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First, I’d like to thank Ron Hendel for steering AHMA with a steady hand through last academic year and the fall semester of this one. Unexpectedly faced with a non-negotiable demand from the Imperium for a systematic self-review of our program, he piloted us through it with his usual good cheer and aplomb, and was rewarded with a highly positive outcome. Caesar gave us the thumbs up, and we left the arena in triumph.
At the beginning of the fall semester two new students swelled our ranks. Lisa Eberle came to us from the Austrian Alps via the London Contemporary Dance School and St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she achieved a First in Classics in spring 2008. And Eli Weaverdyck joined us from the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, the Kenchreai Excavations, and Macalester College, where he gained his BA in 2007. Next year’s entrants are also two in number: Christopher Bravo from the University of Arizona, and Erin Pitt from the University of Colorado at Boulder, both at post-MA level. We look forward to their arrival and wish them every success in the years ahead. Among our continuing students, we congratulate Tim Doran and Brendan Haug for passing their PhD exams and attaining the exalted status of ABD; and Amelia Brown for filing her dissertation on late antique Corinth. Jason Schlude will file his dissertation on Roman-Parthian relations shortly and will spend next year as a lecturer in the History Department; hearty congratulations also to him and Katrina on the birth of their son Hendrick Peter on March 1st. We expect to receive his AHMA application in 2030 or thereabouts.
On June 30th last year our Office Manager of many years, Susan Pulliam, retired; our good wishes and thanks go with her as she rides (literally) into the sunset. Her replacement is Gary Spears, who at my request already has cheerfully buckled down to a thorough review of AHMA finances and funding. I look forward to working with him and the other CASMA staff in the years ahead.
As to the faculty, we can report one new arrival and one imminent departure. In fall we welcomed Ben Porter (Near Eastern Studies) to our ranks. Ben received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 for a dissertation entitled The Archaeology of Community in Iron I Central Jordan, and brings with him a cutting-edge field project at Dhiban in that country. And soon we say a fond goodbye to Crawford Greenewalt, who after more than four decades on the Berkeley faculty and at the Sardis excavations has already handed over the latter to AHMA alumnus Nick Cahill (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and retires from the faculty at the end of this semester. Please accept our most heartfelt thanks for all that you’ve done for us over the decades, Greenie, and our warmest wishes for the future—including, we trust, many years’ continued residence here in Berkeley.
To turn to this year’s activities, we’ve been ultra-busy once again. On November 3rd, Patricia Cox Miller of Syracuse University treated us to an elegant and ingenious Pritchett Lecture at the Alumni House on "Holy Bodies: Imagining Matter in Late Ancient Christianity." And on March 18th, Moshe Fischer of Tel Aviv University spoke to us on “Yavneh-Yam: An Intercultural Crossroads on the Eastern Mediterranean Coast Through History.” Our Noon Colloquia continued unabated, thanks to the enthusiasm and extraordinary organizational skills of Randy Souza. In addition to speakers from Berkeley, Davis, and Stanford, we heard from colleagues from Athens, Cambridge, Exeter, and Minnesota on topics as diverse as ancient Mesopotamian democracy, Licinius Macer, Vestal Virgins, Minoan villas, Etruscan tombs, Jupiter Dolichenus, Greek sculpture, Roman Phrygia, Byzantine science, ecology and state power in Roman Spain, Khshathrapati/ Apollo at Xanthos, and income, growth and inequality in the Roman economy—or, Why The Romans Needed A Sense Of Humor! And under Emily Mackil’s able direction, the Aleshire Center has treated us to an excellent series of speakers and events as well.
Finally, even as I write, three AHMA faculty and their teams are gearing up for a busy summer in the field: Ben Porter at Dihiban; Carol Redmount at El Hibeh; and Kim Shelton at Nemea. They each take with them our very best wishes for a successful season ahead.
