Summer-Fall 2011 Newsletter
Table of Contents
- Letter from the President
- Dues Notice and Distribution of Publications in 2012
- Minutes of Meetings of the Board of Directors
- Vice President Reports (Fall 2011)
- Report of the ACLS Delegate
- Report of the Representative to ACL
- Report of the Delegate to FIEC
- Report of the 2010-2011 Pearson Fellow
- Report of a 2011 Minority Scholarship Recipient
- In Memoriam
- University and College Appointments
- Acknowledgment of Annual Giving and Capital Campaign Gifts (Insert)
- Deceased Members
- 50-Year Club
- Announcement
- Awards to Members
- Meetings/Calls for Abstracts
- Summer Programs
- Funding Opportunities/Fellowships
- Contact Information for APA Member Services
- Capital Campaign News
- Ads
Letter from the President
One of the occupational hazards of working in a Classics Department involves fielding requests to translate mottoes into Latin, a language that is evidently still felt to command the pithiness and prestige associated with inspiring sentiments. At the University of Cape Town in the nineteen-eighties, I received a request to translate “Uplift yourself, uplift your community” for a severely disadvantaged part of the Cape Flats, the windswept plain between the city and False Bay. I remember thinking that the sentiment didn’t sound very Roman; but, comfortably ensconced as I was on the salubrious slopes of Table Mountain, and with some inkling of the conditions on the Flats, I felt humbled that the community wanted to adopt this sentiment at all, let alone in Latin.
Working on arena spectacles for more than two decades since then has made me realize how ubiquitous was the practice in Antiquity for which Paul Veyne coined the term “euergetism.” Quite evidently, “uplifting the community” was just as much a preoccupation in the ancient world as it is in the deprived sectors of modern society. People with means were expected to enhance their communities by donating various amenities; in return, they could expect public recognition in the form of an inscription, often accompanying an honorific statue. (As you may recall, the APA’s Spring Appeal was predicated upon this habit.)
The responsibility of providing for the community was required of certain office-holders. Here the pressure upon those with means from those without is sometimes decorously visible, as with two freedmen, L. Manilius Gallus and L. Manilius Alexander, who endowed 400 loca spectacul(orum) at Aurgi in Hispania Tarraconensis (modern Jaén in Andalusia) to acknowledge their appointment as seuiri Augustales. The project was not their spontaneous choice, but a response to a request from the fellow townsmen of their patron (secundum petitionem m(unicipum)), who was evidently a native of the place. Sometimes the local treasury provided a subsidy for office-holders, in which case to forego it showed special concern for the community and particularly ample means, a magnified version of the feel-good factor involved in a modern contribution to an organization such as the World Wildlife Fund, for which the addressee-funded envelope says, “Your first-class stamp on this envelope will make your contribution to conservation go even further.”
Some of the donations show touching foresight: also at Aurgi, a certain C. Sempronius Sempronianus and his daughter, Sempronia Fusca Vibia Anicilla, provided a set of public baths (thermae), but because baths need water they endowed an aqueduct as well (aqua perducta), and because bathwater needs to be hot, they added 37 hectares of woodland to provide fuel (cum siluis agnuar(um) trecentarum); and they did all this entirely at their own expense, without availing themselves of a subsidy (pecunia impensaque sua omni d(ederunt) d(onauerunt): CIL 2.3361 = ILS 5688). Equally touching are the modest endowments, widely attested in the Roman world, that provide oil in perpetuity for the local baths; soap was something to be grateful for and not to be taken for granted.
But it was not only the initial provision of physical amenities that was beyond the reach of many communities; it was also their upkeep. At Lanuvium under Augustus a certain M. Valerius cleaned the channel of the local aqueduct over a distance of three miles, repaired it, replaced the pipes, and repaired the men’s and women’s baths at his own expense; and he also funded a feast for the community, a gladiatorial show, some form of artificial illumination (lumina), and ludi in honor of Juno Sospes Mater Regina (CIL 14.2121 = ILS 5683). Civic-minded emperors like Hadrian and Antoninus Pius tried to channel donations towards physical improvements that would last, but there was a clear demand for parties and entertainment, and presumably sponsors could tailor the provision of these benefits to suit what they could afford, although the pressure to spend lavishly is evident: when the beasts purchased by Pliny’s friend Maximus failed to arrive in time for his show, Pliny reassured him that his fellow-citizens at Verona had no grounds for suspecting him of cost-cutting (Epist. 6.34).
The impetus to perpetuate the sponsor’s memory is particularly urgent when a donation is ephemeral, as with Valerius’ feast, gladiatorial show, lighting extravaganza, and games. The popularity of feasts and shows is illustrated by capital investments designed to pay for them on a regular basis in perpetuity. On behalf of the Julian colony at Pisaurum—Pésaro, evidently living down its reputation as a moribunda sedes that it earned from a jealous Catullus (81.3)—a certain C. Titius Valentinus invested a capital sum of one million sesterces, from which the interest on 400,000 HS was to fund an annual distribution of food on his son’s birthday, while the rest was to pay for a gladiatorial spectacle every four years (CIL 11.6377); this is no doubt the sort of endowment that Juvenal had in mind when he scorned panem et circenses (Sat. 10.81).
There were some communal fund-raising activities in Antiquity as well. The collegia that funded feasts for their members and insured their burial seem to have required a membership fee, and an aqueduct in the Mosel valley that was constructed in the reign of Hadrian was apparently funded by the corporate endeavor of officials of the imperial cult (CIL 13.4325). But finding—and cultivating—one rich patron was the sine qua non of community upliftment in the ancient world. For mega-projects, the emperor was the only realistic target; Hadrian himself built, or replaced, at least thirteen aqueducts across the width of the Empire, from Syria to Spain. Just as an individual’s advancement depended upon personal patronage, so did the future of entire communities. Many must have failed to find the necessary support.
It is hard to estimate how willingly donors in Antiquity made their donations. Reluctance to stand for office can sometimes be traced to burdensome liturgies. Some local projects foundered because contributors failed to honor their pledges, as Pliny found out to be the case with the half-built theater at Nicaea, where public funds were supposed to be boosted by private donations (Epist. 10.39). On occasion, blackmail was employed; there was nothing like a rotting corpse, denied burial by an angry community, to get the heirs to sponsor funeral games—an act of extortion for which Tiberius had the townspeople and conniving councilors at Pollentia in Piedmont jailed for life (Suet. Tib. 37.3). Inherited obligations can be traced down the generations, as with Ummidia Quadratilla, the dissolute grandmother of one of Pliny’s friends, who built an amphitheatre and a temple at Casinum (CIL 10.5183 = ILS 5628) and repaired the theatre, which her father had either built or enhanced in some way (AE 1946, 174); possibly she resented the expenditure, but more likely she basked in the glory that it shed upon the family name.
Nowadays, we all have to harden our hearts to the blizzard of appeals on behalf of worthy causes from animal rescue to cancer research, otherwise we would end up resorting to charitable donations for our own upkeep. But it is easier to harden one’s heart when the appeal comes from an entity with a distant address on the reply envelope. In Antiquity, appeals for support, other than to the Roman emperor, were overwhelmingly local, and so was the response. The donor was known within the community, and the community and its needs were known to the donor. In a sense, there was no escape. The assumption that people gave grudgingly and had to be bribed with a flowery inscription and a statue is tempting, but it may be anachronistic. Leaving aside the gratitude and admiration that was lavished upon them, donors must have derived considerable satisfaction from seeing, with their own eyes, that they had made a difference. The school that Pliny founded at Comum saved his fellow citizens from having to send their children to be educated in Milan (Epist. 4.13). In writing to Tacitus for help in finding a teacher, he expresses an overwhelming concern that the town itself should feel invested in the project; but, although he does not give himself an overt pat on the back, he evidently felt proud of his accomplishment, as was indeed his due.
Inevitably, my year as President has been partly—although by no means exclusively—occupied by the Gateway Capital Campaign. Not having been involved in a major fund-raising effort before, I now have a new sympathy for the workings of euergetism in Antiquity. Here in the privileged West, we no longer have to depend upon individual donors for the provision of basic amenities like the water supply; those are taken care of by taxation. There are also state-funded entities like the National Endowment for the Humanities that fulfill some of the intellectual aspirations of modern society: the NEH both funds our annual TLL Fellowship and has given the Campaign a major boost with its matching grant. But, ultimately, society still depends heavily on individuals contributing out of their own pockets for the common good. It is not easy to estimate how many donors in Antiquity suffered real hardship as a result of their generosity. But I am well aware that, for many people today, a financial contribution for the common good involves real sacrifice. If you have made a sacrifice for the APA, thank you; the Association will take seriously its obligation to be a faithful steward of your gift.
Kathleen M. Coleman
Dues Rates, Publications, and Member Communications in 2012
Dues Rates. Dues invoices for 2012 have been mailed to members. Please inform the Association Office if you have not received your invoice. The rates for 2011 are as follows:
Salary Dues
| $140,000 and up | $272 |
| $120,000-$139,999 | $238 |
| $100,00-119,999 | $204 |
| $90,000-99,999 | $170 |
| $80,000-89,999 | $153 |
| $70,000-79,999 | $136 |
| $60,000-69,999 | $119 |
| $50,000-59,999 | $102 |
| $40,000-49,999 | $85 |
| $35,000-39,999 | $68 |
| $30,000-34,999 | $60 |
| $25,000-29,999 | $51 |
| $20,000-24,999 | $43 |
| under $20,000 | $34 |
|
Reduced Rate Membership
|
$33 |
| Member Who Joined APA before 1980 | $60 |
| Institutional Subscriber | $120 |
| Life Membership | $3,000 |
| Joint Life Membership | $4,000 |
Payment of dues is requested by December 31, 2011, to ensure an uninterrupted listing in the online Directory of Members and to permit continued access to the members only section of the APA web site. Before submitting your dues payment, please turn over the dues invoice and respond to the survey of members' fields of interest that has been prepared by the Committee on Research. The Committee's goal is to make it possible for members to use the APA's online Directory of Members to find other classicists working in areas of common interest.
Publications. By action of the Board of Directors, APA members will receive printed versions of three Association publications (TAPA, the Newsletter, and Amphora) only on request. The Board has taken this action in order to achieve both financial and environmental savings. In the upper left-hand corner of the invoice you will find check boxes you may use to request copies of these publications in the mail. The Newsletter and Amphora will continue to appear on the APA web site; TAPA will continue to be available to APA members via Project MUSE (click on the "Members Only" link on the main page of our web site).
Communication with Members. If you do not regularly receive e-mails from my office, the APA probably does not have your current e-mail address in the membership records that the Johns Hopkins University Press maintains for us. If you have not provided that address, I urge you to do so either by noting it when you pay your dues or by sending an e-mail to the Press at jrnlcirc@mail.press.jhu.edu. The Board of Directors has instructed me, first of all, not to share members' e-mail addresses with any other organization or individual, and, second, to make communications with the entire membership as brief and as infrequent as possible. By providing your e-mail address to us, you will be sure of receiving important Association announcements.
Adam D. BlisteinMinutes of Meetings of the Board of Directors
- Mail Votes Taken Between January and May 2011
- Conference Call of June 13, 2011
- Meeting of September 16-17, 2011
Reports of Vice Presidents
The Education Division has been busy on a number of fronts, from discussing plans for a web-based classics informational webpage, to continuing efforts at increasing the number of (much needed) certified Latin teachers, to preparing panels, to giving awards related to teaching, travel, and professional study, to supervising the publication of booklets related to the Division’s mission. The Division’s committees and committee chairs have been very active and have provided excellent service to APA.
With the help of Sam Huskey, the Education page of the APA website has been revised and updated. New information includes links to reports from MLA and ACTFL on enrollment statistics in our field at the collegiate and pre-collegiate levels, respectively. Abstracts for Education Division panels are posted there. This is also where the recent Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation and the Report on State Certification Requirements in Latin can be found.
The APA booklet, Careers for Classicists, which has not been revised for about a decade, is currently being updated by its author, Ken Kitchell, in conjunction with the members of the Education Committee. The Committee, which was eager to have input into the revision, shared with Professor Kitchell its comments on the current booklet and suggestions for revision. It was very pleased he was willing to take on this task. We hope to have a draft of the new version read and commented upon by the Committee by around November 15. The new booklet will appear online and will have a print run as well.
This past spring Professor Kitchell came up with an idea for an information webpage for classics and reached out to many members of the profession to see where such a page might be housed. After some discussion that included from APA, Adam Blistein, Sam Huskey, and me, and from ACL, President Peter Howard, it was decided that setting this up could be a joint project of APA and ACL. The Classics page (or whatever it will be called) could be located on the APA website, with appropriate links to ACL and other sites. Such a hub is intended to be generally informational, but also to be a source of details, such as enrollment figures in classics, that could be useful for departments in jeopardy or ones looking for information to contextualize and/or justify their programs. Much of this information is already available. The plan is to get it all in one easy-to-reach spot. For the Joint (APA/ACL) Committee on Classics in American Education’s meeting at the ACL Institute, Dr. Blistein drew up a summary of the list of terms that might appear on such a webpage.
There continues to be a need for certified teachers of Latin at the pre-collegiate level. Information about certification state-by-state is now available on the APA website on the Education page. JCCAE has continued to discuss ways to fast-track potential secondary level teachers to certification. The Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation has been distributed to foreign-language supervisors in state departments of education. It will be sent in the near future to Deans of Education in schools with Classics programs. Peter Howard will bring hard copies to distribute to state supervisors of foreign languages, whose professional association meets at ACTFL this fall. In addition, JCCAE is considering the possibility of sponsoring a Latin teaching methods course, to be taught by a master teacher, for which some financial assistance would hopefully be provided to participants. This could help to speed up the path to certification and could provide a Latin-specific methods course to some potential teachers who might not otherwise have such a course available to them. We hope that the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation will be an aid to all who are involved in preparing Latin teachers, as well as to future (and current) Latin teachers themselves.
APA was approached by the Council of Independent Colleges for an endorsement of and help in providing contacts for an upcoming Workshop in our field. The Education Committee, when consulted, decided to recommend endorsement of the Workshop and I had a phone call with our contact at the CIC in which I recommended some classics faculty who might be useful for the CIC’s planning of such a Workshop.
While attendance at the ACL’s Annual Institute is not required of the APA VP for Education, it is advantageous, in my opinion, when possible. While APA has as the majority of its membership those teaching at the college level, ACL has the majority of its membership teaching at the pre-collegiate level. Attendance at both the APA Annual Meeting and the ACL Institute gives a balanced perspective on the state of classics in North American education and beyond. I attended the Institute this summer for the second year in a row since becoming VP. I expect to attend for the remaining years I am VP, if possible. JCCAE (co-chaired by the ACL President, currently Peter Howard of Troy University and the APA VP for Education) now meets at the ACL Institute as well as at APA, which better allows for committee members who may attend just the APA Annual Meeting or just the ACL Institute to attend at least one of the two committee meetings each year.
