Classicist and a Roman social and cultural historian Dr. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, O.B.E., director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project and master of Sidney Sussex College in England, will lecture at Washington and Lee University on Tuesday, March 23, at 7 p.m. in the Stackhouse Theater in the Elrod Commons.The title of the talk is “Herculaneum: Living with Catastrophe,” and it is free and open to the public.The overall aim of the Herculaneum Conservation Project HCP is to safeguard and conserve, to enhance, and to advance the knowledge, understanding and public appreciation of the ancient site of Herculaneum and its artifacts. Many cities, towns and villas were buried by Vesuvius in 79 A.D., including Herculaneum and the better-known town of Pompeii.The HCP has involved new excavation and new discoveries, as well as collaboration with engineers, surveyors, geologists, chemists, volcanologists, paleobiologists, archaeologists, architects and conservators.Its main objectives are to slow down the rate of decay across the entire site; to test and implement long-term strategies appropriate for Herculaneum; to provide a basis of knowledge and documentation of Herculaneum; to acquire new archaeological knowledge about Herculaneum to help in its preservation; to conserve, document, publish and improve access to the artifacts found in excavations there; and to promote greater knowledge of and discussion about Herculaneum.

Sidney Sussex College, of which Wallace-Hadrill is master, is a college of the University of Cambridge, and was founded in 1596. Wallace-Hadrill was professor of classics at the University of Reading from 1987; has been editor of the leading journal in his field, the Journal of Roman Studies; and was visiting professor at Princeton in 1991. Since 1995, he has been the director of the British School at Rome, the largest and most dynamic of the British Research institutes abroad; he continued at the University of Reading while there.

Wallace-Hadrill’s major books and articles include a study of the first-century Latin writer Suetonius, “Suetonius: The Scholar and His Caesars” (Yale University Press, 1984); a social history of the Roman house, “Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum” which won the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Award in 1995; and “Rome’s Cultural Revolution” (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

via Rockbridge Weekly & Alleghany Journal Newsline.

From the Emory Wheel:

Renowned classicist and contemporary poet Anne Carson read her work at Emory last Wednesday as the 2010 Nix Mann lecturer.

The Nix Mann lecture series features a distinguished lecturer on campus each year.

Carson, who performed her poems “Cassandra Float Can” and “Bracko” in the Michael C. Carlos Museum, has received numerous awards for her work. These awards include the MacArthur Genius Award, Lannan Literary Award and the Pushcart Prize.

She serves as the distinguished poet in residence at New York University.

Carson began the lecture by reciting her poem “Cassandra,” during which 10 Emory student collaborators carried photos and a slideshow depicting different images on a screen.

“Cassandra” is based off of Carson’s translation of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon.”
Cassandra, a princess of Troy, was blessed with prophetic vision, but was cursed so that no one would believe any of her prophecies.

She contrasted Cassandra, a witness to the gory Trojan War, with other observers of tumultuous times, including the architect Gordon Matta-Clark, who found beauty in splicing large objects such as buildings.

“Where is the edge of new?” Carson read. “What is the future doing under the past or Greek metrics in Trojan silence?”

Images of an individual ensconced in a net, the gritty exterior of a house and the rounded narrow view of a staircase flickered on the screen as Carson read.
Carson performed “Bracko” with Emory philosophy professor Richard Patterson and Carson’s collaborator and New York artist Robert Currie.

“Bracko” utilized selections from Carson’s translations of the incomplete works of Sappho, the musician and poet who was born in 653 B.C. who lived on the island of Lesbos.

The incomplete text was marked by brackets, which was both in the written text and verbalized during the performance.

In lieu of dancers who were originally part of the piece, brackets of varying sizes and animation moved across the screen.

“Helen left her fine husband behind. … I would rather see her lovely step,” Carson recited in a monotonous tone.

As she chanted, others speakers’ voices would overlap with the repetition of “bracket bracket,” or complete her phrases with lines such as, “sing to us, the one with violets in her lap.”

Carson received a loud ovation from the crowded room at the conclusion of her presentation.

Carson’s visit to Emory was co-sponsored by the Luminaries in Art and Humanities series of the Office of the Provost, the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry as well as the Poetry Council.

At the end of Carson’s lecture, she answered several questions from audience members who were curious about the tone of voice she used while she was reading her poems.

“I consciously try to scrape [when I read],” she explained.

Carson added that her monotonous voice was intended to remove vestiges of academia because she said she believed academia would clutter the meaning of the words.