- Andrew Stewart, 4/15/09
From the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology and the Petsas House Excavations at Mycenae 2008
The Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology had an exciting and eventful year. We continue to focus on archaeological research, education and public relations, with an ever-increasing commitment to student and scholar involvement in Nemea and the surrounding region. After an international search by the Department of Classics for an Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology and a permanent director of the Center, the Department voted unanimously to offer me the post, which I enthusiastically accepted. This evidence of long-term commitment from the University allows me to plan long term for the Center and for our students. Other important staff additions are making operations in Greece and Berkeley more efficient and more effective. Since July, we are joined by Elizabeth Langridge-Noti, resident of Ancient Corinth, archaeologist and Professor of Art History and Archaeology at the American College of Greece, as the Assistant Director of the Nemea Center.
NEMEA
In June, a four-week program took place in Nemea. Six teams made up of one graduate and two undergraduate students were assigned an area of the site, which had been excavated over several seasons; their task was to identify important ceramic deposits. The teams conducted on-site and archival research using the field notebooks, reports and other resources as available. They sorted, analyzed and identified the ceramics in the Museum workroom. This material was then used to create a photographic record, an informational database and a team analysis of the deposits and their importance in the understanding of the site history. Tours of other sites/museums in the local area and further afield (including Athens, Olympia, Epidaurus, and Delphi) were taken in afternoons and on weekends. A highlight of the program this year was a stadium tour and lecture by Director Emeritus Stephen Miller. Students also played an essential role in a small excavation at the north end of the site, in a photographic project in the storeroom and in the preparations for the Revival of the Nemean Games.
Another project undertaken in 2008 was the identification and registration of fragments of architectural sculpture, collected in storage over many years from scattered find-spots on site, primarily belonging to the Temple of Zeus.
Steven Kenyon catalogues fragments from the 4thc. BCE Temple of Zeus.
MYCENAE
In July, a four-week field school was conducted at Petsas House, Mycenae. Six graduate and 12 undergraduate students undertook excavation, rotating in teams over five trenches in various rooms of the building, a ceramics factory and storage facility destroyed late in the 14th century BCE, and in the workroom of the site museum. Students were primarily responsible for observing and recording the excavation, but they also participated in the digging, sweeping, drawing, measuring and field conservation. In the museum they worked on an analysis of artifacts from the cleaning of sherds through their sorting, cataloguing and restoration. As at Nemea, tours of Athens, Pylos, Olympia, Tiryns and Epidaurus were taken in afternoons and on weekends.
UCB field school students clean destruction debris from the 14th c. BCE structure.
— Kim Shelton
Sardis 2008
Archaeological fieldwork at Sardis in 2008 was conducted by the project called Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, co-sponsored by Harvard Art Museum and Cornell University, under the direction of Nicholas Cahill. Nick, Professor of Art History at the University of Michigan and an AHMA alumnus (1982-1991), was appointed Director last June by the Turkish Government Cabinet (in a document personally signed by all Cabinet Ministers – in Turkey archaeology is taken seriously). Other Berkeley participants were Brianna Bricker (BA 2007, in History) and Felipe Rojas (Classical Archaeology). Excavation, in part programmed, in part rescue, took place at several locations within the 400-acre city site, and exposed a pot-pourri of cultural and chronological material: Lydian defenses of the 7th century BC, Lydian residence of the mid 6th century BC, Achaemenid-era occupation of the later 6th and 5th centuries BC (whence a Lydian electrum coin of ca. 600 BC, unfortunately out of context); Hellenistic theater fill of the late 3rd century BC, Roman theater architecture of the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD, and Late Roman painted tombs (hypogaea) of the 4th century AD.
— Crawford Greenewalt
Spotlight on the Sara B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy
In 2008, the Aleshire Center completed the digitization of its multiple catalogs of holdings. A single database now incorporates records of the more than 8,000 squeezes, photographs, offprints and books in the collection. The database was expertly designed probono by Max Christoff, ABD in Classics from Princeton, now working in technology for Morgan Stanley, and patient husband of Emily Mackil. The Advisory Committee of the Aleshire Center has unanimously voted to inscribe our gratitude for this benefaction on a stele and to set it up in a prominent place. (But stonecutters are in short supply these days, so it may remain a mere resolution for a while.) With the help of Tiernan Doyle (Classics), we are currently in the process of scanning our entire squeeze and photograph collection. The high-resolution digital images will become part of the database, which will then be made available online to users not just in Berkeley but around the globe. It is hoped that this database will become a significant scholarly resource for the study of Greek epigraphy. That it has already considerably facilitated the use of the Aleshire Center’s incomparably rich holdings goes without saying.