The Education Committee will be sponsoring a panel at the 2012 APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Friday, January 6 from 1:30-4:00 entitled, “Teaching about Classics Pedagogy in the 21st Century,” organized by Eric Dugdale (Gustavus Adolphus College) and me (Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center). Speakers will include the two organizers plus Michael Goyette (CUNY), Andrew Reinhard (ASCSA), Laurie Haight Keenan (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers), and William Batstone and Anna McCullough (both from Ohio State University). We hope to have a broad audience, including graduate students, teachers at any level, and Directors of Graduates Studies. The speakers will address various aspects of what future classics professors should know about pedagogy when embarking upon teaching and how and when that knowledge can or should be acquired. The needs of the beginning teacher, technology, textbooks, teaching at small vs. large schools, and what Ph.D. programs can contribute to the pedagogical development of their graduate students are some of the issues that will be addressed. Plans are already underway for the Education Committee’s proposed panel for the 2013 Annual Meeting in Seattle, to be organized by Nigel Nicholson. The topic will be Teaching Literary Theory.
The next APA Guide to Graduate Programs is currently being produced and should appear by sometime this winter. This version will have a small print run, but will also be available online for the first time. This is a very important change, which reflects how those of us already in the profession and students investigating graduate schools typically seek information. The Guide will now include information about Post-Baccalaureate programs as well as Ph.D. and M.A. programs. In the future, we hope to encourage departments to include even more information. This might include number of degrees awarded, job placement records/information, teaching experience available, time to degree etc. Self-reporting via departmental websites would have the advantage of providing a context for this information, e.g., a lot of teaching experience can lead to a longer time to degree etc. In my report in Fall 2011 I mentioned that there had been discussion with James May, APA VP for Professional Matters, about what to include. Joseph Farrell, chair at the time of the unofficial committee of Classics Ph.D. program department heads, had been involved in discussion as well. I repeat here my comment from the Fall 2011 report that it may be useful for the Education and Professional Matters Divisions, Joseph Farrell, and the head of the unofficial committee on terminal M.A. programs to devise a statement for APA Board consideration and possible adoption about what they would recommend departments include in the future. This discussion, if desirable, could begin sometime after the publication of the forthcoming Guide.
Sanjaya Thakur, Co-Chair of the APA-AIA Committee on Minority Student Scholarships, reports:
“Last year my committee, thanks to generous contributions of the APA and AIA members (and the APA's Gateway campaign and AIA gala), was able to award two fellowships for the second consecutive year. Last year we were able to award $6500 in fellowships (a record high amount) to Sarah Malik of the University of Alberta (summer Latin course in New York) and Trisha Tolentino of the State University of New York at Albany (archaeological dig). This year we will again award two winners, expecting to provide $7500 in fellowships. Members can purchase tickets to the raffle (whose benefits go to the fellowship) on their annual meeting registrations, and on the APA and AIA websites, but can also purchase tickets on-site (last year we raised more than $3000 on-site in San Antonio). We will have a booth at the entrance of the book exhibit hall. Finally scholarship applications have now been posted on the APA's website; the due date is 12/14/11.”
Unfortunately the AIA has just reported that it will no longer be jointly sponsoring the Minority Student Scholarships with the APA. Thus this committee will now be a committee of the APA alone. The Committee has produced a handsome booklet about the scholarship program in the past. The 2010 version is available online through the Education page of the APA website. A print version was available last year as well. The responsibility for the booklet had been taken on by the AIA as of last year’s Annual Meeting. The Committee and APA will need to decide what form the booklet should take in the future and how any costs will be handled. Dr. Blistein has indicated that APA should be able to absorb the cost for this year’s booklet.
The following report is from Georgia Tsouvala, chair of the Committee on Ancient History:
“The Committee on Ancient History has been active since our meeting in January and we have followed through with the goals we had set out at the 2011 APA in San Antonio. In May, the Committee completed its report to Sam Huskey with suggestions as to the content of its APA webpage. Furthermore, the Committee has contacted the APA Program Committee to address the subfields that are representative of ancient history on the abstracts submission form. The Program Committee has responded that it will attempt to make some sort of positive response to the desire for a modified system of submission categories in time for next year's abstract submission cycle.
One of the most important tasks for the CoAH is the organization of professional panels that deal with teaching and professional issues. We are always looking for new topics and people to organize these panels. The panel “Law in the Undergraduate Curriculum” for APA 2012, organized by Celia Schultz and Serena Connolly, was accepted by the APA Program Committee this past spring. The organizers have lined up an excellent group of speakers: Bruce Frier (University of Michigan), Victor Bers (Yale University), Leanne Bablitz (University of British Columbia), and Kevin Crotty (Washington & LeeUniversity), with Adriaan Lanni (Harvard University) as respondent. The panel will be dedicated to the late Ernst Badian. Both organizers have been invited to the CoAH's meeting in January to provide the members with an update.
A panel on "Teaching History and Classics with Inscriptions" for APA 2013 is being organized by me. I have lined up a number of distinguished scholars. Topics include teaching with inscriptions, inscriptions and new technologies, epigram and inscriptions, etc. The panelists will send me their formal abstracts by September 15, 2011. If the panel is accepted by the CoAH, then I will submit it to the APA Program Committee.
The Committee is continuing discussions about the best ways it can serve the profession. In an effort to address the fact that some ancient historians feel marginalized, I, as the chair of the Committee, continue to attend both the APA and Association of Ancient Historians (AAH) meetings and to keep the lines of communication between the two organizations open. Also, I submitted a short report of our Committee's activities to the AAH newsletter and website so that ancient historians, who do not attend the APA regularly, will stay informed about our committee's efforts in the field. Furthermore, Serena Connolly has been working on finding out ways in which our committee can open relations with the American Historical Association (AHA). She has submitted a report to me already, and she will provide the membership of the committee with an update in January. At this stage, it seems that the best way to get an "in" into that organization is for the APA and the Committee of Ancient History to become an affiliated organization with the AHA.”
Making awards to teachers continues to be an important part of the Education Division’s work. The 2011 David D. and Rosemary H. Coffin Fellowship for Travel in Classical Lands was awarded to Mr. William Clausen, who teaches Latin and English at Washington Latin Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. The 2010 APA Awards for Teaching Excellence at the Collegiate Level went to Peter Anderson of Grand Valley State University and Nita Krevans of the University of Minnesota. The 2010 APA Award for Excellence in Pre-Collegiate Teaching went to Max Gabrielson of Wilton High School, Wilton, CT. The following individuals served on these awards committees: Coffin, Eric Dugdale (Gustavus Adolphus College), chair, and Greta Ham (Episcopal Academy) and Bronwen Wickkiser (Vanderbilt University); Collegiate, Kathryn Morgan (UCLA), chair, and Mary English (Montclair State University) and Elizabeth Vandiver (Whitman College); Pre-Collegiate (subcommittee of JCCAE), Ronnie Ancona, chair, and Peter Howard (Troy University), Ed DeHoratius (Wayland High School), and Eric Dugdale (Gustavus Adolphus College).
With the new funding available from the gift of Daniel and Joanna Rose, the Teaching Award amounts (for both college level and pre-collegiate) will be raised for 2011 to $500 per award, with an addition $200 for the winner’s institution for materials to be chosen by the winner. This is a considerable jump from the current level of $300 per winner with no added institution funding. The Committee is very grateful to the Roses for their generous support. We hope in the future to provide more information about the award winners on the APA website, to include links with their institutions, pictures, etc. in an effort to have both outreach to winners’ institutions and links back to APA.
Funding from the ongoing Capital Campaign will allow for some “Next Generation” scholarships starting in fiscal year 2012 to be given for professional development in line with last year’s recommendations from the Education Committee as reported in the APA Board minutes for Jan. 9, 2011. In addition to the increase in the teaching awards, the Committee suggested a new award category of funding be set up for pedagogy development, open to both college and pre-collegiate teachers. Funding would ideally be a minimum of $500 and a maximum of $2500, depending on the nature of the project to be funded. A second new award category proposed would be used for Latin teacher training leading towards certification. A possible funding level of up to $1500 was discussed. Necessary funding would have to be in place for these awards to be initiated and amounts for awards would depend upon specific monies available.
Respectfully submitted,
Ronnie AnconaAPA VP for Education 2010-14
In this, my final report as Vice President for the Division of Outreach, I am grateful for the opportunity to look back over the past four years as well as to look ahead, and to thank the many individuals who have generously contributed time, talents and energies to Outreach activities. I am pleased to report on a wide array of projects organized by the three committees under the purview of Outreach—the Outreach Committee itself, the Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception (COCTR), and the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (CAMP)—as well as on the APA publication Amphora.
Amphora: The current Editor and Assistant Editor of Amphora, T. Davina McClain of Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University, and Diane Johnson of Western Washington University, will be stepping down from their positions in January 2012. I would like to thank them both for the TLC (tempus, labor, cura) that they have given to the journal during their years of service. Amphora is an important voice for APA Outreach, and for the APA itself, testimony to the many and diverse engagements of our members with those both inside and outside the classics community who share our interest in the Greco-Roman past.
Efforts to hire a new editor and assistant editor began with the appointment of a search committee at the January 2011 annual meeting, and came to happy fruition in June, when the Board approved the appointment of Dr. Ellen Bauerle, University of Michigan Press, as Editor and Dr. Wells Hansen, Milton Academy, as Assistant Editor, effective January 2012.
Ellen has for several years worked as the editor for classics and archaeology at the University of Michigan Press. She also oversees book production for the not-for-profit Michigan Classical Press, and in the past has created and sold e-books on the web. Recipient of a BA in Greek and English from Oberlin College, and an MA and PhD in Classics from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, she has been an Eric P. Newman Fellow at the American Numismatic Society and Seymour Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Ellen is delighted that Amphora is evolving to include the latest technologies, as additional ways of reaching its key constituencies among interested non-specialists, scholars, teachers and students at the secondary level, and administrators.
In addition to his role as housemaster at Milton Academy outside of Boston, where he manages the academic and social programs of about forty students each year, Wells teaches in Milton’s classics department. He also works with university partners and private clients in Asia to promote talent identification and development, especially in math and science. After earning his BA in classics at the University of Chicago, Wells received his doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. A longstanding APA member, he has published numerous journal articles about classical topics, especially Roman poetry. Wells has a particular interest in developing the visibility of Amphora in social media and in social aspects of the web.
Both Ellen and Wells have had opportunities to discuss best practices and the status of the current Amphora issue with the outgoing editors and with APA Executive Director Adam Blistein and Information Architect Samuel Huskey, University of Oklahoma. Ellen and Wells are developing a short strategic plan of possible recurring columns and materials that will be discussed with Amphora’s advisory board, and they have been talking with a few authors of possible Amphora contributions. In addition, group conversations are also helping to define best media for possible Amphora contributions, and what kinds of materials are better left to the APA website and/or its blog.
I greatly enjoyed chairing the Amphora Editors’ Search Committee. Many thanks to my fellow committee members for their efforts in identifying and selecting these two talented colleagues: Adam Blistein (ex officio); Barbara Weiden Boyd, Bowdoin College; Matthew Dillon, Loyola Marymount College; John Gruber-Miller, Cornell College; T. Davina McClain (ex officio); Kathryn Morgan, University of California at Los Angeles.
There are other ongoing initiatives in the area of outreach that warrant attention as well, since they bring both classical antiquity and the APA to a wider audience. The first, moreover, numbers the APA among its partnering sponsors.
Update on Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives: In 2010 Peter Meineck, Artistic Director of the Aquila Theatre Company and clinical professor at New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies, received a highly prestigious Chairman’s Special Award of $800,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. One of the two largest grants made by the NEH that year—and indeed the sole grant in this category made to a theater company—it was also the largest award that the NEH has ever given to any theater company. The award is funding “Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives (AGML)”, a major national humanities program slated to travel to one hundred public libraries and arts centers across the USA. Its mission is to bring the writings and insights of Greco-Roman antiquity to communities of veterans and their families in inner cities and rural areas. Peter Meineck is overseeing this program in conjunction with the American Philological Association, the Urban Library Council, Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. and New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies. In recognition of his outstanding contributions to APA Outreach through Aquila and his NEH-funded programs, he was awarded the 2010 APA Outreach Scholarly Award at the 2011 APA meeting.
As of May 31, 2011, AGML has produced the following forty successful events reaching approximately 37,622 Americans: 8 reading group sessions (144 people); 6 acting workshops (120 people); 14 public lectures (325 people); 12 staged readings of scenes from Greek drama (742 people), 12 post-performance discussions with local scholars (550 people); a conference at New York University; 12,689 Program Essay Recipients; Website visits by 22,575 people.
The programming has occurred at: Mount Kisco Public Library, Mount Kisco, NY; Poughkeepsie Public Library, Poughkeepsie, NY; Queens Library, Queens, NY; Utica Public Library, Utica, NY; Richland County Public Library, Columbia, SC; Hemmerdinger Hall at New York University, NYC, NY; Gertrude C. Ford Center for the Performing Arts, The University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS; The University of Mississippi Museum, Oxford, MS; J.E. Broyhill Civic Center, Lenoir, NC; The Palace Theatre, Marion, OH; Folsom Lake College Performing Arts Center, Folsom, CA; Oates Park Arts Center, Fallon, NY; Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, Santa Rosa, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, NYC, NY.
AGML has selected the following as Program Scholars for the first round of programming sessions. They will be presenting talks on the program themes, moderate staged readings of themes from Greek drama, and lead book and film discussion groups during the 2011-2012 academic year: Jana Adamitis, Christopher Newport University; James Andrews, Ohio University; Randall Childree, Union College; Jaclyn Dudek, Wayne State University; Eric Dugdale, Gustavus Adolphus College; Anne Duncan, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Emily Fairey, Queens College and Sarah Lawrence College; Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California, Santa Cruz; Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park; Daniel B. Levine, University of Arkansas; Mike Lippman, University of Arizona; Sally MacEwen, Agnes Scott College: Laura McClure, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Temple University; Timothy Moore, University of Texas-Austin; Corinne Ondine Pache, Trinity University; Nancy Rabinowitz, Hamilton College: Patrice Rankine, Purdue University; Diane Rayor, Grand Valley State College; Brent Michael Rogers, Gettysburg College; David Schenker, University of Missouri; Niall Slater, Emory University; Nancy Sultan, Illinois Wesleyan University; James Svendsen, University of Utah; Gonda Van Steen, University of Florida; Timothy Wutrich, Case Western Reserve University.
The AGML consultants, who have written scholarly essays on the four programming themes, are: Daniel Banks, Director of the Hip Hop Theatre Initiative, Faculty, City University of New York, “From Homer to Hip Hop: The Art of Storytelling,” Paul Cartledge, Cambridge University, “Rites of Passage: Changing Worlds, Transforming Lives,” Mary R. Lefkowitz, Wellesley College, “Stranger in a Strange Land: Encountering the Other,} Lawrence Tritle, Loyola Marymount University; “Homecoming: Return of the Warrior”
These essays are being distributed to all program participants, and are available online at http://ancientgreeksmodernlives.org/themes. Nancy Tessman, Director Emerita, Salt Lake City Library, is in charge of Venue Coordination.
The members of the AGML Advisory Board are Susan B. Benton, President, Urban Libraries Council; Judith P. Hallett, Professor of Classics, University of Maryland, College Park and APA Vice-President, Outreach; Jay Kaplan, Director of Programs and Exhibitions, Brooklyn Public Library; Gregory Nagy, Professor of Classics, Harvard University, and Director, Center for Hellenic Studies; Matthew S. Santirocco, Professor of Classics and Associate Provost of Undergraduate Academic Affairs, New York University; Paul B. Woodruff, Dean and Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin.
Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives was officially inaugurated by Combat Trauma on the Ancient Stage: a conference hosted by Aquila Theatre, the NYU Center for Ancient Studies and Humanities Initiative and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, on Wednesday, April 20 and Thursday, April 21, 2011. It featured talks by several prominent humanities scholars. David Konstan, Professor of Classics, New York University, delivered the keynote address, “Denying Combat Trauma: The Missing Diagnosis in Ancient Greece.” Konstan was followed by: “Women After War. Weaving Nostos in Homeric Epic and in the 21st Century” by Corinne Pache; “Performing Greek Tragedy at GITMO: Excavating an Ancient Audience” by Bryan Doerries, Artistic Director, Theatre of War Productions; “Recollections of Combat Trauma in the Dialogues of Plato” by S. Sara Monoson, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University; “When war is performed, what do soldiers see and hear, think and say—or not say”? by Thomas Palaima, Professor of Classics and Director, Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory, University of Texas, Austin.; “Of Dreamers and Ravished Minds: Surviving War, Surviving Trauma” by Lawrence Tritle.
The conference also featured a staged reading of passages from Homer’s Odyssey, Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Ajax, and Euripides’ Herakles with Deborah Rush (Julie and Julia, TV’s Spin City), Brian Delate (Far From Heaven, TV’s Law and Order), with members of the Aquila Theatre Company, Michele Vazquez, Jay Painter, James Knight, John Buxton and Jeffrey Golde. It culminated in a post-show discussion following Aquila’s production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search of An Author at the NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts with panelists Peter Meineck, S. Sara Monoson, Thomas Palaima, Lawrence Tritle and Desiree Sanchez, the play’s director.
The Aquila Staff is currently solidifying dates for the second year of programming to occur during the 2011/2012 season at the following locations (listed chronologically): Richmondtown Library, Staten Island, NY; Harlem Library, NYC, NY; Belmont Library, Bronx, NY; Queens Library, Flatbush, NY; Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn, NY; Tuckahoe Public Library, Tuckahoe, NY; Hartford Public Library, Hartford, CT; Denver Public Library, Denver, CO; Pueblo City Library, Pueblo, CO; Pikes Peak Library, Manitou Springs, CO; Athens County Library System, Athens, OH; Licking County Library, Newark, OH; Twinsburg Public Library, Twinsburg, OH; Stark Library, Stark, OH; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Grand Rapids Public Library, Grand Rapids, MI; American Theatre, Hampton, VA; Miller Center for the Arts, Reading, PA; University of Wisconsin Whitewater, Whitewater, WI; Skokie Public Library, Skokie, IL; Missouri State University, Springfield, MO; Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS; Lawrence Public Library, Lawrence, KS; Terrebonne Public Library System, Houma, LA; Jefferson Parish Public Library, Metairie, LA; Manship Theatre, Baton Rouge, LA; Warren County Memorial Library, Warrenton, NC; District of Columbia Public Library, Washington, DC; Prince George’s County Memorial Library, Hyattsville, MD; Piedmont Arts Association, Martinsville, VA; Palm Beach Public Library, Palm Beach, FL; University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC; Chuck Mathena Center, Princeton, NC; University of Missouri Rolla, Rolla, MO; Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library, Topeka, KS; Cam Plex, Gillette, WY; Parks County Arts, Cody, WY: Carpenter Center California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, California; Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, CA; County of Los Angeles Public Library, Los Angeles, CA; San Diego Public Library, San Diego, CA; Kern County Library, Bakersfield, CA; Sacramento Public Library, Sacramento, CA; Fresno County Public Library, Fresno, CA; Harris County Public Library, Houston, TX; Austin Public Library, Austin, TX; Lancaster Veterans, Dallas, TX; Dallas Center for the Book, Dallas, TX; San Antonio Public Library, San Antonio, TX; Memphis Public Library, Memphis, TN; Chattahoochee Valley Libraries, Columbus, GA; Atlanta Fulton County Library, Atlanta, GA; West Palm Beach Public Library, West Palm Beach, FL; Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR; Sno-Isle Libraries, Marysville, WA.
The Center for Ancient Studies at NYU has arranged meetings of the program consultants to plan project materials and training, and develop teaching resources for the thematic units. The first group of 27 program scholars was trained at the 2011 APA Meeting in San Antonio, where they gathered for an in-person workshop. There the scholars became equipped with the tools they needed to liaise successfully with their local public library, and incorporate program themes into their lectures and reading groups.
The program website (ancientgreeksmodernlives.org) hosts podcasts and video clips for reading groups to discuss, further information on each thematic unit, supplementary reading, scholars’ essays, useful web links, details on the productions, production photos, information on the libraries, venues, scholars, consultants and partners. The website also acts as a digital forum for all involved parties to communicate about teaching methodology as it hosts a discussion board and information about the time, dates, and locations of all the program events. The Aquila office has handled travel arrangements, the scheduling of events, and the distribution of materials. Aquila Theatre also facilitates local and national advertising efforts. Publicity materials have been created (bookmarks, banners, essays and posters) and have been distributed to all of the host venues, as well as featured as downloads on the program website and venue websites. These include the scholarly essays on each of the program themes by Daniel Banks, Paul Cartledge, Mary R. Lefkowitz and Lawrence Tritle.
Update on Classical Reception Studies Network: In my capacity as a “private citizen”, I am partnering with Judith Fletcher of Wilfrid Laurier University and S. Sara Monoson of Northwestern on the new North American Classical Reception Studies Network (NACRSN), which will be activated in fall 2011. This collaborative project evolved from an initiative launched by the Classical Reception Studies Network (CRSN), based at the Open University (UK), which the Outreach Division, representing the APA as a whole, joined in 2009 as an Overseas Affiliate Partner. The CRSN has several overseas affiliate institutions, some of them colleges and universities in the US such as Northwestern; the Australasian Classical Reception Studies Network (ACRSN) is a partner as well, and a model for NACRSN. The main aim of the NACRSN is to establish and maintain a website that will facilitate, keep track of, and heighten awareness of the growth of this research field in North America. Northwestern University will support the technical requirements and arrange for graduate assistants to monitor the site and keep it current. The website will incorporate a directory of North American scholars doing research in classical reception studies, announcements of scholarly conferences, lectures and other events featuring classical reception, and a collection of syllabi and other teaching resources for colleagues developing courses.
Update on Classics in Social Media, and on Listservs and Websites: One of the chief responsibilities of the Outreach Vice-President has been to develop and pursue different strategies for reaching out both within and beyond the professional classics community, first and foremost by collaborating with colleagues around the US and Canada to gather information on classically related events in their geographical regions, and to publicize these events globally as well as locally. I have been working closely with the APA Information Architect, Samuel Huskey, to provide material for the World of Classics section of the APA website; I have made similar contributions to The Dionysiac, a listserv announcing classical plays, theatrical events and conferences, run by Hallie Rebecca Marshall of the University of British Columbia. Huskey has, moreover, regularly posted the announcements appearing in the World of Classics section and on The Dionysiac listserv on the APA Facebook page, which emerged into the luminis oras in December 2010. Our Facebook page also includes important announcements from the APA itself, and attracts several hundred visitors each week. My deepest appreciation to Sam Huskey and Heather Hartz Gasda of the APA office for getting our Facebook page up and running, and for maintaining the initial momentum.
Update on Rosters of Musical and Performance Classicists: During 2010 Outreach launched two rosters: one of classicists with backgrounds in musical performance and the history of music; the other of classicists with backgrounds in theatrical performance and in classical performance receptions. In compiling the roster of “musical classicists”, which now numbers 36 individuals from North America and beyond, we were especially eager to identify colleagues who would be willing to share their knowledge of both music and classical antiquity with individuals writing or performing works that are set in the ancient Greco-Roman world, draw on ancient Greek and Latin literary texts, or feature classical figures and themes.
For the roster of “performance classicists”, we sought to identify colleagues willing to share their knowledge of classical antiquity and performance with individuals who are considering staging works that are set in the Greco-Roman world, draw on Greek or Latin literary texts, and/or feature classical figures and themes, in the areas of drama, music and dance. We also assumed, accurately, that the senior scholars listed in this roster—which now numbers 33 individuals—might be asked to assess “classical performances” staged by faculty members under review for tenure and promotion, and publications about such performances. Special thanks to Ted Gellar-Goad, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for helping to conceptualize, publicize and coordinate these two rosters.
The various committees in the Outreach division have planned a number of exciting events for the 2012 APA meeting in Philadelphia. Each is described in the report submitted by the respective chair.
Outreach Committee (Chair, Judith P. Hallett): For the APA meeting in Philadelphia, the Committee on Outreach will present a panel, “Beyond Multiculturalism: Classical Africana and the Universalization of the Classical Experience.” Organized by Dr. Eugene O’Connor, Ohio State University Press, and myself, it will feature five papers:
- Barbara Goff, University of Reading, “Niobe of the Nations: Classical Metaphors in the Writings of 19th Century West African Nationalists”
- Daniel Orrells, University of Warwick, “Molora: Greek Tragedy and South African Democracy”
- Margaret Malamud, University of New Mexico, “The Uses of Antiquity in Antebellum African-American History”
- Heidi Morse, University of California at Santa Cruz, “Figural Rhetoric: Anna Julia Cooper’s Ciceronian Transformations”
- Mathias Hanses, Columbia University, “E Pluribus Unum: Moving Classica Africana from ‘Classicists’ to ‘Classicism’”
- Kenneth Goings, The Ohio State University, will deliver a response.
The call for papers yielded fifteen abstracts, many of extremely high quality. Special thanks are due to Eugene O’Connor and the referees: Kenneth Goings, and Denise McCoskey, Miami University (Ohio).
This year the Committee on Outreach has lent its sponsorship to another panel at the APA meeting in Philadelphia, entitled “Abstracting Classics: Cy Twombly, Modern Art and the Ancient World.” Organized by Richard Fletcher of the Ohio State University, and planned long before Twombly’s death this past July, the panel features five leading and international art and cultural historians and classicists: Nicholas Cullinan, Carol Nigro, Ahuvia Kahane, Tim Rood, and Mary Jacobus. It will be held in conjunction with an event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which includes a tour of Twombly’s series “50 Days at Iliam”[sic], a permanent exhibition at the museum.
In addition, the Committee is among the sponsors of “Re-Creation: Musical Reception of Classical Antiquity,” a conference held from October 27-30 at the University of Iowa. Co-organized by Robert Ketterer of Iowa and Andrew Simpson of the Catholic University of America, it had its genesis in the 2011 APA Outreach panel on “The Children of Orpheus: How Composers Receive Ancient Texts.” The conference includes sessions on “Musical Theater/Music in Theater”, “Theoretical and Philosophical Issues”, “19th and 20th Century Opera”, “Early Opera,” “Stage Practice”, “Film”, and “The Twentieth Century.” Among the presenters at these sessions are Thomas Jenkins, Trinity University; Peter Burian, Duke University; Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California, Santa Cruz; and Jon Solomon, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana; 46 abstracts were submitted, of which only 25 could be accepted. Many more than were accepted were of very high quality, and the choice was difficult. The conference also features public lectures by Wendy Heller, Princeton University and Simon Goldhill, King’s College, Cambridge; a concert by the Center for New Music; a performance of Peri’s Euridice; and a showing of silent films on classical themes with live piano accompaniment by Andrew Simpson.
In November, committee member Keely Lake, Wayland Academy, will be presenting a paper on National Latin Teacher Recruitment Week (NLTRW) at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages Meeting in Denver. The APA is helping to fund the grants provided by NLTRW.The topic of the Outreach panel for the 2013 APA meeting in Seattle will be ancient and modern sport. Paul Christesen of Dartmouth College and Garrett Fagan of the Pennsylvania State University will be the co-organizers. I would like to thank Mary-Kay Gamel and Toph Marshall, University of British Columbia, for their work in planning the panel so far. A call for papers will go out in October.
Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (Chair, Dorota Dutsch, University of California, Santa Barbara): Chair Dorota Dutsch has written the following report:CAMP will be sponsoring a panel entitled “Theater on the Move” at the 2012 APA Meeting in Philadelphia. It features four papers:
- Kathryn Bosher, Northwestern University, “Regionalism in Ancient Greek Drama”
- Anne E. Duncan, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, “Alexander the Great’s Traveling Road Show”
- George W. Mallory Harrison, Concordia University, “Hercules on Oeta: Not a Stoic S(t)age”.
- Sissi Liu, City University of New York Graduate Center, “Musicalized Antigone on Tour”
Performance in the ancient world involved travel and “transport” in many different senses. Athenian dramas were exported to Sicily, southern Italy, and other parts of the Mediterranean, especially during the 4th century BCE, where they were performed for non-Athenian audiences and adopted into local cultural canons. In more recent times and to this day, travel and transport have figured prominently in the productions of ancient plays, especially those belonging to the touring repertory of troupes such as Le Theatre du Soleil (Les Atrides) and the National Theatre of Greece. These papers will address the effect of travel and transport on productions from four different periods and situations: classical and Hellenistic Greece, the Roman Empire and the international theater scene of the past thirty years.
CAMP has assisted in the relocation of the online journal Didaskalia to its new home at Randolph College, under the editorship of CAMP member Amy R. Cohen. The College has provided office space and a budget, and the journal is now also staffed with as assistant editor, Jay Kardan, and a student intern (Gage Stuntz for 2011-2012). Toph Marshall remains as associate editor for executive decision-making. The journal’s new phone number is +1 434 937-8117. In the first six months since the relaunch of Didaskalia, the journal has published sixteen reviews, interviews and articles—and many more are in process. Until the journal sets up an RSS feed, readers can stay informed of new publications on Facebook (“Like” facebookcom/Didaskalia.net) or Twitter (@DidaskaliaEd). CAMP has helped raise awareness of the journal itself, staff its editorial and advisory boards, and establish regular communications between the journal and the committee.
The 2012 performance at the APA meeting in Philadelphia, to be held on Friday, January 6, will be The Jurymen, a new “Aristophanic” play about the last days of Socrates. Directed by Amy R. Cohen, the play is by her former student Katherine Janson; this will be its debut performance since the play was published. The call for participants has yielded over a dozen responses from both regular cast members and new blood, and Cohen will be organizing the cast and crew during the fall in advance of rehearsals o begin on Wednesday, January 4. The Committee has issued a call for directors of future performances, and is revising the policies connected with its call for directors and play selection procedures.
Working with the Vice-President for Outreach, CAMP is planning to collaborate with the European Network of Research and Documentation of Performances of Ancient Greek Drama. It hopes in particular to bring their summer courses to the attention of US students.
A workshop at the 2012 Philadelphia APA meeting, organized by Dorota Dutsch and Nancy Rabinowitz, Hamilton College, is the result of several CAMP discussions. Entitled “Classics in Action: How to Engage with the Public,” it features four different presentations on how the discipline and profession of Classics may increase their engagement with the non-specialist public. All will ask what it means to be a publicly engaged classicist, identify successful public engagement initiatives, and consider the kinds of initiatives that the APA might develop in the future.
- Judith P. Hallett will describe several current APA Outreach activities as well as a UK initiative, “Communicating Ancient Greece and Rome: New Public Engagement Training Programme for Classics PhD Students”
- Peter Meineck will discuss his NEH-funded project, Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, and its use of public libraries as venues for reaching underserved populations.