“I just have the words be the words,” Carson said.

Carson served as a member of the Emory classics department in the 1980s.

Officials at the Carlos Museum, which hosted the event, wanted to invite Carson to lecture this year due to her strong ties with the classical world not only as a scholar but also as an imaginative poet, Director of Education Programs at the Carlos Museum Elizabeth Hornor said.

“One of the things that is important to the Carlos Museum is to try to demonstrate that the ancient world is a great source of inspiration for contemporary writers and artists,” Hornor said.

Anne Carson was a great choice for this year’s Nix Mann lecturer, Emory classicist and history professor Cynthia Patterson wrote in an e-mail to the Wheel.

“She is elegant and very funny,” Paterson wrote. “She is both a creative poet and an expert translator of Greek.”

• Anne Carson Explores Ancient Greek Poetry | The Emory Wheel.

Denise McCoskey, associate professor of classics at Miami University, has won the American Philological Association 2009 Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level.

“I find it nearly impossible to write about Denise without resorting to a list of superlatives, but she really is extraordinary,” one nominator wrote.

McCoskey joined Miami’s faculty in 1995. She received her bachelor’s degree in classics and archaeology from Cornell University in 1990 and her doctorate in classical studies from Duke University in 1995.

She teaches a range of courses, including Classical Mythology, Women in Antiquity, Greek and Roman Tragedy and Lyric Poetry. She also has initiated several specialized courses and is affiliated with the Jewish studies and black world studies programs.

McCoskey’s classes foster student involvement in learning and a diverse curriculum and disrupt student expectations. Her teaching style utilizes participation and discussion.

An observer remarked, “Her classes are noisy, wonderfully noisy, with lively discussion and much excited argument. ”

McCoskey is the second member of Miami’s classics department to receive this award in the last five years.

Judith de Luce, professor of classics, won it in 2005.

via Miami professor wins national teaching award | Oxford Press.

Classics professor Eric Rebillard has been awarded a $45,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support his research on funerary behaviors among the common people of the Roman Empire.

“Knowledge about Roman funerary rituals and burial practices is largely limited to a few texts and a few monuments, both products of the cultural and social elite of the Roman Empire,” said Rebillard. “I believe that burials allow us to go far beyond the limits of our other evidence in the study of the non-elites and that the study of funerary rituals can thus extend considerably our understanding of Roman culture.”

Rebillard’s project applies statistical analysis to a database of excavated tombs in Italy during the first three centuries of the Roman Empire to analyze the layout and contents of the graves and treatment of the bodies.

The project is unique, says Rebillard, because previously funerary monuments and grave goods have been studied mainly as indicators of social status. Rebillard’s approach is to emphasize funerary ritual itself and to study funerary behaviors.

The Mellon Foundation previously awarded Rebillard a New Directions fellowship to support his research.

via Cornell Chronicle: Grant funds classics research.

Interesting intro to a religion column in the Marion Star:

In 1979, I sat in Dr. Richard Cutter’s early morning Greek class at Baylor University praying my professor would call on someone else to translate the homework passage from Plato.
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My prayers were answered when he called on John.

John was more clueless than I was in this second-year Greek class, but he took a gallant stab at translating the passage.

After five agonizing minutes, Dr. Cutter thanked John and interrupted our naps with seemingly the most random of questions.

“How many of you think crap is a bad word?” he asked the class comprised of mostly Baptist ministerial students.

A few brave souls from the conservative South raised their hands, while the rest of us stared forward with wide-eyed incredulity.

“A freshman girl came to me after class last week,” he said, introducing his reason behind the question. “She told me that she was offended by my occasional use of the word crap because her East Texas upbringing taught her that it was an expletive.”

Cutter told us he’d apologized to the girl, but explained to her that his upbringing on a Kansas farm taught him to understand crap as a common word.

For him, the word was a homonym, a word having the same spelling and pronunciation, but with different meanings. Offering an example, he explained that a Baptist deacon in Kansas might use crap to describe the proposed church budget as well as the piles scattered in the pasture next door.

Hoping his heartfelt explanation had convinced us, he repeated his polling question. “How many of you still think that crap is a bad word?”

We cowered in silence. It was our second year with Dr. Cutter, and most of us recognized the sound of him loading both barrels.

“Good,” he said, taking our silence as approval.

“John,” he exclaimed pointing to the unfortunate translator, “that translation was a bunch of crap.”

I’m sure we’ve all been in John’s shoes at some point … some of us have also been in the (late) Dr Cutter’s.