In October 2008 the Aleshire Seminar was given by Merle Langdon, Lecturer and Research at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Professor Langdon gave a fascinating presentation, entitled "Shepherds Can't Write! Epigraphic Evidence for Literacy in Archaic Attica" on a large number of unpublished rock-cut inscriptions in Attica that date from the late Archaic period and point to previously unimagined levels of literacy among non-elite sectors of the population, especially shepherds.
Aleshire funds continue to support graduate student research in Greek epigraphy: Michael Laughy (AHMA) spent the 08-09 academic year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens with an Aleshire-ASCSA fellowship, working on his dissertation on “Cult and Authority in Ancient Athens.” David Goldstein (Classics) went to Greece on an Aleshire travel grant to work on the epigraphic component of his dissertation on word order in ancient Greek. Nathan Arrington (Classical Archaeology) also received a travel grant to go to Athens where he conducted research related to his dissertation, “Framing the Warrior in Classical Greece,” which deals extensively with the Athenian casualty lists and the demosionsema. The projects of these grant recipients are a metric of the vibrancy of Greek epigraphy at Berkeley, and of the Aleshire Center’s role in it.
—Emily Mackil
Reports from Current Students
New Students
After about nine months of ups and downs, five graduate seminars and two language exams on the West Coast, Lisa Eberle is faced with the prospect of a summer in New York, Berkeley and Austria developing her MA thesis on the ways and means of deploying plunder in what she provisionally calls “the Greek world.” This is a prospect that she is very much looking forward to. She would like to take this opportunity to thank Group students and faculty alike for not only being wonderful scholars, but also at times proving to be very kind people.
Continuing Students
Ryan Boehm has spent 2008-2009 participating in the Regular program at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He will be returning to Berkeley in June, where he will be teaching over the summer and getting started on his dissertation.
David DeVore has spent all of 2008-2009 taking his exams in Roman Imperial History from Augustus to Constantine, Classical Greek History and Historiography, and Roman Material Culture from Sulla to Severus. He also managed to teach himself to read Italian (modern Greek is next!), work a flurry of hours at the Robbins Collection and do plenty of GSR work. The reason for all of this additional labor was that in October (just before the market crashed!) David and his wife Sandi Garcia purchased a condo in Alameda, which their upstairs neighbor proceeded shortly to flood by leaving her bathtub running for three hours. (Fortunately, the neighbor’s landlord’s agreeable insurance and connections from Sandi’s real estate career delivered a much upgraded unit at a bargain price by February!) He has again enjoyed editing the group newsletter.
In November Timothy Doran and another Group student, Alan Farahani, presented a paper at a UCLA graduate student conference MC'd by Suzanne Dixon on paternity in the ancient world. Their presentation concerned antinatalism and pronatalism in Christian discourse up to Augustine and its relationship with early Christian population. Timothy passed his orals in March and is taking a moment to catch up on Season 3 of "Dexter" before he plunges into his dissertation which concerns the population crisis in Classical Sparta, its causes and its effects. He is still gratefully accepting donations of memorabilia and neckties from the 1920s through 1950s and recently received a wonderful set of mid-1950s neckties from another Group student, Jeff Pearson, who inherited them. Timothy and his wife are contemplating buying a house in Oakland since the prices are so low.
Brendan Haug writes, “I completed my exams in March and will soon begin work on a dissertation concerning the Egyptian Fayum in the Byzantine period. In the meantime I am working on two projects with Prof. Todd Hickey, both focusing on late Antique Oxyrhynchus. The first is a collection of several documents from the dossier of Flavia Anastasia, a late sixth-century landowner. The second deals with the coloni adscripticii in Egypt. The former will appear in the proceedings of the March 2008 conference ‘Potere e ricchezza nell’Egitto bizantino: La famiglia degli Apioni. Sviluppi e prospettive della ricerca papirologica’ while the latter will be published by Cambridge in the volume ‘Law and Society in Egypt.’”
