hispanophone and Lusophone African and Afro-Latin American clubs, organizations, and literary circles (e.g. the Ateneo in Mexico)
Please send your 600-word proposal to Elisa Rizo (rizoe@iastate.edu) or Madeleine Henry (mhenry@iastate.edu) by Dec. 1, 2012. We will review these and prepare the panel for review by the APA Program Committee; panel submission deadline is anticipated for March 2013. Our endeavor is part of a three-year project funded by Iowa State University’s Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities. Other activities will include a dedicated conference on our campus in 2014 and publications ( special journal volume or edited volume; select works in translation).
Resources
Avila Laurel, Juan Tomas. Historia Intima de la Humanidad. Malabo, Ediciones Pangola 1999.
Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1952.) Trans. C. Markmann. Grove Press 1967.
Henry, M. “The Other Side of Atlantis”, delivered at APA January 7, 2012.
Hewitt, J. Cuervo. “Luís de Camoens en el reino de Calibán: Las ‘Lusíadas’ en ‘Changó, el gran Putas’ de Manuel Zapata Olivella” Afro-Hispanic Review 22:1 (Spring 2003) 13-23.
Lupher, D.A. Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America. Michigan 2003.
Nikoloutsos, K. “Seneca in Cuba: Gender, Race, and the Revolution in José Triana’s Medea en el espejo.” Reception of Greek and Roman Drama in Latin America. Special issue of Romance Quarterly 59.1 (2012): 19-35.
Rizo, E. “Bridging Literary Traditions in the Hispanic World: Equatorial Guinean Drama and the Dictatorial Cultural-Political Order” 142-164 in Critical Perspectives on Afro-Latin American Literature. Ed. A.D. Tillis. Routledge 2012.
Watson, S. Stephenson. “Chango, el gran putas: Contemporary Afro-Hispanic Historical Novel”, Afro-Hispanic Review 25:1 (Spring 2006) 67-85.
Zapata Olivella, Manuel. Chango, the Biggest Badass. Trans. J. Tittler, Texas Tech University Press 2010.
_____. “Los Ancestros Combatientes”: Una Saga Afro-norteamericana” Afro-Hispanic Review 21:1-2 (Spring-Fall 2002) 9-16.
In Memoriam: Louise Price Hoy
Louise Price Hoy, former chair of Classical Studies at Marshall University and longtime CAMWS Vice-President for West Virginia, died July 4, 2010. She possessed enviable academic credentials: B. A. in Latin from Duke University where she was elected into Phi Beta Kappa in 1939, M. A. in Latin in 1945, and Ph. D. in Latin 1952, both from Bryn Mawr College. She completed her dissertation, Political Influence in Roman Prosecutions, 75 B.C. to 60 B.C., under Lily Ross Taylor, becoming Professor Taylor’s last doctoral graduate. She began her career at Swarthmore College and Western Reserve University before coming to Marshall University in 1963 where she taught with distinction and chaired the Classics Department for 24 years. Her early experiences in rural Appalachia and the southern coal fields shaped her understanding of the human world and created in her traits that made her a consummate teacher and a life-changing influence on students from small agricultural communities and coal towns throughout West Virginia. She was born in Mullins, West Virginia, on November 11, 1920 to Cyrus Christopher and Eva Louise Price. Moving his family as many as twenty times a year, her father ran coal company stores, an occupation that brought Louise into contact with diverse kinds of people, some so isolated that they did not know of strawberries until her father introduced them. This upbringing galvanized her to create the best educational experiences possible for students who sorely needed it and to position her women students for success in an often hostile world—both with a tireless and assertive practicality. Though she spent the first third of her career as her institution’s single classicist, by the middle of her tenure at Marshall, she had trained almost every high school Latin teacher in West Virginia. When the state budget did not provide, she spent her own funds generously on educational travel and supplies; she could be relied on to extend a helping hand to students in need. Louise regularly taught overloads and guided her students to acquire research skills so that they would have a competitive chance for graduate school. She encouraged her students to become broadly educated in the humanities and instructed them in the values of a liberal education. In that context, she spent her academic life in the research of teaching, and the product was its own reward. In retirement, she increased her lifelong commitment to the American Association of University Women and was instrumental in helping Centre College in Danville, Kentucky to create a Latin and Greek curriculum. Louise was especially fond of Aeneas’ reflection to Achates on the human condition (Aen. 1.462): sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt. For all Louise’s students, colleagues, and friends, this line now takes on special meaning.
CONF: Seneca the Elder
Abstracts and program for the first event on SENECA THE ELDER, Montpellier 22-23rd November 2012 in the series READING ROMAN DECLAMATION have now gone live on the conference website ( https://sites.google.com/site/readingromandeclamation/home).
To register please e-mail roman.declamation@gmail.com
Further events will take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 25-26 September 2013 (QUINTILIAN) and London, UK, 2014 (CALPURNIUS FLACCUS).