- Jana Adamitis, Christopher Newport University, and Mary-Kay Gamel will focus on the value of dramatic performances for inspiring interest in the ancient world.
- Nancy Rabinowitz will examine prison education programs and the classics.
The 2013 CAMP
Finally, a core issue for CAMP since the committee’s founding has been advocating for the recognition of performance as a major research and professional endeavor. One important form of recognition would be the creation of a North American Performance Archive. In 2009 the Research Division of the APA established a task force to consider the question of such an archive. In 2010, as a result of a report submitted by this task force, the APA reappointed its three members—Toph Marshall, Kathryn Bosher, and Mary-Kay Gamel— as a review committee to consider proposals for an APA- supported archive.
This committee issued a report in early 2011. It recommended support for an external proposal submitted by New York University. CAMP is delighted about this welcome initiative, and has been communicating with Executive Director Adam Blistein and Vice President for Research Roger Bagnall, New York University, concerning guidelines for establishing such an archive, and also about formulating criteria for assessing the work of scholar-practitioners in the area of performance.
Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception (Chair, Thomas Jenkins, Trinity University):
At its meeting on Sunday, January 9, 2011, the APA Board of Directors voted to approve a request from the Committee on the Classical Tradition to change its name to the Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception, and thereby more accurately represent the range of research, teaching and professional activity focused on responses by later cultures to texts and materials from Greek and Roman antiquity.
Chair Thomas Jenkins has written the following report:
The newly renamed COCTR has now adopted a two-year schedule for the planning and implementation of its panels at the APA; for January 2012, the topic is “Antiquity in Action: Tradition, Reception and the Boundaries of Classical Studies.” The occasion of the committee’s change-of-acronym seemed a fitting time to take a snapshot of classical tradition and classical reception studies as a field: considering both where research and teaching in this area have been, and where they are going. The panel thus explores the dominant methodologies of classical tradition and reception studies and suggests further areas of exploration, in matters both theoretical and geopolitical. The first two papers, by editors of major compendia on tradition/reception, issue some provocative calls for change, as they examine the strengths and weakness of current scholarly trends. The last two papers emphasize the urgency of analyzing modern, ideologically charged receptions of antiquity: these are post-colonial appropriations that materially, and not just theoretically, affect the world around us. The papers in this session are:
The proposed panel for January 2013, “Islamic and Arabic Receptions of Greek Literature,” organized by committee member Paul Kimball, Billkent University, Anakara, Turkey, builds on the panel for 2012, and looks at a specific and resonant geopolitical reception of the classical world. The panel seeks to understand the specific contexts, localities, and periods within which the Arabic reception of Greek literature occurred by examining the place of Islam as such in the process, selection, translation, adaptation and even rejection of classical texts. We are hopeful that this panel in Seattle will also attract audiences from local universities and community organizations, and help achieve the larger goals of the APA Outreach Division.
COCTR member Konstantinos Nikoloutsos is organizing a panel entitled “Postcolonial Latin American Adaptations of Greek and Roman Drama” at the 2012 annual APA meeting. The panel was first presented at a regional level at the 2010 annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States; the papers will be published in a forthcoming special issue of Romance Quarterly (58.4). The APA panel includes papers on reworkings of Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Hippolytus, and Plautus’ Amphitruo from countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico as well as Puerto Rico. Speakers include Jesse Weiner, University of California, Irvine; Jacques Bromberg, Colby College; Rosa Andujar, Princeton University; Katie Bilotte, Royal Holloway College, University of London; and Roderigo Goncalves, Federal University of Panama/Universite Paris-Sorbonne. Lorna Hardwick, Open University, will serve as the respondent.
Final Thoughts. It has been a pleasure and honor to serve as Vice-President for the Division of Outreach, first in an acting capacity when Outreach was first founded in 1999, and again from January 2008 through January 2012. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Executive Director Adam Blistein for making so many of our enterprises possible and operational. Thanks to the endeavors, enthusiasm and creativity of countless APA volunteers, my report about Outreach activities and accomplishments has gotten longer each year (and in fact what I write here is an abbreviated version of what I originally planned to submit!). I am certain that my successors will have even more to report as time goes by.
Respectfully Submitted,
The Division of Professional Matters includes under its jurisdiction the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics, the Committee on Placement, the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, and the Classics Advisory Service. Here follow brief reports from each committee, outlining recent activities.
Subcommittee on Professional Ethics. Various questions were presented to the subcommittee for its consideration; as always, our deliberations are strictly confidential. In addition, the subcommittee received a few suggestions from members of the Association, aimed at strengthening the language of the Statement of Professional Ethics concerning procedures for reviewing submissions to scholarly journals. As a result, revised language concerning rendering editorial decisions and specifying a suggested window of time for such decisions was, following Board approval, offered as a referendum to the full membership this past summer; we are currently awaiting the results of the vote.
The APA Census of Classics Departments in the U.S. and Canada was distributed electronically (for the first time) late last spring, in the hopes that an on-line version of the census would enhance participation. So far, returns have been slow, with only about 100 departments responding. A reminder was sent in late August to departments that had not yet completed the census.
Committee on Placement (Submitted by Erich Gruen). The Placement Committee has been happily spared any serious complaints since the Annual Meeting in San Antonio. So, no investigative activities were required. We have, however, discussed by e-mail a number of issues that arose in communications from colleagues and in our committee meeting in January. As a consequence, we proposed changes in the wording of the Placement Guidelines to address troublesome matters that came before the committee.
First, the problem of candidates for senior (i.e. tenured) positions, who, for reasons of awkwardness or embarrassment, did not wish to go through the normal registration and scheduling process. We suggested wording that would allow them that flexibility.
Second, a comparable matter of too short a period between advertisement of a post and the deadline for submission, which may inconvenience some senior scholars, not otherwise in the market, who will need more time to ponder a major move, assemble a dossier, and avoid a public candidacy. Our new language for the Placement Guidelines extends that period to at least six weeks for any advertisement prior to Oct. 15.
Third, a new insertion in the Guidelines strongly discourages institutions from putting pressure on young candidates to respond to job offers within a very short time and forgoing other options.
Fourth, some curt and discourteous replies were received by applicants whose candidacy was rejected. We added a statement to the Guidelines reminding institutions that rejection messages in the current climate need to be especially thoughtful and sensitive.
In addition, the committee offered a number of recommendations on increased automation in the Placement Service’s process of conveying information about jobs and scheduling interviews. After a series of communications with Adam Blistein, we have agreed to postpone action on those proposals, await the operation of the placement process this year, and use that experience to reconsider our recommendations next year.
Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (Submitted by Joy Connolly). The Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups had a busy and successful year in 2010-11. Stephen Trzaskoma, the 2010 committee chair, presented a draft of the 2006-2007 Department Survey at the January meetings, and he finalized the report this summer. The 2011 chair, Joy Connolly, has requested that the report be made available to members on the APA website.
Back in January, the Committee agreed to revisit the methods of gathering data and compiling reports at the next Meeting in Philadelphia. There is a growing consensus that more efficient use of technology and the possible opportunities afforded by the volunteer “wiki” model of information-sharing will serve us well in the future as we collect timely information about departmental membership, hiring, and promotions. Meanwhile, we agreed to concentrate on the committee’s mission to increase the visibility of race-, class-, and gender-related scholarly issues inside and outside the APA membership.
Since January, we have pursued this goal in two ways. First, we established a blogspot.com blog called “Classics in the 21st Century.” Currently the blog serves as a site for discussion among the committee members only. We plan to open it to a larger membership this fall. The blog will not present itself as an official voice of the APA, but rather a center for information about the field, featuring news items about the state of Classics and issues directly related to the committee’s mission.
Second, we successfully submitted a proposal for a Committee Sponsored Panel in Philadelphia in January 2012 titled “Authors Meet Critics: Race and Reception. Four scholars—Simon Goldhill, Patrice Rankine, Sydnor Roy, and Cornel West—will respond to the authors of two notable recent books. James Tatum, co-author of African American Writers and Classical Tradition (written with William Cook) examines the work of African Americans in reshaping classical texts and themes in literature and in the profession of Classics. In Afro-Greeks, Emily Greenwood studies Anglophone Caribbean literature in its social context from the 1920s to today, showing how the complex dynamics of appropriation create a distinctive regional aesthetic. We aim to open a lively conversation with the audience about these books and the issues they raise, conceptually (methods, themes) and professionally (the status of work on race, relations with other fields).
Classics Advisory Service (Submitted by John F. Miller).
Respectfully submitted,
The elected members of the Program Committee in 2011 were Elizabeth Asmis, Kirk Freudenburg, Maud Gleason, Corinne Pache, and myself. We met twice in Philadelphia to consider submissions for the 2012 meetings, also to be held in Philadelphia. As usual, Heather Hartz Gasda and Adam Blistein provided indispensable support in making our meetings possible and our deliberations efficient.
At our first spring meeting on April 30 the Committee reviewed the reports of groups chartered to organize sessions and evaluated new proposals regarding panels, seminars, workshops, and roundtable discussions.
Groups Chartered to Organize Sessions. 17 Affiliated Groups submitted reports; all but 1 were accepted. The one was required to reduce the number of papers in the session to comply with Association regulations. After it complied, its report was accepted in June.
6 Organizer-Refereed Panels submitted reports; all were accepted.
New Submissions to Program Committee. 6 committees submitted panels; 5 were accepted and 1 was required to resubmit. The resubmitted panel was accepted in June. In addition, the Program Committee itself organized a panel.
Individual Abstracts. The Committee met again for two days on June 24–25. As noted above, we accepted the one At-Large Panel proposal that had been revised and resubmitted. The adjudication of 473 individual abstracts was the main item of business. This was a record number of submissions, up 16% from the 407 abstracts submitted for the San Antonio meeting of 2011 and 6% larger than the previous record of 446 abstracts submitted for the meeting in San Diego in 2007.
As most members are probably aware, every year before the June meeting, each of the five members of the Committee independently reads, writes comments upon, and rates every individual abstract on a scale of 1 to 4. After the committee members have submitted their ratings, Heather Gasda collates them in tabular form in advance of the meeting: the collated ratings provide the basis for our discussions. In cases where the committee members agree, there is little or no discussion. Otherwise we discuss each abstract until a consensus is reached. There are no quotas. We consider all abstracts on their own merits and in accordance with the guidelines published on the Association’s website.
Of the 473 abstracts submitted, the Committee accepted 127 or 26.8%. Both these numbers were up slightly over those of last year (121, 24.4%). The number of submissions and the acceptance rates relevant to various demographic and disciplinary categories are summarized in the tables "2012 Annual Meeting Abstract Statistics" and "Comparison of Individual Abstract Submission and Acceptance Statistics 2011 and 2012 Annual Meetings"; these numbers were comparable to our experience in previous years.
On the afternoon of June 25 the Committee organized the accepted papers into sessions, identified potential presiders, and drafted a preliminary program for the meeting in Philadelphia.
The discussion of abstracts and the organization of sessions occupied most of the June meeting, but the Committee managed to carve out a bit of time to reflect on our work, to begin planning for the future, and to take a couple of decisions that we hope will lead to improvements. First, we decided that for the 2013 meeting we would allot 20 minutes to each paper instead of 15. Second, we introduced new guidelines for presenters and presiders that would obtain for the 2012 meeting. These guidelines provide for the timely circulation of papers well in advance of the meeting itself and aim to promote lively discussion among presenters and presiders as well as audience members. The Committee also discussed what further measures might be taken to enhance the program. I will report on these measures as they develop. By the same token, the Committee is always eager to learn of any initiatives that the membership would like the Committee to undertake to enrich the annual program, and we invite the members to send their suggestions and comments to my successor or any of the continuing members of the committee.
On the Committee’s behalf I warmly thank all those who have submitted abstracts, organized panels, and agreed to chair sessions for the meetings in San Antonio; and Adam Blistein and Heather Gasda for their help in all aspects of preparing the program. I also warmly thank my colleagues on the Committee, whose service demands weeks of their time each year, and in particular our colleague Liz Asmis, whose term is now ending.
Respectfully submitted,
The Vice President for Research submitted this report:
The Annual meeting of the ACLS met in Washington D.C. at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel on May 5-7. Familiar faces included our own Adam Blistein and Jim O’Donnell, who has served on the ACLS Board and has been elected for a three year term as Secretary of the Society I always return from these meetings energized by the vitality of the Humanities and related disciplines, despite the fact that we are all too aware of the ongoing threats, economic and intellectual, to our fields. We know the ACLS best for its grants to scholars, and President Pauline Yu reported on the various fellowships and awards programs, which have become more and more critical as other sources of funding are reduced or cut completely. With a slowly rebounding economy, ACLS funding improved over last year and made awards to 350 scholars at all levels of their career. Some of the more recent initiatives by the ACLS respond directly to the difficult times facing the Humanities. What is most heartening is the recent focus on younger scholars and the new programs including Dissertation Completion Fellowships, Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowships Fellows, and New Faculty Fellowships. APA members should be aware of these programs and encourage applications. In fact, one of the most enjoyable and impressive parts of the Annual meeting is the presentation, mainly by younger awardees, of their research.
Both President Yu in her report and James Leach, Chairman of the NEH in his luncheon speech inevitably focused on the erosion of support, both public and private for the Humanities. One of the evening panels on “The Consequences of Financial Turbulence in the Academy,” while sobering, did not lack some specific strategies that can empower faculty, some of whom, as we know, are under very serious siege. Another session focused on “Global Perspectives on U,S, Higher Education” that offered several different models of American involvement in international education including autonomous institutions like the American University in Cairo and satellite campuses recently established by a number of American Universities (Duke, NYU). Finally, and always the highpoint, the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture, delivered by Henry Glassie, Emeritus Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington. This one very much lived up to the theme of these lectures, “A Life in Learning.” Professor Glassie’s extraordinary career that took him to Appalachia, Ireland, Turkey, and India, his sense of humor, and his eloquence in describing his experiences, and the empathy and rapport he established in the communities he studied made for a lovely evening that culminated in a reception in the majestic Great Hall of the Library of Congress. I was honored to be a part of it.
Respectfully submitted,
Attendees at the 64th Annual Institute of the American Classical League, celebrated from 25 to 27June, 2011 at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, included teachers of Latin and Classics from all over North America, and several from Britain. Many of these were teachers in primary and secondary schools: but also attending were graduate students and professors of Classics. The theme of the conference, “Fines Latiores” Wider Boundaries, was certainly reflected in the wide range of sessions and workshops which illustrated how teachers of Latin are indeed widening their boundaries by making use of new techniques in language acquisition, new tools available in audio-visual format and on the internet, active methodologies in the Latin classroom, multi-disciplinary approaches, and exploring a wider range of periods of Latin literature from which to select interesting and important materials for students of Latin. This year’s display of books and teaching materials at the ACL Institute was appropriately rich – in keeping with the theme of the conference! The Institute Program on the ACL web site (http://www.aclclassics.org/events/2011-Institute) gives a detailed picture of the meeting's activities.
This year’s Institute was honored by the presence of Father Reginald Foster, famed for his role in the Latin Letters section of the Vatican Secretariat of State, and for his sessions in reading, singing, speaking and celebrating Latin held every summer in Rome, which enthralled students and teachers of Latin from all over the world for decades. Father Foster, who is now based in Milwaukee, gave a plenary speech to ACL Institute attendees on June 26, entitled Lingua Latina nobis conservanda est – NUNC!, and on the same day presented a workshop whose subject was Vivam epistularis Cicero dux ad latinitatem.