Noah Kaye says, “I have spent this academic year focusing on my PhD exams, in the fall semester as a visiting student at Columbia, studying with Prof. Seth Schwartz of the affiliated Jewish Theological Seminar, and sitting in on a seminar of Prof. William Harris. In December, I finished a rough manuscript of my die study of the silver tetradrachms of the Hellenistic Bithynian king Prousias II. I am enjoying very much this spring's AHMA Seminar, which takes an epigraphic approach to the economic history of Classical and Hellenistic Greece. This summer, I hope to get started on a dissertation prospectus while in Greece, first excavating in the Athenian Agora, and later studying modern Greek in Thessaloniki.”
John Lanier is finishing up his second year with more coursework and language exam preparation. He will spend Summer 2009 at Berkeley teaching Latin 1 and reading reading reading. He hopes to finish up language exams in the Fall and begin field exams. Meanwhile there is poker, disc golf, and a lamb roast to keep him human.
Laura Pfuntner spent an enjoyable summer of 2008 at Nemea, followed by travel in Greece and England. She has had a busy but rewarding academic year, teaching Western Civ and Latin 1; taking seminars on Roman Historiography, Greek Economies, Roman Urbanization, and Hellenistic Art; and preparing for her first field exam in April. She plans to spend most of the summer in Berkeley plugging away at exams and reviving her Italian.
Carolynn Roncaglia will be in Corinth this summer working on editing inscriptions from the Julian Basilica.
Amy Russell writes: “I passed my orals in August 2008, and have spent a productive year sketching out plans for my dissertation and teaching. In April I gave a paper at a conference in Oxford in memory of my MPhil supervisor, Peter Derow, and had a chance to reminisce there with many of his former students, including Jo Crawley Quinn and Bob Morstein-Marx; I'm told that we are the only three to have passed through the tender care of both Peter and Erich! I am delighted to have been awarded the Rome Scholarship at the British School for next year, and look forward to visits there from many Groupies.”
Jason Schlude reports: “This year I discovered at least one recipe for a busy life: 1) teach Latin republican prose in the summer; 2) teach a research seminar for undergraduate history majors in the fall; 3) work all the while to complete a dissertation on Roman-Parthian relations in the first century BCE; and 4) prepare for and welcome into the world your first child. Hendrick Peter Schlude arrived at 6:34pm on March 1 with big bright eyes, a head full of soft brown hair, and weighing in at 7lbs 14oz. He is beautiful. Right now Katrina and I have a difficult time even imagining what it was once like to sleep through the night. Other gratifying developments included the publication of my review of The Defeat of Rome (by Gareth Sampson) in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (March 2009) and notification that I will receive a teaching award from the Classics department. After graduation this May, I am excited to stay on at Berkeley for a year as Lecturer in Ancient History for the History department, in which capacity I will teach courses on the Hellenistic world, Roman Empire, and Roman and the Near East. ”
Randy Souza writes: “I finished an MA thesis this spring dealing with community and disaster in Hellenistic Sicily. After taking a reading exam in Latin, I'm turning to the other side of the Mediterranean, excavating at Sardis this summer. Next year I'll be reading a lot of Greek.”
Faculty Reports
Susanna Elm writes, “A book on medicine entitled Quo Vadis Medical Healing has come out in January 2009, and I am glad it has seen the light! Among other publications, my contribution to a Festschrift for Peter Brown has also just appeared—it was a great honor to have been asked to praise such a luminary. In addition, I gave several keynote lectures, one of them the inaugural lecture in a series on religion in Gainesville, to which my daughter Clara came with me—to the others, in Leuven, Freiburg and Turin I went all by myself.... I'll be off to Bloomington and a conference on ‘Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity’ and after that to Damascus, and then Chicago, Knoxville and Cardiff for more lectures. I will be spending Fall 2009 at the LMU in Munich as visiting professor, and then back to Berkeley...we are a peripatetic lot!”
Marian Feldman has been spending the year at Stanford as the Burkhardt Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Studies. There, she is working on a new project that examines the materialities and traditions of first millennium BCE ivories and bronzes from the northern Syrian and Phoenician regions. She had an essay appear in the catalogue for the sumptuous exhibition, “Beyond Babylon,” held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this winter (ed. Joan Aruz, 2008) and presented a paper at a symposium there in December.