Martin Dinter (KCL)
Charles Guerin (University of Montpellier et Institute universitaire de France)
Marcos Martinho (University of Sao Paulo
Program READING ROMAN DECLAMATION, SENECA THE ELDER
Université Montpellier 3 - Campus Saint Charles
Keynote speakers : Anthony Corbeill (University of Kansas) Danielle van Mal-Maeder (Université de Lausanne)
Thursday, November 22
9.15 Opening adress
9.30 Keynote speaker: Danielle Van Val-Maeder
10.30 Coffee break
10.45 Panel 1: Seneca and literary genres
- Y. Baraz - The bitter medicine of history: Seneca on the genre of declamation
- B. Larosa - The mythical exempla of faithful heroines in the Elder Seneca's work: literary fortune of a declamatory device
- A. Rolle & J. Pingoud - L'intertextualité chez Sénèque le Père
12.30 Lunch Break
14.30 Panel 2: Criticism and agression in declamatory practice
- J. Mannering - Attuning the Roman Ear: The Poetics of Criticism and Collaboration inside the Declamatory Arena
- C. Schneider - On ne plaisante pas avec le rire
15.30 Coffee break
16.00 Panel 3: Seneca and declamatory practices
- A. Balbo- Between real and fictional eloquence: the declaimers who were also orators
- C. Van der Berg - The Rhetoric of Decline and the Rhetoric for declamatio
Friday November 23
10.00 Keynote speaker: Anthony Corbeill
11.00 Coffee break
11.30 Panel 4: Structure and meaning in Seneca's works
- O. Cappello - Nomination and Systematisation in Seneca's Controversiae
- P. Schwartz - The opposition ingenium-iudicium in Seneca the Elder
CFP: Classical Association Annual Conference 2013
University of Reading, 3-6 April
In 2013 the Annual Conference of the Classical Association will be hosted by the Department of Classics at the University of Reading. The dates for the conference are Wednesday 3 April to Saturday 6 April 2013. Accommodation will be in reasonably priced hotels and academic sessions will take place on the main university campus. The conference dinner will be in Reading Town Hall and excursions will be arranged to places of interest in and around Reading and the Thames Valley.
We welcome proposals for papers (twenty minutes long followed by discussion) from graduate students, school teachers, academic staff, and others interested in the ancient world, on the topics suggested below, or on any other aspect of the classical world. We encourage papers from a broad range of perspectives. We are particularly keen to receive proposals for coordinated panels (comprising either three or four papers on any classical theme). We also warmly encourage submissions for posters.
Suggested topics: the digitisation of Classics; translation; performance; Classics in children’s literature; Classics in museums; the teaching of Classics (primary/secondary/higher); Aristophanes; Plutarch; Greek religion; linguistics; historiography; immorality; frontiers; fragments.
Please send your title and abstract (no more than 300 words), not later than 31 August 2012 to CA2013@reading.ac.uk.
We prefer to receive abstracts by email attachment. The postal address is:
Dr Katherine HarloeDepartment of Classics
University of Reading
Reading RG6 6AA
U.K.
Report to APA Members About L’Année philologique
Members may have seen a petition posted to the website of L’Année philologique (anphil.org), expressing concern about funding for the German office of L’Année. Here is a brief account of the situation, of which the APA Board has been aware since January, and how we have decided to proceed.
The Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique (SIBC), based in Paris, is the international not-for-profit organization that oversees L’Année. The German office is one of six self-sustaining offices that prepare entries for L’Année;the others are in Paris (the main editorial office), Genoa, Granada, Lausanne, and Durham, NC. This last is the American Office, which is the responsibility of the APA and reports to our Research Division. The funds raised in our current Gateway Campaign to date ensure the continued operation of the American Office (though we continue to solicit contributions to meet all NEH challenge grant requirements), but the APA is very concerned about the health of the German Office, which prepares a significant amount of the content in each issue of L’Année: its funding is up for renewal in a difficult fiscal climate. It is important for members to realize, however, that a threat to an individual office does not mean that the operation of the bibliography as a whole is in danger.
The APA has several formal and informal representatives on SIBC’s Board. They include Hans-Friedrich Mueller, Chair of our American Office Advisory Board; Lisa Carson, Director of the American Office; Roger Bagnall, Vice President for Research; Dee Clayman, President in 2010 and Director of the DCB project; and Philip Stadter, former Director and member of a number of relevant APA committees. The SIBC Executive Committee will meet at the end of this month to discuss the situation of the German office, and the APA will coordinate with SIBC in responding to issues or problems.
In early May please look for further information on the APA website and suggestions for action by individual members.
Jeffrey Henderson
President
Submitting Individual Abstracts for 2013 APA Annual Meeting
Follow this link to submit an individual abstract for the 2013 Annual Meeting. The Program Committee will review these submissions on June 29-30, 2012. Please be sure that your membership is current (i.e., paid up for 2012) before beginning the submission process. If you are not sure whether you have paid your APA dues for the current year, ask the customer service staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press at jrnlcirc@press.jhu.edu, 800-548-1784 (US and Canada only), or 410-516-6987 (all others).
Before submitting your abstract, please read the Program Committee's instructions for the submission of individual abstracts this year. Please note that the Committee has instituted several changes in the submission process. In addition, see the Association's general regulations concerning abstract submissions and suggestions from the Program Committee that emerged from a workshop on abstract writing at the 2010 annual meeting.
The deadline for submission of individual abstracts will be May 16, 2012, at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time.