As always, the needs and achievements of teachers were in the spotlight at this year’s ACL Institute. Among a myriad of sessions from which anyone interested in enhancing their repertoire of techniques for teaching, whether at the primary, secondary, or university level, could have learned a great deal, we note not only a Pre-Institute workshop devoted to the new AP Latin course under the guidance of Mary Pendergraft, Robert Cape and Dawn LaFon, but also a session in the Institute itself offered on June 27 by Dawn LaFon and Mary Pendergraft entitled AP Latin: What’s Coming in 2012-2013! Sherwin Little presented a report on the ACTFL Reading Proficiency Assessment in Latin. This year the APA/ACL pre-collegiate teaching award was presented at the ACL Institute: the winner was Max Gabrielson of Wilton High School, Wilton, CT. Finally, the 2011 Institute inaugurates the ACL presidency of Peter Howard of Troy University. It was an auspicious beginning.
I was appointed APA delegate to FIEC before the General Assembly of FIEC in Barcelona in 2007, which I attended together with Ruth Scodel, the alternate delegate. We both also attended the 13th FIEC Congress in Berlin in August 2009. After the 12th Congress in Ouro Preto (Brazil) in 2004, where I had been an invited speaker, the FIEC Board had appointed me to the Berlin Congress’ International Program Committee, for which I attended a meeting in Berlin and for which I undertook a considerable amount of work before and during the Congress. I thus have some impression of FIEC and the Association’s activities, although this impression probably is still far from complete.
Before writing this report, I asked many participants from the US and a considerable number of colleagues in other countries (about 25 in total) about their impressions of the Berlin Congress and FIEC’s range of activities. FIEC is an umbrella organization, currently comprising around 80 member organizations, some national, some regional within countries, some international, some broadly comprehensive (like the APA), some focused on specific topics or subfields. Unlike the APA, FIEC does not have individual members or a permanent staff that is centrally engaged in organizing its meetings. Rather, these tasks are left to local committees of universities and organizations (such as, in 2009, the Mommsen Gesellschaft of Germany and the Classics Department at the Humboldt University in Berlin) that volunteer to organize either a congress or a General Assembly between congresses and to raise the substantial funds needed to cover the expenses (e.g., for travel and accommodation of Board members and invited speakers from many countries, as well as sponsored events, such as dinners, receptions, or excursions). The Board members include the President, two Vice Presidents, Treasurer, and Secretary-General as well as two members-at-large. An increase of the Board to 9 or 10 members is under consideration. Upon proposals by the Board, the General Assembly, consisting of delegates of the member organizations, appoints the officers and members-at-large, decides upon admission of new member organizations, selects the organizers of upcoming General Assemblies and Congresses, appoints delegates to some organizations (such as the Année Philologique, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, and the Conseil International pour la Philosophie des Sciences Humaines [a subcommittee of UNESCO]), distributes a few travel grants and very modest contributions to a small number of scholarly projects, and approves the Treasurer’s report.
The events FIEC organizes are thus staged largely by volunteers and amateurs, and at the Berlin Congress this showed in sometimes awkward ways. For example, at a grand party in a garden restaurant participants waited in line most of the time because the provisions were totally inadequate for the number of guests. Long distances between lecture rooms in the conference building made it difficult to switch from one panel to the other. Many participants complained that various conditions (heat and the need to keep the windows open, outside noise interference, acoustics, etc.) made it often very difficult to hear the speakers. An inordinate number of last minute cancellations created havoc with the program and often caused participants to arrive long after the paper they wanted to hear had been given. Session moderators were appointed at the last minute, in some cases pressed into service right before their panel (which made it impossible to prepare for the session and get in touch with the speakers in advance).
Inertia and language barriers had a negative impact too: it was easier to stick to those speaking English rather than mingling with, say, Spanish-speakers, and many participants admitted freely that they wanted to see their old friends rather than making new ones. Others, however, did mingle and found the opportunity to establish new contacts most useful and invigorating: contacts were made and maintained beyond Berlin. But there was no place available to sit and talk with people; sessions were scheduled tightly, without opportunities to linger; coffee breaks took place in narrow and crowded hallways, receptions in hot and overcrowded locations, etc.: none of this encouraged participants to reach out and seek new contacts. The organizers tried to mix languages in thematically arranged panels but this does not by itself change the problem that papers delivered rapidly in a language not our own, or with a heavy accent in a language that is not the speaker’s own, are often almost impenetrable. (One way of easing this problem would be to publish somewhat long English abstracts, or perhaps even the entire papers, in whatever language, in advance on the website: those interested in the topic could then prepare themselves.)
The booklet with program and abstracts prepared for the congress was highly informative and praised by many, criticized for its confusing organization by others (one might suggest the addition of English abstracts when papers are given in other languages). The quality of papers and panels was naturally mixed: many presentations were excellent but most agreed that the selection process had been far too lenient (the local committee apparently ignored the limitations the International Program Committee had recommended and was reluctant to reject anything); accordingly there were far too many poor papers. The program showed a wide variety of topics, although, naturally, everybody found something that was missing.
Despite such flaws, I need to emphasize that the organizers in many ways did an admirable job in mastering innumerable difficult challenges, and the Congress overall was a remarkable success. Over 900 participants from all continents attended, and most of those with whom I communicated enjoyed the event greatly. They appreciated perks like free public transportation and museum passes, and Berlin as a venue is hard to beat.
After the General Assembly in Barcelona in 2007 Ruth Scodel (then President of the APA and its alternate delegate to FIEC) wrote a rather critical presidential column in one of the 2007 APA Newsletters. We were both struck and disappointed by what we perceived as a surprisingly low level of professional engagement in that meeting. All it seemed to be about were technicalities: memberships, rules and regulations, the organization of the next Congress and General Assembly. Important though these issues are, what about the life and role of Classics as a profession and a field, a subject of teaching and research in today’s world? My impressions of the General Assembly during the Berlin Congress left me in the same quandary. In both meetings I raised a question that seemed to me then—and still seems to me today—quite crucial. I formulated that question in one of my “presidential columns” in the APA Newsletter in 2008 (in which I also commented on FIEC’s 60th anniversary) and reformulate it here: is organizing a world congress every five years—that is, to do exactly and only what the organization decided to do when it was founded 60 years ago—really all that FIEC as the world organization of Classics can do to represent and advance our discipline—especially in a time when our discipline is under siege in many countries, when departments and programs are being cut back or eliminated even in countries that have the proudest tradition of scholarly achievement and leadership in our field, and when many colleagues in parts of the world that are less privileged than western Europe and North America are struggling, with often minimal resources, to maintain a decent level of teaching and research? Sixty years ago, world-wide congresses seemed to make eminent sense: after the deep ruptures in international academic interaction and the massive loss of resources and lives caused by World War II in our field as in every other, it was an urgent desideratum to facilitate the resumption of such interaction and to support rebuilding.
I need to emphasize that I believe strongly in the mission of FIEC and am sure that it has a very important role to play in today’s world. I do not doubt that it is worthwhile to encourage scholars and teachers from many countries to meet, renew old and make new acquaintances, exchange knowledge, experiences, and advances in scholarship, and start collaborative relationships. Nor do I believe in change for the sake of change. But I wonder seriously whether one world congress every five years is the best and only way to achieve such goals. Another question is whether, despite its limited resources in personnel and funding, the organization could contribute more to serve the needs of classicists all over the world, not only but perhaps especially of those in what I call less privileged countries.
After the Berlin Congress the Board asked me to write down a few comments and suggestions. I summarize here my response to that request; it is intended to be constructive and helpful rather than critical. I hope that it will help the Board to rethink its own role and functions (even if I hasten to add that my own knowledge of the FIEC Board’s activities is limited; it may already be doing more than I know of, in the areas I mention and in others).
One might begin with two simple observations (mentioned by several of my correspondents): the organization, after 60 years, is still unknown to far too many classicists (including many members of the APA) and, while lots of participants traveled around the globe to attend the Berlin Congress, far too many senior scholars especially from Germany but also from other European countries (the UK!) were conspicuously absent, apparently not considering this event (and the Association organizing it) worth their time and attention.
Admittedly, FIEC’s resources in personnel and funds impose limitations on any increase of activities. But it is not all an issue of money. The planned increase of the number of Board members to 9 or 10 is a step in the right direction. But this should be done not only, as the Secretary General’s report suggests, “to increase the geographic diversity of the Board and improve our visibility in the world”; it would also create opportunities for new activities and responsibilities. After all, Board members should not only be visible and represent but do some work for the organization (quite apart from the question of what those who are not President or Secretary-General do now to be visible as representatives of the Association). To begin with, the at-large members could serve precisely as a task force to explore possibilities of how the Association might play a more active role and engage in outreach that would make it (and our field) more visible in today’s world. (I notice in passing that the goal of visibility was not served well at the Berlin Congress—or, to put it more cautiously, I did not see any big efforts to establish visibility. The world organization of Classics was meeting in Berlin, and no big banners were hanging in front of Humboldt University’s main building announcing this to the city, the country, and the world!)
I mention here a few tasks or responsibilities FIEC might think of (all mentioned by at least a few of my correspondents):
Respectfully submitted
When I arrived in Oxford in late September of last year, I felt dizzied by the strangeness of the place. I remember a pouring rain welcomed me in typical English fashion. There seemed no intuitive pattern to the street grid, no clear markers on many of the dozens of colleges sandwiched together in and around the city center. Maybe it was the jet lag in part, but never before had I felt so out of place. For the first time in my life, I was a foreigner.
Although the intensity of the feeling decreased over time, it still haunted me for my entire stay—when I paid with unfamiliar coins for unfamiliar brands at the supermarket, listened to peers at Corpus Christi College banter over cricket, or donned sub-fusc at any number of events. I bring these things up not to defer attention from the magnificent academic course I took at the University of Oxford this year, but to emphasize that, in retrospect, my nine months in the United Kingdom were as much defined by the profound human and social experiences I encountered as the scholastic ones. I learned to navigate the tourist sites of London from the peak of St. Paul’s Cathedral to the crypts of Westminster Abbey after an epic walking tour graciously led by my housemate, Antony Smith. Two “football” aficionados accompanied me to Birmingham in November to take in a Premier League match and introduce me to the intricacies of the game at its highest level. And I am indebted to many more people, who I now consider friends and mentors, for helping me to find my way and succeed in such an intimidating and wonderfully challenging place as Oxford.
During this last academic year I completed the Master of Studies in Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature program supervised by Prof. Tobias Reinhardt. Choosing to forgo writing a Master’s thesis, I took courses in Latin palaeography with Stephen Heyworth and Tobias Reinhardt, Latin meter with Peter Brown, Later Roman History with Neil McLynn, and Medieval and Renaissance Latin Hexameter poetry with an assortment of tutors. This combination allowed me opportunities to explore technical disciplines of Classics and still build upon my core interests in Late Latin literature. I found my course with Dr. McLynn especially helpful as I expanded my knowledge of Latin Late Antiquity tenfold under his guidance, greatly supplementing and contextualizing the work I had done as an undergraduate on Juvencus’ fourth-century bible epic Evangeliorum Libri Quattuor. This August I began a PhD in Medieval Latin at Harvard University under the supervision of Jan Ziolkowski, where I plan to continue focusing my research on Late Antique Latin literature.
All in all, I was utterly mesmerized by academic life at Oxford. Coming from Duke University, where I graduated with just a handful of other students majoring in Classics, I was impressed by how the field thrives at Oxford. Nearly every day I had opportunities to attend talks, seminars, or conferences with prominent scholars, or simply engage in a friendly chat with a fellow student over something Classics related. The unique tutorial system pushed me to research and prepare for classes at a higher level than I had ever before. And the university had an expert in seemingly every nook of the field, whom I could consult freely if I wished.
After my course at Oxford, I am certain that I have gained a deeper and better-rounded understanding of scholarship and more direction in my research goals. Most importantly, however, my passion for Classics has multiplied as a result of having been surrounded by so many who care deeply for the discipline. I am forever grateful to the APA and the Pearson Fellowship Committee for affording me this invaluable opportunity, and those at Oxford for making it such a special experience. Thank you.
This past summer, I used the funds I received from the AIA/APA Minority Scholarship to participate in excavations in Cyprus and Macedonia. From late July to early September, I excavated with a team of students and archaeologists affiliated primarily with the University of Edinburgh at the site of Prastio-Mesorotsos. Prastio has consistently proved itself to be one of the most interesting sites in western Cyprus, if not the whole of Cyprus itself, because it has evidence of cultural material from virtually every period of human occupation, starting from the Neolithic all the way up to its abandonment during modern times in the 1950’s following an earthquake. This season’s work focused mostly on excavations and a brief period of survey, and the trench I worked in showed clear evidence for multi-period inhabitation, at least during prehistoric times. The main feature we revealed was the continuation of a large Late Bronze Age wall from what we believe may have been part of a monumental administrative building. Excavations from the previous season revealed an intact skyphos laying perfectly against the wall itself, and while we were unable to find yet another vessel we did find plenty of other cultural material such as chipped stone tools, pottery fragments, and worked picrolite which served as good evidence of trade. In addition, I was also trained in flintknapping techniques and floation procedures, and since we were living in Kato Paphos there was also ample time to visit many museums and other archaeological sites such as the Tombs of the Kings, Nea Paphos, Kissonerga, Souskiou and Kouklia. One of my favorite parts about working on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean were the absolutely breathtaking beaches, in particular, Petra Tou Romiou which legend tells us is the birthplace of Aphrodite. In the end, it was an invaluable experience that I will forever treasure.
After digging in western Cyprus for five weeks, I finished off the season by returning to the place where I attended my first field school at the site of Stobi, in the Republic of Macedonia. I chose to dig here last year for my first field school because my interest in Roman provincial archaeology in the Balkans and Central European region, and Stobi proved to be an excellent site with remains from Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine periods. This year’s work focused on excavations in the Northern Residential area, which was inhabited since the Roman period. The houses we worked on were dated to the late 6th century, we found many cultural remains typically associated with household lifestyles during that time such as fragmentary cooking vessels, pithoi, amphorae, bone and even the occasional bronze coin. Besides learning proper techniques for using archaeological tools and identifying and documenting artifacts and stratigraphy, participants were also treated to lectures and workshops on subjects ranging from the History of Ancient Macedonia (2nd cent. BC to 6th cent. AD), Roman and Early Byzantine Architecture, and Mosaic Floors in Stobi amongst others. We were also able to take excursions to the UNESCO world heritage site of Ohrid and the charming town of Bitola. The project, which is run by Balkan Heritage as an annual field school proved to be an excellent, comprehensive introduction to the world of classical archaeology and the many different subfields associated with it, and I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to return home to my first dig.
The following are the names of the candidates who obtained new positions through the 2010-11 Placement Service. Candidates whose names appear in bold and italics represent individuals who filled a new position at that institution. Also listed are institutions who contacted the Placement Service and stated that no one was hired as a result of their candidate search.