Erich Gruen writes, “I spent the academic year 2007/8 as ‘Villa Professor’ at the Getty Villa in Malibu, organizing nine different colloquia or conferences. Since no good deed goes unpunished, I now pay the price of putting together a volume of all the papers delivered there during the year, to be entitled Cultural Identity and the Peoples of the Ancient Mediterranean. I also had the privilege of delivering lectures at various places, the Getty, UCLA, UCSB, Emory, Georgia, London, Durham, and Oxford (the David Lewis Lecture). Since my return to Berkeley, the travel circuit has actually been intensified. I have had lectures or campus visits at Reed, Pomona, Georgetown, Indiana, and Toronto, all within the space of two months. I am off to Oxford for its spring term from April through June. In the meantime, a couple of articles appeared, one on ‘Persia through the Jewish Looking Glass,’ and one on ‘The Letter of Aristeas and the Cultural Context of the Septuagint.’ Once the Getty volume is put to rest, I plan to complete my book, tentatively titled Confronting the ‘Other’: Greek, Roman, and Jewish Impressions of the Alien some time this (calendar) year.”
Robert Knapp went off to Nemea last June and ran in the Fourth New Nemean Games. He wasn't first, but he wasn't last, either. Alas, he did injure himself slightly at the starting gate, and so couldn't do the Footsteps of Herakles run. Just as well, perhaps. The event was well attended and definitely an experience to remember. He works away on his Roman social history project and the gangster murder book which continues to expand, now with juicy police wiretaps recently discovered.
Nikolaos Papazarkadas writes, “Since arriving at Berkeley in Fall 2007 I have taught, with enormous pleasure, courses on Greek, Thucydides, Greek Epigraphy, Athenian Archaeology, and I am currently (Spring 2009) running a graduate seminar on Greek Economies with Professor Mackil. In the meantime, I have seen the publication of two of my articles: ‘An Honorific Decree from Classical Siphnos’ in Revue des Etudes Anciennes 109 (2007), and ‘Athens and Kydonia: Agora I 7602’ in Hesperia 77 (2008) [with Peter Thonemann]. Most importantly, however, I co-edited, with Robert Parker and John Ma (Oxford), the volume Interpreting the Athenian Empire, which has just been published by Duckworth; my own academic contribution in the volume is an article entitled ‘Epigraphy and the Athenian Empire: Re-shuffling the Chronological Cards’.”
Benjamin Porter has spent the past year getting adjusted to life at Berkeley. When not teaching, he has spent most of his time writing grant proposals for his Dhiban Excavation and Development Project in Jordan. He also managed to find an unpublished cemetery from Bahrain in the Hearst Museum that he is happily investigating with Alexis Boutin (Sonoma State University, Anthropology), Alan Farahani (AHMA), and Colleen Morgan (Anthropology). He is planning a VERY long excavation season this summer at Dhiban, where he will focus on the Iron Age, Byzantine, and Mamluk settlements.
Since arriving in Berkeley in the fall of 2007, Francesca Rochberg has given a number of lectures: ‘“By Means of Maps’: The Expression of Terrestrial and Celestial Order in Ancient Mesopotamia” the 16th Nebenzahl Lecture at the Newberry Library, Chicago; “The Reception of Babylonian Science within the General History of Science,” at University College London; “Inference from Evidence in Ancient Mesopotamian Thought: Omen Texts and Inferential Reasoning” at the Leverhulme Conference on Evidence and Inference, University of London; and “New Light on Mesopotamian Maps and Mapping,” at the Warburg Institute, London. She has also given papers at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, symposium on ancient divination: “If P, then Q: Toward A Theory of Signs in Babylonian Divination”; and at the University of Pennsylvania symposium in honor of Barry L. Eichler, “Divine Causality and Cuneiform Divination” She has organized a symposium “The Nature and Aim of Prediction in Ancient Science,” for this summer’s International Congress for the History of Science and Technology, held this July in Budapest.
“What she did last summer” was to join David Stronach for her first archaeological field experience, excavating the Urartian citadel at Erebuni in Armenia. Her report: “Wow! And I spent the last few decades just doing philology?”
