d.m. Evelyn Byrd Harrison

From the ASCSA:

Renowned art historian Evelyn Byrd (Eve) Harrison died peacefully in her New York City apartment on November 3.

Born in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1920, Eve Harrison received her A.B. from Barnard College in 1941 and her M.A. from Columbia University in 1943, but her graduate studies were interrupted by the Second World War. Until the end of 1945, she served as a Research Analytic Specialist, translating intercepted Japanese messages for the War Department.

In 1949, she joined the staff of the ASCSA’s Athenian Agora Excavations. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1952, and a revised version of her dissertation on the portrait sculpture found in the Agora inaugurated the series The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her Portrait Sculpture was followed in 1965 by Archaic and Archaistic Sculpture, volume XI of The Athenian Agora.

Professor Harrison began her teaching career in 1951 at the University of Cincinnati, where she taught not only art history but also first-year Greek and Latin. After a second research position with the Agora Excavations between 1953 and 1955, she joined the faculty of the Department of Art History and Archaeology of Columbia University, where she was named full professor in 1967. Four years as Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University followed, and in 1974 she was named Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

She was honored for her contributions to art history and archaeology by election as an Honorary Councilor of the Archaeological Society of Athens, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Archaeological Institute of America recognized her lifetime of accomplishment by awarding her its Gold Medal for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement in 1992.

d.m. Glenys Lloyd-Morgan

From the Guardian:

My friend Glenys Lloyd-Morgan, who has died aged 67 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, devoted her career to the appreciation and understanding of Roman archaeology.

She was born in Halifax and brought up in Caernarfonshire; her father was a merchant sea captain and her mother was an entomologist and teacher. Glenys graduated from the archaeology department at Birmingham University in 1970 and acquired fine skills in excavation. Former contemporaries recall how she practised it at Droitwich, Worcestershire.

Under Richard Tomlinson’s supervision, she did a PhD at Birmingham on Roman mirrors, which she studied, along with any potential Celtic-related predecessor artefacts in museums throughout Britain and Ireland. Venturing into the world of Roman Europe, she spent a very happy period at the Museum Kam in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1973-74. At the British School at Rome, she met Sir Anthony Blunt, who vividly recalled Glenys’s enthusiasms for Etruscan mirrors and how she had enlivened the school’s New Year’s Eve party by dancing on the table.

In March 1975, Glenys joined the Grosvenor Museum, Chester. There, she catalogued collections and did convincing re-enactments as a Roman lady. Though hoped-for promotion never materialised, she soldiered on until marrying and moving to Rochdale in 1989. She became a finds consultant specialising in Roman artefacts. In 1998, she returned home to north Wales, where it was recognised that she had developed Alzheimer’s. She was taken into a home soon afterwards and the rest of her life was spent in full-time care.

I first met Glenys at the Young Archaeologists’ Conference in Durham early in 1968, where she sang and danced, as was often her habit. Her dress could be unconventional and her eastern dances disarming to those more used to her authoritative archaeological presentations.

Made a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in March 1979, she published in mainland Europe, Britain and Ireland. Glenys was a warm-hearted and helpful collaborator who made lasting friendships, retained her youthful sense of fun, loved children and assumed the role of aunt without encouragement. Her scholarly works will endure.

She is survived by her sister, Ceridwen, her brother, Dewi, and three nephews.

Vomitorium Watch

Alas … after going over a year without catching an example of the egregious misuse of the word,  Will Self in an opeddish thing in BBC Magazine (of all places):

For what I think we require, as a society, is some sort of collective vomitorium. Not, you appreciate, that I expect you – like those mythical Roman patricians – to void the contents of your stomachs then limp groaning back to the dinner table.

… oh, and by the way, the Roman patricians weren’t mythical either.

CONF: The Classical Body

seen on the Classicists list:

The Department of Classical Studies at The Open University warmly invites you to a one-day seminar on the theme of The Classical Body, to be held on Saturday February 2nd 2013 at the OU Regional Centre in London (Camden Town) 10am-4.30pm.

The conference charge will be 7 pounds (for catering costs). To register your interest and receive a booking form, please email Jessica Hughes on jessica.hughes AT open.ac.uk by January 15th 2013. Speakers and topics are listed below.

We hope to see you there!

—-

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE CLASSICAL BODY


Phil Perkins (OU) – ‘Images of Birth in the Ancient Mediterranean’

Helen King (OU) – ‘Reading the Bearded Lady: Phaethousa of Abdera’

Sue Blundell (OU) – ‘Both Feet on the Ground: Stepping Out in Ancient Greece’

Mark Bradley (Nottingham) – ‘Foul Bodies in Ancient Rome’

Rebecca Fallas (OU) – ‘Promoting Fertility: Regimes for Fertility in the Ancient Medical Texts’

Emma Bridges (OU) – ‘Bodily Mutilation and Despotic Power in Herodotus’ Persian Wars Narrative’

Emma-Jayne Graham (OU) – ‘Dying Disabled in Ancient Rome’

A map of the Camden area can be accessed via this link: http://www3.open.ac.uk/contact/maps.aspx?contactid=1

CFP: Translating Myth

seen on the Classicists list:

TRANSLATING MYTH

Date: 5-7 September, 2013

Venue: firstsite, Colchester, UK

An international conference organized by the Centre for Myth Studies at the
University of Essex, supported by the Department of Literature, Film, and
Theatre Studies and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies.

The Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex is pleased to
announce an international conference to be held from 5 to 7 September 2013
at firstsite, the home of contemporary visual arts in Colchester. We invite
proposals for papers (of 20 minutes duration), or panel sessions (three
papers), exploring the theme of ‘Translating Myth’. The organisers would
particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions, especially ones that
bridge the domains of literature and psychoanalysis, but we encourage
submissions on all aspects of myth that involve the idea of translation.
‘Translating myth’ is to be taken in a broad sense as encompassing any topic
that addresses the process of conversion or transfer of cultural sources
construed as mythic. The organizers list the following keyword combinations
as a stimulus to thought, but, as it always is with myth, your own ideas
should allow the imagination free rein in deciding on the possibilities
offered by the conference theme:

Accommodation and assimilation; adaptations of the classics; anamnesis and
orality; archetypes, prototypes, stereotypes; astrology and astronomy; babel
and fable; boundaries and interfaces; chaos and creation; enchantment and
ecstasy; gender and hybridity; genre and media; illud tempus and terra
incognita; interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism; identity and
intertextuality; mask and mandala; migration and transfer; monad, binary,
triad, quaternity; mythos and logos; omens and oracles; register and
revelation; resistance and change; rites of passage and cultural transfer;
roots and rituals; sacred and profane; stage and screen; storyteller, poet,
shaman, auteur; theories, poetics, dialectics; transformation and
transposition; versions and motifs; zero and hero(ine).

PLENARY SPEAKERS: David Hawkes (Arizona State University), Miriam Leonard
(University College London), Harish Trivedi (University of Delhi).

The deadline for proposals is Friday 25 January, 2013. Proposals should take
the form of a title for the paper and a 250-word abstract, accompanied by a
brief biographical note, including institutional affiliation where
appropriate. To submit a proposal, or for more information, please write to
Dr Leon Burnett, Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies,
University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ or, by e-mail,
to mythic AT essex.ac.uk.

It is planned to publish a selection of papers on ‘Translating Myth’ after
the conference.

Note: Thanks to the generosity of the Bean Trust, a limited number of
bursaries are available for speakers contributing to a panel session on the
place that William Blake occupies in the field of myth. If you wish to apply
for one of these bursaries, please indicate in your proposal.