University of Arizona
Baylor University
Beloit College
Boston University
Bowdoin College
Visiting Assistant Professor: Jorge Bravo
Visiting Assistant Professor: Stephen O’Connor
Brigham Young University
Brown University – Classics
Brown University / Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
Bucknell University
College of Charleston
Christendom College
University of Cincinnati
Assistant Professor: Valeria Sergueenkova
Columbia University
Concordia University
Cornell University
Creighton University
Dalhousie University
Dartmouth College
Duke University – ICCS/Rome
Duquesne University
Florida State University
Grinnell College
Hamilton College
Harvard University
Hillsdale College
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
University of Iowa
John Carroll University
Kenyon College
University of Massachusetts – Boston
Miami University
University of Mississippi
University of Missouri
Monmouth College
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of Oregon
University of Pennsylvania
Princeton University
Purdue University
Santa Clara University
Stanford University
University of Texas at Austin
Union College
Wabash College
Wake Forest University
Wellesley College
Wesleyan University
University of Western Ontario
Syllabus, a new peer-refereed journal, intends to provide an outlet for recognition and support to faculty who excel in teaching. It publishes original course syllabi, essays, and shorter “tool box” entries. All are subjected to blind peer review. The journal is at http://syllabusjournal.org/.
James H. Tatum, Dartmouth College, has won the American Book Award for 2011 for his book African American Writers and Classical Tradition, Chicago, 2010, co-authored with William Cook. The American Book Awards, established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation, recognize outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America's diverse literary community.
A few years ago, I sat with two neighbors from my condo block in our insurance agent’s office, crowing over the unlikelihood that Cambridge, Mass., would ever be struck by an earthquake. Last month, parts of Springfield, Mass., were flattened by a tornado. Google tells me that it is only 77 miles as the crow flies from Springfield to Cambridge. That seems awfully close. But Cambridge is almost on the ocean. Maybe tornadoes don’t happen near the ocean. Better consult Google again.
Caring about human tragedy only when one perceives oneself to be in danger is, of course, a very self-centered reaction. But Springfield’s fate, so close to home, did set me wondering what it was like to face climate threats before Google, before meteorology became sophisticated, before the secrets of barometric pressure had been unlocked, before—really—anyone understood weather at all. In other words, what was it like to live with perpetual uncertainty, driven by fear, fear not only of what might happen, but of what one might inadvertently do to offend the powers that could make it happen? From the pre-Socratics onwards, philosophers struggled to find scientific explanations for the arbitrary behavior of the elements. The Stoics pursued meteorology so as to understand the divine λόγος ordering the world, the Epicureans so as to eliminate divine interference from the sphere of human affairs. But, for every person liberated from fear by Seneca’s prose or Lucretius’ poetry, there must have been thousands of others trapped in fearful ignorance, an easy target for soapbox orators threatening divine wrath.
When the weather misbehaves in terms of our pre-conceived patterns of what its proper behavior should be, the effect is deeply unsettling. All those standard couplings—ice floes in the Arctic, England’s “green and pleasant land,” tornado-free Massachusetts—become unfastened. Confidence to conduct daily life depends upon predictable associations. Most people in Antiquity led parochial lives, and communication was slow, so that people could go on relying on the traditional associations, even if actual circumstances undermined them. The snows of Rhodope were a valid cliché, even if snow-cover became very thin over a number of years or none fell at all. But nowadays news moves fast, and the comfortable clichés of our own experience are being replaced by paradox: drought threatening verdant Europe, Arctic winters descending upon New England, tornadoes straying thousands of miles from their customary swathe of destruction. Unsettling, indeed.
Scientific enquiry has always been a target for ridicule by the layman, as in the scene at Clouds 228, where Socrates is suspended in a basket so as to contemplate τὰ μετέωρα πράγματα (“meteorological phenomena,” lit. “things above”); it is hard to know what the experts are up to. Aristotle and his successors struggled to express their findings in language that lacked the scientific terminology to describe them—a fortunate lack, from our perspective, because we can hear the Greeks and Romans experimenting with metaphor, analogy, and all the other tools that language provides to convey notions as abstract as the hidden forces that control the elements. In the process, we sometimes hear noises that were familiar to them, or see the sights around them or smell the smells; Lucretius, for instance, describing the clouds, compares a thunder clap to the noise that an awning makes in the theatre when it gives a sudden ear-splitting flap (DRN 6.109–10): dant etiam sonitum patuli super aequora mundi, / carbasus ut quondam magnis intenta theatris / dat crepitum malos inter iactata trabesque, “They also give out a sound over the surface of the spreading heavens, just as a canvas stretched over a mighty theater sometimes gives a crack, tossing among the masts and beams.” Thunder must have seemed inexplicably savage; the urban image tames it a little.
We should not underestimate the perennial fascination exerted by extreme weather and natural disasters, easily demonstrated by browsing through a list of films, from The Wind (1928) to The Perfect Storm (2000). Terrifying emissions from above are a feature of apocalyptic literature, memorably exemplified by the trumpet-blast delivered by the first of the seven angels standing before God in the Book of Revelation, which precipitated “hail and fire mixed with blood” (χάλαζα καὶ πῦρ μεμιγμένα ἐν αἵματι, Rev. 8.7). Disasters in the ancient world became a respectable belletristic theme, employed, for instance, in Pliny’s taut and vivid account of a flood of the Tiber at Epist. 8.17, and furnishing a powerful opening to a letter of Seneca to Lucilius on facing the unexpected, which takes as its pretext a fire that ravaged Lyons, the home of a mutual friend (Epist. 91.1–2). In historiography, the annalistic record of prodigies requires mention of disasters; these can become worked up into set-pieces of thrilling intensity, as at Hist. 1.86, where among the prodigies recorded for AD 69 Tacitus dwells especially on the Tiber flood, and the pathos of innocent people swept away in the streets or overwhelmed in their shops or their beds.
But not every mention of a natural disaster is designed to thrill or shock; disasters also inspired some of the most moving writing to have come down to us from Antiquity. With exquisite empathy and a rare exclamatory heu shattering the emotional detachment of the didactic poet, Virgil personifies the vine trying to protect its grapes from a hailstorm that crackles with alliteration (G. 1.448–9): heu, male tum mitis defendet pampinus uuas: / tam multa in tectis crepitans salit horrida grando, “Alas, the vine will then defend its grapes to no avail: so much bristling hail leaps rattling on the roof.” Other treatments call on us to muster our resolve; the cadences of Seneca’s exhortation to bravery in the face of natural disaster are still inspiring in their simplicity, precisely captured in Harry Hine’s new translation (NQ 6.32.2–3): maiora me pericula expectant: fulminibus et terris et magnis naturae partibus petimur. ingenti itaque animo mors prouocanda est, siue nos saeuo uastoque impetu adgreditur, siue cotidiano et uulgari exitu, “Greater dangers are waiting for me: we are the targets of lightning-bolts, of the earth, and of large segments of nature. So we must challenge death with great courage, whether it attacks us with a cruel, large-scale assault, or with an ordinary, everyday exit.”
The weather was not, of course, stable across the millennium with which we, as Classicists, are professionally concerned. The weather gods were notoriously fickle, and the default expectation was that disaster might strike at any moment. The long view back into the past depended upon memory transmitted from generation to generation, rather than scientific recovery of data from the permafrost layer or the remnants of primeval forests. Now, suddenly, we can access the evidence of those weather patterns that so terrified the inhabitants of the ancient world. An article in Science on January 13, 2011, reconstructs summer rainfall and fluctuations in temperature in Central Europe over the past two and a half millennia, based on the evidence of tree-rings. The authors suggest that it is no coincidence that climate variability is noticeable ca. AD 250–600, precisely the period of massive migrations and political upheaval that marked the decline of the Roman Empire. The people trapped in the moment could not assemble the data that the tree-rings have left for us; but their texts register their alarm, for which pagans and Christians alike could muster only providential explanations: it is God’s will/the will of the gods.
As Classicists, we are all aware of the need to insert ourselves into the discourse about “hot” topics, and we are all familiar with the buzzword “interdisciplinarity.” Climate change seems an ideal opportunity for us to take possession of both these arenas. The reactions of the ancient writers to extreme weather (the Classicist’s domain), coupled with the evidence for climatic factors and climate change in the ancient world (the domain primarily of geologists and environmental scientists), could provide a team-taught course of undeniable relevance to every College student poised on the brink of a cataclysmic alteration to the planet as we know it. Will they follow Aristotle and Seneca? Or succumb to divine will? Or only start getting anxious when the tornado strikes too close to home?
Kathleen M. Coleman
The Joint Committee on Placement and APA Staff are developing a system that will bring greater automation to the process of registering candidates and institutions for the Service and of scheduling interviews at the 2012 Joint Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. We hope to have this system in place by the beginning of September. While this new system is being developed, the Service will operate in the following manner:
For candidates: Placement Director Renie Plonski will send an e-mail to all candidates registered for last year’s Service (2010-2011) stating that, unless they wish to discontinue their subscriptions, they will continue to receive e-mails around the 1st and 15th of each month containing all position listings recently submitted to the Service. Any new candidate who wishes to receive the semi-monthly e-mails may be added to the e-mail list at no charge by submitting that request to Renie (plonskii@sas.upenn.edu). Note: Once the new automated system is implemented, we will no longer use this interim e-mail list. All candidates wishing to participate in the 2011-2012 Service will need to register for it and pay the required fee.
For institutions: Complete the new registration form and submit it to the APA Office via mail, FAX (215-573-7874), or as an e-mail attachment (plonskii@sas.upenn.edu) along with the text of the advertisement and payment information. The form can be filled out online, but information entered into it cannot be saved. Institutions can print a completed form and scan it to submit an e-mail attachment. Institutions submitting listings during this interim period will not need to register once the automated system becomes available. Placement Service staff will enter their information into the new Placement database.
All institutional representatives and candidates should read the recently revised Placement Guidelines. Institutions must acknowledge that they have reviewed these Guidelines before they submit a position listing. In addition, institutions are urged to read the Reminders for Search Committees, and candidates, the Checklist of Advice for Job Candidates.
Adam D. Blistein
The American Philological Association is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Ellen Bauerle of the University of Michigan Press as Editor, and Dr. Wells Hansen of Milton Academy as Assistant Editor, of Amphora, its Outreach publication, effective January 2012.
Ellen has for several years worked as the editor for classics and archaeology at the University of Michigan Press. She also oversees book production for the not-for-profit Michigan Classical Press, and in the past has created and sold ebooks on the web. Recipient of a BA in Greek and English from Oberlin College, and an MA and PhD in Classics from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, she has been an Eric P. Newman Fellow at the American Numismatic Society and Seymour Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Ellen is delighted that Amphora is evolving to include the latest technologies, as additional ways of reaching its key constituencies among interested nonspecialists, scholars, teachers and students at the secondary level, and administrators.
In addition to his role as housemaster at Milton Academy outside of Boston, where he manages the academic and social programs of about 40 students each year, Wells teaches in Milton's classics department. He also works with university partners and private clients in Asia to promote talent identification and development, especially in math and science. After earning his BA in classics from Boston College, and his MA in classics at the University of Chicago, Wells received his doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. A longstanding APA member, he has published numerous journal articles about classical topics, especially Roman poetry. Wells has a particular interest in developing the visibility of Amphora in social media and in social aspects of the web.
Many thanks to the members of the Amphora Editor Search Committee for their efforts in identifying and selecting these two talented colleagues: Adam Blistein (ex officio); Barbara Weiden Boyd, Bowdoin College; Matthew Dillon, Loyola Marymount College; John Gruber-Miller, Cornell College; Davina McClain, Louisiana Scholars' College (ex officio), Kathryn Morgan, University of California at Los Angeles.
Judith P. Hallett
http://www.apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/FY10FinancialStatement.pdf
Meeting of the Board of Directors of the American Philological Association
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter Hotel, San Antonio, TX, on January 6, 2011. Those present were Profs. Dee L. Clayman, President, Ronnie Ancona, and Roger S. Bagnall, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Barbara Weiden Boyd, Kathleen Mary Coleman, Bruce W. Frier, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, John Marincola, James M. May, Carole E. Newlands, Josiah Ober, James J. O’Donnell, and Ann Vasaly. Also present by invitation were the following Directors who would take office on January 9, 2011: Profs. Joseph Farrell, Jonathan M. Hall, Jeffrey Henderson, and Kathryn Morgan. Profs. Peter Bing and S. Georgia Nugent were absent.
Prof. Clayman called the meeting to order at 3:30 p.m. She welcomed the newly elected directors and officers whose terms would begin on January 9 and she thanked the following members of the Board whose terms were concluding at the annual meeting: Prof. Ober (President, 2009), Prof. Kaster (Vice President for Program, 2007-2011), and Profs. Boyd and Gowing (Directors, 2008-2011).
The Board had received an agenda for the meeting as well as minutes of its meeting on October 1-2, 2010.
Action: The Board approved the agenda for the meeting.
Action: After adopting one correction offered by Prof. May, the Board approved the minutes of its meeting on October 1-2, 2010.
Prof. Kaster thanked the Board, the members, and APA staff for their support during his four-year term. He noted that three of the five members of the Program Committee would be new in the coming year (the Vice President and two ordinary members). All members of the Committee (incoming, outgoing, and continuing) would meet on the following day to review several issues before the Committee and to give the new members an overview of the Committee's work.
In October the Board had imposed disciplinary actions against a party involved in an Ethics Subcommittee case and had asked Prof. May to notify parties involved in this case of its action. Prof. May reported on events that had taken place in the course of carrying out the Board's instructions and noted that the disciplined person's institution was aware of the complaint.
Action: The Board asked Prof. May to write to the disciplined person's institution, explain the Association's involvement in the case, ask what action the institution intended to take, and offer to share information gathered by the APA with the institution.
The Directors had received a proposal from Prof. Bagnall to create a new position on the Advisory Board to the American Office of l’Année philologique (APh), an appointed chair who would serve a five-year term and represent the Association at meetings of SIBC and the directors of APh offices. The Vice President for Reseach, who currently serves as Chair of the Advisory Board would continue to be an ex officio member.
Action: The Board approved the modification of the Regulation concerning the Advisory Board to the American Office of l’Année philologique to create the position of Chair appointed by the President for a five-year term and to make the Vice President for Research an ex officio member.
Dr. Blistein had distributed to Directors a statement comparing the Association’s income and expenses to budgeted numbers for the 2010 fiscal year as well as a revised budget for the current (2011) fiscal year that reflected changes in assumptions or experience during the first six months of the year. The budget for 2010 had anticipated that the APA would break even financially during the year by retaining $80,000 from the NEH challenge grant to offset fund-raising expenses. Because of the extension of deadlines for the challenge grant, this sum had not been received, and Dr. Blistein expected the resulting deficit to be slightly below $50,000 as a result of other savings.
The significant changes in assumptions in the 2011 budget were estimating registration fees based on 2,000 paid registrants instead of 2,100 and increased exhibit income. When the Finance Committee met, it would also review a proposal from the Ad Hoc Committee on Archives to fund expenses for its work in the APA Office during the Winter. If this proposal were accepted, the budget anticipated a year-end deficit of about $17,000, provided that the $80,000 in challenge grant funds were claimed.