A number of papers have appeared in print: “Babylonian Astronomy: The Hellenistic Transmission,” Mélanges de l’Université Saint-Joseph 61 (2008), and “Inference, Conditionals, and Possibility in Ancient Mesopotamian Science,” Science in Context 22 (2009).
Andrew Stewart will return to Greece in June-July to continue work on the Agora’s Hellenistic sculpture and to make an expedition to Chios with friends at the American School of Classical Studies. The year’s publications included: “A Tale of Seven Nudes: The Capitoline and Medici Aphrodites, Four Nymphs at Elean Herakleia, and an Aphrodite at Megalopolis” in Antichthon; an entry on “Alexander the Great” in The Grove Encyclopedia of Classical Artand Architecture (Oxford: 2007); “Alexander, Philitas, and the Skeletos: Poseidippos and Truth in Early Hellenistic Portraiture” in New Directions in Early Hellenistic Portraiture, ed. Ralf von den Hoff and Peter Schulz. (Cambridge: 2007); a three-part article on “The Persian and Carthaginian Invasions of 480 and the Beginning of the Classical Style in Greek Sculpture” in AJA 112 (2008); and Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art (Cambridge: 2008), which is currently shortlisted for the Runciman Prize of the Anglo-Hellenic League. He delivered the Ludden Lecture at the Ohio State University on “Individuality and Innovation in Greek Sculpture” in April 2009, and the Homer A. and Dorothy B. Thompson Memorial Lectures at Princeton, Yale, and Philadelphia in November 2008 on “Designing Women: The Hetaira as Model from Phintias to Praxiteles.” He also received the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award for 2009. And on August 14, his daughter Caroline presented him with twin grandchildren: Giselle and Sophia (below).
David Stronach writes to say that a number of his contributions, dated to 2007 and later, have appeared within the past twelve months. These include Tepe Nush-i Jan I. The Major Buildings of the Median Settlement, co-authored with Michael Roaf; "The building program of Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae and the date of the fall of Sardis" in Ancient Greece and Ancient Iran: Cross-Cultural Encounters; “The Campaign of Cyrus the Great in 547 BC. A hitherto unrecognized source for the early history of Armenia?” in the Armenian Journal of Near Eastern Studies; and “Erebuni 2007” in Iranica Antiqua 44.
For Holger Zellentin, 2009 brought the publication of his study of Artapanus. He writes, “This opaque Egyptian author combined Hellenistic lore with the story of the Jewish Exodus. In effect, I tried to date him a little more securely in the late second century BCE, and have convinced everybody but the one person who really understands the text (some say he is Professor Emeritus from UC Berkeley, but given his work ethic, the Emeritus status must be a rumor). See for yourself, in the collected volume Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World (Mohr Siebeck, 2009). Currently, I am enjoying my relief from teaching at the GTU and writing on rabbinics, though I shall be back teaching full time 2009-10.”
Alumni Updates
Ory Amitay (Ph.D. 2002) writes: “Since last spring I have (hopefully) finished revising the manuscript of my book, ‘From Alexander to Jesus.’ A contract has been signed with the University of California Press. Deovolente by the next newsletter the book will already be in print. Also, I have taken another step up the academic ladder, the next stage to be full tenure. In addition, I've started to fill in some gaps in my education, such as basic Egyptology and Assyriology, in view of my next major research interest: the history of Monotheism's first 2,000 years.”
Jorge Bravo (Ph.D. 2006) reports: “I am in my third year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Languages at Carleton College in Minnesota. This summer I will be returning to Greece to work once again on the joint Greek-American excavations at Kenchreai, the ancient eastern harbor of Corinth. I am especially excited that five of my Carleton students will be joining the field school. I continue preparing the publication of the hero shrine of Opheltes at Nemea, although my teaching schedule makes progress difficult during the school year. I am looking forward to making headway on the project in the summer. Last December, at the invitation of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, I wrote an essay, entitled ‘Recovering the Past: the Origins of Greek Heroes and Hero Cult,’ to accompany the catalogue for an exhibition on Greek heroes opening in the fall.”
Jorge Bravo demonstrates the starting stance to students in the Nemea stadium last summer.
Amelia Brown writes: “I'm pleased to report that I received my Ph.D. from the Group in Fall 2008, finishing my dissertation on Corinth in Late Antiquity. Many thanks are due to the faculty, friends and family who helped me finally achieve this goal. Since becoming Doc Brown, I've been occupied with job-seeking, article-writing and travelling with my husband, Graham. I'm excited to begin turning my dissertation into a book on Greek cities between the second and sixth centuries, and also spend some time researching Mediterranean maritime cults and the Price Edict of Diocletian in Greece. I've begun a book on the latter topic with Robert Pitt of the British School in Athens, and was amazed to discover that 28 Greek cities have fragments of this monumental text promulgated in 301. This summer I am starting a dig on Malta, too, investigating the unpublished finds and unexcavated urban quarter of an important Early Roman peristyle house rebuilt in the 1880s. I split my time mainly between Athens, Malta, and southern England.”
Update: Amelia Brown has accepted a Hellenic Studies Post-Doc at Princeton for the 2009-2010 academic year. Many congratulations to her!
Jon Frey (Ph.D. 2006) reports: “My wife Susannah and I just had twin boys on March 3, Timothy William Frey and Theodore John Frey. We're very relieved everything went well but we're also adjusting to our new lives as parents.“I am in my second year of teaching here at Michigan State University and will be leading my second study abroad group to Greece this summer. I continue to work on a project using 3D laser scanning technology to map the interior of a cave on Crete occupied in the Bronze Age and will return again to Isthmia this summer, where I am studying the reused architectural fragments of the sanctuary that have been incorporated in the nearby late Roman fortifications.”
Matthew Gonzales (Ph.D. 2004) reports: “I am happy to report that I have been promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at St. Anselm College. Publication-wise, my article “New Observations on the Lindian Cult-tax for Enyalios (SEG 4.171),” has appeared in ZPE 166 (2008), pp. 121-134. Otherwise things trundle along in their interminably-long-New-England-winter way.”
Eric Orlin (Ph.D. 1994) writes: “In February, I was promoted to full Professor at the University of Puget Sound, only days after the manuscript for my second book, on the treatment of foreign cults in the Roman Republic, was accepted by Oxford University Press. Needless to say, there was much rejoicing. Last summer, my article on ‘Octavian and Egyptian Cults: Redrawing the Boundaries of Romanness’ was published in AJP, an article I was grateful to be able to dedicate to Erich Gruen on the occasion of his ‘retirement’. More recently I have been very involved with the foundation of a new society for the study of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, and I have ended up as the group’s first Secretary-Treasurer. We are sponsoring a conference in Rome this summer (details at http://socamr.wikispaces.com); if you can't make it, look for us at the APA in Anaheim next winter. As a result of my involvement with SAMR, I have taken on a new project: a proposal to become general editor for the Cambridge Dictionary of Ancient Mediterranean Religions has just been approved by Cambridge University Press. This one-volume works aims, rather ambitiously, to cover religions from Assyrian to Islamic and everything in between. We will need lots of help, so send me a note if you want to write some entries!”
John Pollini (Ph.D. 1978) reports: “In 2008 I gave a variety of lectures on the East Coast (William and Mary, Duke, Dickinson, University of Nebraska, Creighton, Yale, Princeton, and NYU) on different aspects of my present research, as well as the William S. Metcalf Lectures at Trinity, U. of Oregon, and U.C. Santa Barbara. This spring I have given or will give a variety of papers at conferences at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, University of Buffalo, Creighton, and Tarragona, Spain. In February, I led a tour of Egypt for the USC Alumni Association. Both my wife Phyllis and son Gaius also participated on the trip. Egypt proved to be a gold mine of material evidence for my book project, ‘Christian Destruction and Desecration of Images of Classical Antiquity: A Study in Religious Intolerance and Violence in the Ancient World.’ I will be traveling around Spain in late spring to collect other evidence for this topic in the Roman West. I was recently informed that my forthcoming book, From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome (University of Oklahoma Press) has received a substantial publication subsidy from the Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation. I was particularly delighted to have been nominated for the Humboldt-Forschungspreis to Germany.”