The Directors had also received a summary of the Association’s investments from July 1 to December 31, 2010. The four funds had appreciated by 15% to 17% in that period, net of withdrawals and additions. Dr. Blistein briefly described the Association’s portfolio and the work of its investment manager. He noted that the Research and Teaching Fund, which had previously been invested more aggressively than the other three funds, now had the same guideline, i.e., 60% in equities and 40% in fixed income securities, because the first disbursements from the fund would take place this summer. He also reviewed a document showing gifts to the Research and Teaching Fund for purposes other than supporting the American Office of l’Année. During the annual meeting, the Finance Committee would discuss the procedures for calculating withdrawals from the Fund, and the Education Committee and the Joint Committee (with ACL) on Classics in American Education would consider appropriate uses for gifts made to support teaching awards and teacher development.
The Committee on Archives had met by conference call on several occasions during the year, and the Board had received summaries of their meetings. Dr. Blistein reviewed Committee recommendations that required Board action.
Action: The Board approved the recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee on Archives to retain files in the format in which they were produced, to modify its document retention policy to place into archives information relevant to the history of the discipline that might not have to be retained for legal reasons, to set up rules for access to the archives, and to establish policies for retention of peer-reviewed materials.
Dr. Blistein reported that he expected the San Antonio meeting to attract between 2,000 and 2,100 paid registrants. The exhibit manager, AIA’s meeting planner, was having some success in finding exhibitors from fields other than academic publishing, and this had made it possible to sell all available booths in the exhibit hall.
Staff was working with the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) to determine whether SSRN could again host abstract submissions for the 2012 annual meeting in Philadelphia, but staff was also seeking proposals from other firms. Dr. Blistein had signed contracts for several additional meetings in the past few months. Future meetings would take place in Seattle (2013), Chicago (2014), New Orleans (2015), and San Diego (2016).
The Directors had received summaries of receipts to date in both annual giving and the Gateway campaign. Solicitation for the latter campaign had reduced member participation in annual giving, but response to the Fall 2010 appeal was projected to be at about the same level as in the past few years. Efforts in the Gateway campaign would focus on obtaining a number of larger gifts.
About 40 institutions, the same number as in the previous year, were conducting interviews with the help of the Placement Service. While further automation of the Service’s process was clearly necessary, staff still believed that it needed to oversee the actual scheduling of interviews.
Staff was now settled into its new offices. The additional space there made work easier.
Action: The Board voted its congratulations to a member, Dr. Constance Carroll, who had been named to the National Humanities Council. Prof. Hallett agreed to write a letter conveying the Board’s good wishes.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 5:20 p.m.
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter Hotel, San Antonio, TX, on January 9, 2011. Those present were Profs. Kathleen Mary Coleman, President, Ronnie Ancona, and Roger S. Bagnall, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Dee L. Clayman, Joseph Farrell, Bruce W. Frier, Jonathan M. Hall, Judith P. Hallett, Jeffrey Henderson, John Marincola, James M. May, Kathryn Morgan, Carole E. Newlands, S. Georgia Nugent, James J. O’Donnell, and Ann Vasaly. Prof. Peter Bing was absent.
Prof. Coleman called the meeting to order at 11:40 a.m.
Action: The Board approved the agenda it had received in advance of the meeting.
Action: In accordance with By-Law #14, Profs. Bagnall and Hall were chosen by lot to be members of the Executive Committee for 2011.
Dr. Blistein reported on the meeting of the Development and Capital Campaign Committees that had taken place the previous day. The Campaign Committee agreed to focus on raising larger gifts to meet upcoming NEH matching fund deadlines, and there was considerable discussion of potential prospects for these gifts. The Committees discussed content and format for appeals to be mailed to members during the winter for the capital campaign and during the spring for annual giving. They also reviewed the success of the fund-raising event in New York City in October, plans for subsequent ones in other cities, and the generally positive reactions to the campaign display at the APA booth in the exhibit hall in San Antonio. Appeals to honor several distinguished classicists had generated a significant number of gifts in 2010, and the Committees agreed to list the names of donors to these “Friends” funds in a separate section of the APA web site.
The Committees discussed the campaign case statement at some length and concluded that the APA should not revise it at that point but agreed that its fund-raising efforts could focus on outreach and pedagogical goals now that sufficient funds had already been raised to meet the research component’s initial goal, i.e. continuing operations of the American Office of l’Année philologique. The Committees felt that the membership at large would welcome this news and the news that in the coming year the Association would also be able to use some earlier gifts to the campaign for additional minority scholarships and enhancements to the teaching award program. Several Committee members agreed to draft this message to the membership for signature by Prof. Coleman as the new President.
The Board discussed the importance of reminding members that the Association was conducting two appeals at once, its usual annual giving appeal and the capital campaign. It asked the Development Committee to consider modifying acknowledgment letters for each campaign to mention the other one.
Action: The Board approved a suggestion to add a line for donations to the capital campaign to the dues bill.
Prof. Nugent stated that during its meeting the previous day the Committee had reviewed both an initial draft of the auditors’ report for the 2010 fiscal year and a comparison of budgeted income and expense figures to actual results prepared by Dr. Blistein. It reviewed the budget for the current (2011) fiscal year which had been modified to reflect new information about ongoing costs and to accommodate two proposed meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee on Archives. Finally, it discussed the fund-raising expenses the Association would incur during the 2012 fiscal year because of the extension of time given by the NEH to raise matching funds for the challenge grant.
The Association’s auditors had asked the APA to establish a policy on the treatment of investment gains and losses in permanently restricted funds. The Committee had reviewed an opinion on this matter from the APA’s attorney. (This document had also been distributed to the Board.) In addition, the Committee discussed the length of time funds should be in an Association endowment before they could be used for the purpose the donor had designated.
Action: With one abstention, the Board voted that the Association should never change the value of permanently restricted assets unless new gifts were received. All investment appreciation should be treated as temporarily restricted assets, and no expenditures should be made from a fund if investment losses resulted in its falling below its initial level.
Action: The Board accepted the Finance Committee’s recommendation that APA should have gifts on deposit for at least a year, and that any special fund needed to reach $50,000 before it could generate support for a particular program.
Action: The Board approved the expenditures proposed for two meetings of the Ad Hoc Committee on Archives in the APA Office to sort through papers accumulated since the last addition of materials to its archives at the Columbia University Rare Book Library in 1986.
Action: The Board extended the term of the Development Director’s position to June 30, 2012.
Outreach. Prof. Hallett described the annual meeting panels organized by committees in her division in San Antonio and planned for the next meeting in Philadelphia. The editorial board of Amphora had held a useful meeting to plan articles for the next issue, and Prof. Hallett had formed a search committee to find a new Editor and Assistant Editor for the publication during the spring.
The annual performance organized by the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (CAMP) had been well received. In the future, the Committee would attempt to integrate its rehearsals better into the available meeting space, and it asked that any panel it organized be held after the performance. The Committee continued to assist the Aquila Theatre Company to identify program scholars for its Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives project and was developing suggested criteria for assessing the work a scholarputs into performance. It would also seek ways to publicize the APA’s lists of music and performance experts outside of the Association’s own web site.
The Committee on the Classical Tradition urged the APA to maintain some kind of liaison with the Modern Language Association now that the latter group was holding its meeting at the same time and had changed its regulations for allied status. It also asked the Board to consider a new name for the Committee.
Action: The Board changed the name of the Committee to the Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception.
Professional Matters. Prof. May expressed the concern of the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (CSWMG) that its survey work often required expertise that its members did not have, and that it distracted the Committee from other activities it might undertake. He would ask the committees involved in these surveys (CSWMG collaborates with other Association committees on some of its questionnaires) to recommend possible changes to these instruments. Prof. May had arranged for the next installment of the Association census of classics departments to be conducted online; it would be important to increase the number of responses to the questionnaire.
For 2012 the Placement Committee was considering organizing another panel on nonacademic job options for classics Ph.D.’s. In the next few months it would review Placement Guidelines for possible changes and would work on additional automation of the Service.
Publications. Prof. O’Donnell reported that the Committee on the Web Site and Newsletter had had a useful meeting with the new Information Architect, Samuel Huskey. Katharina Volk’s first report as Editor of TAPA indicated that the journal was flourishing. He expressed gratitude to Kathryn Gutzwiller for her excellent stewardship of the Monographs Series for five years, especially her willingness to extend her term by a year and her considerable assistance to authors. To date the search for her replacement had been unsuccessful. In the interim, Prof. O’Donnell would handle the Monograph Editor’s duties. Finally, he described books in production and several new publishing initiatives that were still in the discussion stage.
Program. Prof. Farrell stated that the Program Committee had discussed two areas in which it might take a more direct role in shaping the annual meeting program: by encouraging the organization of panels on more imaginative topics and by more careful selection of presiders who would, in turn, have more responsibility for the success of their sessions. At a future date, it might ask the Board for modification of the current rules for submissions.
The Board discussed the changes implemented in the Plenary Session at the San Antonio meeting as well as the low attendance at the President’s Reception. Suggestions for improvement included finding a way to combine the many receptions hosted by individual institutions with the President’s Reception, asking award committees to provide a very short (a few sentences) citation that could be read as the award winner came to the stage to receive his or her prize, and emphasizing the various projects the Research and Teaching Fund was now supporting in the regular talk about progress in the capital campaign.
Research. Prof. Bagnall reported that the Advisory Board for the American Office of l’Année philologique had discussed various production issues as well as the need for more publicity about the new features in the online version of the bibliography. The Office had successfully taken on some additional work caused by the failure of a Canadian office to generate records from journals published in that country. The TLL Selection Committee continued to operate well and had selected a Fellow for 2011-12 from a very large number of submissions.
Several Research Division task forces had made progress on their assignments since the Board meeting in early October, and Prof. Bagnall asked the Board to act on several of their recommendations.
Action: The Board created a standing Committee on Translations of Classical Authors reporting jointly to the Publications and Research Divisions.
Action: The Board dissolved the Task Force on Ancient Biography and asked the Research Committee to monitor other groups’ work in this area to determine whether additional efforts by APA were necessary.
Action: The Board made the Task Force on a Biographical Database of Classical Scholars an Advisory Board to a project on this topic to be hosted by the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina. The APA would have no financial responsibility for this project, but the Board authorized the Executive Director to work with the Center in other ways.
Action: The Board authorized the Task Force on Performance Archives to set a March 31, 2011, deadline for final proposals to host an archive of classical performances and to recommend an acceptable proposal to the Board.
The Research Committee had reviewed a useful report from the Task Force on Digital Peer Review and the APA Portal which had been chaired by Cynthia Damon. Neither the Task Force nor the Committee was interested in ranking journals. The Task Force had greater interest than the Committee in establishing a system of peer review for digital projects. The Committee had greater interest than the Task Force in developing a mechanism to identify useful resources on the Internet and suggested that the Board assign this responsibility to the six ordinary Directors. Prof. Bagnall stated that he would circulate Prof. Damon’s report as well as his own to the Board for further discussion of this matter.
Education. Prof. Ancona described the annual meeting panels organized and being planned by the Committee on Ancient History. The Committee was developing suggestions for changes in abstract categories. The Committee on Minority Scholarships had selected two outstanding recipients for the summer of 2011, and its fund-raising raffle had been successful. AIA had offered to print a new brochure for the program.
The Education Committee’s panel on the new Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation had been successful, and, in conjunction with the Joint Committee on the Classics in American Education (JCCAE), it was working on further dissemination of the Standards document. The Committees had considered appropriate uses for gifts to the Gateway campaign designated for improvements in Latin teaching (next generation gifts) and for teaching awards.
For next generation funds, the Committee recommended establishing programs to reimburse tuition for courses taken to acquire certification in Latin teaching (to be awarded after courses were completed) and to solicit and review proposals for professional development from established teachers. The latter grants should range between $500 and $2,500. The Board deferred action on this recommendation because the Association had not yet received sufficient gifts to fund these programs.
Action: The Board accepted the recommendation of the Education Committee and JCCAE to use the gift of Daniel and Joanna Rose to increase the amounts of teaching awards to $1,000, plus a contribution of $250 to the awardee’s institution for teaching materials of the awardee’s choice. [It was subsequently determined that the current level of the fund would permit only $500 for the award and $200 for the teaching materials in 2012.]
Action: The Board amended the instructions it had given to Prof. May on January 6 concerning a letter it had asked him to write concerning an Ethics Subcommittee matter. It asked him to send a copy of the letter to the disciplined party.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 3:10 p.m.
It is with great pleasure that I announce the winner of the David D. and Rosemary H. Coffin Fellowship for Travel in Classical Lands. From a strong field of applicants, Mr. William Clausen of Washington, DC emerged as an inspiring teacher intensely dedicated to his students and his school.
A graduate of Cornell University with a B.A. in Classics, Mr. Clausen went on to complete a second degree (M.A., Oxon) at Oxford University. For the last four years he has taught Latin and English at Washington Latin Public Charter School, where he serves as the head of the Foreign Languages Department.
Describing Mr. Clausen’s teaching, a student cites “his earnest and honest and belief in his students and desire to see them succeed” as the reason for his transformation into an engaged student. A school administrator remarks: “The students love him and his classes, and many of them, in all seriousness, have remained at this fledgling, experimental school because Mr. Clausen is still there.” Mr. Clausen’s participation in the Vergilian Society’s summer program (Vergil, Aeneas, and Augustus) will enrich his teaching of the AP Vergil course and further student trips to classical lands.
I would like to thank my colleagues on the committee, Dr. Greta Ham and Dr. Bronwen Wickkiser, for their deliberation, and Adam Blistein for his help with the process.
Eric Dugdale
Chair
2012 Annual Meeting. The APA Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (CAMP) seeks participants for its performance at the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. This year’s play is the premiere of The Jurymen, an Aristophanic take on the last days of Socrates, written by Katherine Janson, and directed by Amy R. Cohen. We need actors, musicians, stage crew, and helpers for our limited-rehearsal staged reading. Rehearsals will begin on Wednesday, January 4 and the performance will take place on the evening of Friday, January 6. Send an e-mail describing your interests and talents to acohen@randolphcollege.edu, by September 1, 2011. Read the script at apollonejournal.org.
2013 Annual Meeting. The Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance invites expressions of interest in directing a staged reading at the 2013 APA meeting in Seattle, Washington. CAMP is very proud to sponsor this reading, which has become a tradition. The tenth annual reading, which will take place at the 2012 APA meeting in Philadelphia, will be The Jurymen, an Aristophanic take on the last days of Socrates by Katherine Janson, directed by Amy R. Cohen.
Past scripts have included translations and adaptations of ancient Greek and Roman plays, as well as plays inspired by classical themes, figures, and topics. Previous performances were:
Proposals for plays must be accompanied by a firm commitment by a director or a larger creative team who will assume full responsibility for production. Scripts must be complete by the time the statement of interest is submitted, and the proposer must have the legal right to perform the script.
The director is given free rein with regard to the artistic realm of the play, including the scale of the production, though we strongly caution potential directors to be mindful of the extreme limitations imposed by a very short rehearsal period (approximately two days), a short time slot for performance (under two hours), few theatrical resources, and a limited budget. The director is responsible for writing and distributing a call for actors, for planning in advance the type of production to be done, for maintaining contact with a CAMP liaison and the APA regarding performance progress and needs, and of course for directing the show in Seattle.
Statements of interest must address the following issues:
Please send statements of interest and a script of the play to Dorota Dutsch (ddutsch@classics.ucsb.edu) by October 15, 2011.