“This past year several of my articles appeared: ‘Christian Destruction and Mutilation of the Parthenon,’ in the Athenische Mitteilungen 122 (2007) 207-228; ‘Gods and Emperors in the East: Images of Power and the Power of Intolerance,’ inThe Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East: Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power (Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion), edd. E.A. Friedland, S.C. Herbert, and Y.Z. Eliav (Leuven 2008), 165-196; ‘A New Bronze Lar and the Role of the Lares in the Domestic and Civic Religion of the Romans,’ in Latomus 67 (2008) 391-98; and ‘A New Portrait Bust of Tiberius inthe Collection of Michael Bianco,’ in Bulletin Antieke Beschaving83 (2008) 133-38.”
“I am currently spearheading a new Visual Culture Initiative of the Ancient World (Old World, New World, Asia) that will bring together LA based institutions and museums (USC’s International Museum Institute, the J. Paul Getty Villa, Getty Research Institute, LA County Museum, the LA Natural History Museum, and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA) for the purpose of collaborating on projects of common interest. I am also in the process of setting up an archaeology program in Rome with a dig component for USC students.”
Josephine Quinn (Ph.D. 2003) reports: “I'm still enjoying the life of the Oxford Don enormously, teaching ancient history at Worcester College in occasional breaks from the consumption of port and snuff. I spent a very useful three months in the Spring of 2008 at the Getty working on a book on Africa in the Hellenistic World that I have (of course) had no time to get back to since, but I'm hoping to reintroduce myself to on sabbatical this fall. In the meantime, I've been editing the Papers of the British School at Rome (new subscribers always welcome!) as well as two collections of essays, one on the Hellenistic West (with Jonathan Prag of Merton College, Oxford) and the other called ‘Identifying the Punic Mediterranean’ (with Nick Vella of the University of Malta). Both will hopefully be out next year.”
Sharon Steadman (Ph.D. 1994) writes: “Hi everyone! Girish Bhat (History 1994) and I are still at SUNY Cortland. Girish is chair of the History Department. Don't ask him how that is going. He has one year left and is counting the hours, if not the minutes. I have successfully avoided the department chairmanship (Sociology/Anthropology) by having two other administrative roles, Coordinator of the International Studies major and Director of the Rozanne Brooks Ethnographic Museum. I staunchly retain these positions in order to avoid chair fate and because they are very rewarding.”
“There are several items of reasonably big news for me. First my department moved from its rather ‘Siberian’ location (on campus) to the center of campus in a newly renovated space. The Brooks museum grew in size by over 300% and this gives me a lot more to do, more work for my students, and generally a joyful space. I also (stupidly) let three book contracts converge. The first, my own book on the archaeology of religion, should be out in April. The second is an edited volume (with Jennifer Ross, Near Eastern Studies 1999) on “Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East.” This should be out in the fall. The third is an edited volume, with Greg McMahon (University of New Hampshire) on Anatolian Studies, out in 2010 at some point. After this third I intend to rest a bit on the book front. I am still the Field Director of the Çadir Höyük project in Turkey. As is everyone else, we are experiencing some financial difficulties. The project will continue this summer if funding permits. In the book on agency there is an Anthro Berkeley grad, and I am putting together an edited journal issue that includes Jenni and another Berkeley type. It is great to work with the old gang and I look forward to visits to the old stomping ground. Best to everyone!”
John Wonder (Ph.D. 1993) writes: “Best to everyone. I continue to teach at San Francisco State University and direct summer programs for the Vergilian Society. The 2008 summer program was particularly interesting. After a few days in Rome, we traveled down to the Bay of Naples for a week (staying in the Villa Vergiliana) and explored Greek and Roman sites at Cumae, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Ischia, Capri, Oplontis, Paestum, Baiae, Pozzuoli and Naples. We then proceeded by boat to Sicily and spent six days visiting Agrigento, Syracuse, Taormina, Cefalu, Solunto and Palermo. I’m working on two articles and plan to submit one (on the Italian League and the Lucanians) this spring. Our three children are growing up now, giving us some breathing room and years of college expenses to look forward to.”