The American Philological Association (APA) invites college and university departments offering programs in classical studies to become departmental members. The APA instituted this category of membership as a way of giving recognition to those departments that are willing to support the entire field while they do the essential work of passing on an understanding of classical antiquity to each new generation of students. Departmental members will be listed on the Association's web site, in an issue of the Association's Newsletter, and on a page in the Annual Meeting Program. The APA will issue outstanding achievement awards to students designated by the department. Departmental members will also be able to obtain certain APA publications and other benefits at no charge, and they will support two important international classics projects in which the APA participates: the American Office of l'Année philologique and its fellowship to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL). Departmental dues revenue that exceeds the value of benefits received will be used to support these two projects and, in the case of the TLL Fellowship, will make the APA eligible to receive matching funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) which is currently the major supporter of this project.
A form for enrolling a department as a member is available on the APA web site: http://apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/11Dept_Member_Form.pdf. Departments may select a membership category that corresponds to the highest academic degree that each one offers. However, departments selecting the higher Supporting or Sustaining categories will enable the Association to claim additional matching funds from the NEH so that the Association can focus its fund-raising efforts on the capital campaign and on unrestricted annual giving.. The listings of member departments give appropriate recognition to those selectingthe higher levels.
As of July 15, 2011, the following departments are participating in the program for this year.
Sustaining
Supporting
Ph.D.-granting Departments
B.A.-granting Departments
This 90-minute joint session with the AIA consists of a number of tables devoted to discussions of a variety of topics, with at least one discussion leader for each topic. Members are invited to propose themselves as roundtable discussion leaders. Topics may be the leader’s area of scholarly interest or an issue important to the profession. Since certain topics lend themselves to presentation by more than one leader, proposals for multiple leaders are welcome. The Program Committee believes that these sessions can provide an excellent opportunity for younger registrants (both graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s) to interact with established scholars in a less formal environment than a session or a job interview. Leadership of a roundtable discussion does not count as an “appearance” on the annual meeting program; i.e., roundtable leaders may present a paper or serve as a respondent in an APA paper session.
The Program Committee invites members to submit brief (50-100 word) descriptions of a suitable topic for a roundtable. These submissions for the annual meeting in Philadelphia, PA should be sent to Heather Gasda (heatherh@sas.upenn.edu) by September 6, 2011.
The slate of candidates for this Summer's election has been posted on the APA web site (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/apa_blog/apa_blog_entry/2470/). Once again, members will have the option to cast ballots online and will receive voting instructions in August.
The Joint Committee on the Classics in American Education invites nominations for the 2011 APA Awards for Excellence in Teaching at the Precollegiate Level. Thanks to a very generous gift to the APA’s Gatekeeper to Gateway Campaign for the Future of Classics from Daniel and Joanna Rose, the amounts to be awarded this year have been increased substantially. Up to two winners will receive a certificate of award and a cash prize of $500. In addition, each winner’s institution will receive $200 to purchase educational resources selected by the winner. The winners will be announced at both the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA in January 2012 and the ACL Institute in June 2012, and winners may select the meeting at which they wish to receive the award.
Eligibility is open to teachers, full- or part-time, of grades K-12 in schools in the United States and Canada who at the time of the application teach at least one class of Latin, Greek, or classics at the K-12 level. Membership in the APA is not required. Nominations may be made by a colleague, administrator, or former student, who is thoroughly familiar with the teacher's work. (Additional guidelines for nominators are offered below.)
The nomination packet should consist of three components and should be submitted collated in sextuplicate under one cover. The components are 1) a letter of nomination; the letter may come from someone within the educational institution of the nominee; 2) a letter of support from someone in the field of classical studies; and 3) the candidate's current curriculum vitae. Nomination letters should indicate how the candidate meets the criteria of the award. The letter is the key to the candidate's continuation in the selection process.
The Committee reviews nominations and invites the submission of full dossiers for selected nominees. Note these new instructions for the full dossiers: These dossiers must also be submittedcollated in sextuplicate and will include
Applicants will be compared and judged by quality rather than quantity of application materials and are asked to be selective rather than comprehensive.
Award winners are selected by a subcommittee of the Joint Committee on the Classics in American Education, whose membership is selected equally from both the APA and the American Classical League. September 16, 2011, is the deadline for the receipt of nominations.
Applications should be submitted to the ACL/APA Joint Committee on the Classics in American Education, c/o The American Philological Association. The APA's address is University of Pennsylvania, 220 South 40th Street, Suite 201E, Philadelphia PA 19104-3512. Questions about the competition may be directed.to apaclassics@sas.upenn.edu.
Additional Guidelines for Nominators. The key to a successful nomination is detailed information about the nominee's teaching practices and results. The nominator plays a crucial role in gathering and presenting this information. The additional letters of support should be from students, colleagues, administrators, parents, etc. who can also speak in detail about the nominee. Due to the fact that all of the nominees are usually highly qualified, letters of nomination must move far beyond general statements that the nominee is an excellent teacher.
Supporting Materials for the Second Round. Finalists in the competition will be invited to submit additional supporting materials such as innovative teaching units, Latin publicity items, additional testimonials and recommendations, etc. As noted above, these materials must be submitted collated in sextuplicate and cannot be returned except under special circumstances.
Every application should address at least four of the following criteria:
The American Philological Association invites applications for a one-year Fellowship, tenable from July 2012 through June 2013, which will enable an American scholar to participate in the work of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Institute in Munich. Fellows at the TLL develop a broadened perspective of the range and complexity of the Latin language and culture from the classical period through the early Middle Ages, contribute signed articles to the Thesaurus, have the opportunity to participate in a collaborative international research project in a collegial environment, and work with senior scholars in the field of Latin lexicography. The Fellowship carries a stipend in the amount of $50,400, and is made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The incumbent Fellow may re-apply for a second year, but all applications will be judged on an equal footing.
Applicants must (i) be United States citizens or permanent residents and (ii) already have the Ph.D. or anticipate the award of the degree by July 1, 2012. The opportunity to be trained in lexicography and contribute articles to be published in the lexicon may be of special interest to scholars who are already established in tenure-track positions, as well as those who are just entering the profession. The Fellowship offers valuable experience for scholars in a variety of specialties (e.g., Latin language and literature, Roman law, Roman history, the literature of early Christianity); although it is not limited to individuals working in Latin philology, applicants should possess a thorough familiarity with and a special interest in the Latin language, as well as advanced competence in Greek. It is anticipated that applicants will already have a reading knowledge of German and will be willing to work toward proficiency in spoken German. Women and members of minority groups underrepresented in Classics are particularly encouraged to apply.
Applications should include a curriculum vitae, a statement of what benefits the applicant expects to derive from the Fellowship for his/her research and teaching, and the names of three referees, whom the applicant should ask to send supporting letters to the Executive Director of the American Philological Association without further notice. It will be in the candidate’s interest if at least one letter can specifically address the candidate’s suitability for the Fellowship. Candidates will be considered by the APA’s TLL Fellowship Committee, which serves as the selection committee. The committee will choose a short-list of candidates to be invited for interview at the Annual Meeting in January 2012 in Philadelphia, and the name of the successful candidate will be announced shortly thereafter. Applications must be received by the deadline of Tuesday, November 15, 2011. Applications must be submitted via regular mail or courier. Materials sent via FAX or e-mail will not be accepted.
Applications should be sent to Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Executive Director, American Philological Association, University of Pennsylvania, 220 South 40th Street, Suite 201E, Philadelphia PA 19104-3512.
For additional information about the Fellowship, see the relevant section of the APA web site (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/research/fellowship/thesaurus_linguae_latinae/) or contact the Chairperson of the APA's TLL Fellowship Committee: Professor Anthony Corbeill, Department of the Classics, University of Kansas, 1445 Jayhawk Blvd., Rm. 1035, Lawrence, KS 66045-7590, Telephone: (785) 864-2393, E-mail: corbeill@ku.edu
The Pearson Fellowship Committee invites nominations for the 2012-2013 Lionel Pearson Fellowship, which seeks to contribute to the training of American and Canadian classicists by providing for a period of study at an English or Scottish university. The competition is open to outstanding students majoring in Greek, Latin, Classics, or closely related fields at any American or Canadian college or university.
Fellows must undertake a course of study that broadens and develops their knowledge of Greek and Latin literature in the original languages; candidates should therefore have a strong background in the classical languages. They should expect to obtain the B.A. by September 2012, in order to begin an academic year of postgraduate work at that time. Normally, the recipient will hold the Fellowship in the academic year immediately after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. The term of the Fellowship is one year. The recipient may use the Fellowship for part of a longer program of study, but under no circumstances will support from the Fellowship extend beyond one year. Fellows are responsible for seeking and obtaining admission to the English or Scottish university where they intend to study. The maximum amount of the Fellowship will be $25,000 which may be used to offset academic fees, travel expenses, housing and subsistence costs, and book purchases. Candidates should be aware that the Fellowship amount ($25,000) is the maximum that can be awarded each year, and will cover a significant portion, but by no means all, of the expenses the Pearson Fellow will incur during his or her Fellowship year.
Candidates for the Fellowship require nomination by a faculty member who is familiar with their work. Faculty members who wish to nominate a student for the Fellowship must send the student's name to the current chair, Professor Lesley Dean-Jones, who will send the nominator an application form and other relevant materials. The committee discourages programs from nominating more than one student, and those desiring to make multiple nominations should contact the chair in advance. Nominations and inquiries may be made only by e-mail to Prof. Dean-Jones (ldjones@mail.utexas.edu). The deadline for receiving nominations is Friday, September 30, 2011.
The second step in the nomination process is the submission of a completed application. Application materials will be sent to nominators and/or nominees via e-mail by October 5th and the completed application must arrive at the offices of the American Philological Association by Friday, October28, 2011.
Reminder for Organizers of Panels at 2013 APA Annual Meeting
The Program Guide for the January 2013 Annual Meeting will appear in October. Organizers of affiliated group and organizer-refereed sessions that have been approved for presentation at the 2013 meeting are reminded that calls for abstracts for their sessions should be sent to the Association Office no later than September 16, 2011. See the APA web site (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/annual_meeting/meeting_info/calls_for_abstracts_for_organizer-refereed_panels_and_affiliated_group) for samples of previously published calls for abstracts.
The following APA members have received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the 2011-12 academic year.
In 2012 the annual meeting of the Classical Association will be hosted by the Department of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Exeter. The dates for the conference are 11th-14th April 2012. The plenary lectures and panels will be held on campus in the Peter Chalk Centre. Accommodation and meals will also be provided on campus in Holland Hall and Mardon Hall, with the possibility for those who should wish it of individual bookings in nearby hotels. Excursions will be arranged to places of interest in Exeter and in the surrounding area.
We welcome proposals for papers (20 minutes long followed by discussion) and coordinated panels (comprising either 3 or 4 papers) 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 are keen to encourage papers from a broad range of perspectives.
Suggested topics: Hellenistic and Roman culture; globalisation and cosmopolitanism; impact of Greek culture; use of language in antiquity; the Black Sea; Galen and ancient medicine; the ancient book/material text; reading in antiquity; modern receptions of ancient erotica and sex; concepts of authenticity and the fake; ancient ideas and their reception; sport, spectacle and festival; gift-giving; food, culture and the environment; politics, religion and ideology. We also warmly encourage submissions for non-research presentations such as dramatic performances of ancient texts, introductory workshops on technical disciplines such as papyrology and palaeography, spoken Latin conversation sessions, oral reading workshops, etc.
Please send your title, abstract (no more than 300 words), and any enquiries (preferably by e-mail) not later than 31 August 2011, to: cah-ca2012 AT ex.ac.uk.
Postgraduate Work-in-Progress Seminar, Institute of Classical Studies. School of Advanced Study, University of London. We are now inviting abstracts from postgraduate students who would like to present a paper at the seminar during the year 2011/12. Submissions will be accepted for all three terms, with a second call for papers in January, if necessary.
Speakers give a paper of about 45 minutes duration dealing with any subject connected with the ancient world (broadly defined), the reception of antiquity, or classical scholarship. They have the opportunity to receive questions, moderated by the joint chairs, from an audience of postgraduate students, mainly, but not exclusively, from the University of London, and to continue the discussion over wine and nibbles. The seminar provides a friendly environment in which speakers are able to talk about their research, take part in stimulating discussion of their paper, and extend their social and academic network. During the past three years we have been pleased to attract speakers from twenty-nine different institutions in the United Kingdom, the EU and North America. The seminar will take place at Senate House at 4.30 p.m. on Fridays during term (28 Sept- 16 Dec, 9 Jan- 23 Mar, 23 April- 8 June).
Please submit:
Submissions should be directed to the seminar’s joint chairs, Jessica Baxter-Lloyd, Gillian Bentley, Beth Rowell and Gabrielle Villais at postgradwip@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 12 midday on 22 August 2011.
Ancient Aitia: Explaining Matter between Belief and Knowledge, New York University Classics Graduate Student Conference, December 3, 2011. Why does a shepherd’s song echo in the mountains? What causes epilepsy? Why does the priest of Herakles on Kos wear women’s clothes? Graeco-Roman sources abound in myths of origins, and they are equally prominent in Near Eastern wisdom literature, apocalyptic texts, and biblical narratives. These texts tell aitia in order to explain names, religious rituals, civic institutions, crafts, natural phenomena or medical conditions. Aitia are a form of collective knowledge, created through tradition and living memory rather than through systematic inquiry. Because they treat topics also covered by ancient sciences such as history, medicine or natural philosophy, aitia sit at the juncture of divine and research-based accounts. Such causation narratives differ also from historical accounts, insofar as the aition replaces the complexities of diachronic evolution with a single, transcending moment of creation.
Aetiology, therefore, is an important locus for examining the intersection of religion and mythology with the various forms of ancient scientific thought and models. How this intersection is defined, where it lies, and what tensions (if any) it gives rise to is culturally dependent. Since many aitia occur in poetry, a literary approach to aetiology has traditionally prevailed. However, the organizers of this conference maintain that aetiology is a subject that explicitly invites a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. The exchange between students of mythology, literature, and intellectual history, with those of ancient sciences, anthropology and material culture can significantly enhance our understanding of ancient aitia.We invite submissions from all subfields and related disciplines (Graeco-Roman, Near Eastern and Judeo-Christian religion, ancient literatures, the study of material culture etc.) investigating topics such as, but not limited to, the following:
Graduate students wishing to present a paper at the conference should submit a titled abstract of 300 words or less to ancientaitia@gmail.comby August 17, 2011. Please write your name, institution, contact information, and the title of your abstract in the body of the email. Notifications will be sent in the first half of September. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes in length, and NYU and other local students will prepare 5 minute responses. Questions about the conference can be directed to Inger Kuin and Katia Kosova at the same email address.
Ancient and Medieval Interpretations of Aristotle’s Categories, Franciscan University of Steubenville, April 12-14, 2012. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together scholars interested in sharing their work on the ancient and medieval traditions of ontological interpretations of Aristotle’s Categories. Possible classical and medieval figures may include: Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Dexippus, Simplicius, Olympiodorus, Syrianus, Proclus, Boethius, Avicenna & Al-F?r?b?, Albertus Magnus, William of Ockham, John Duns Scotus, Henry of Ghent, John Buridan, Francisco Suarez, Radulphus Brito, Thomas of Erfurt, Martin of Dacia, Simon of Faversham & Peter of Auverne, Thomas a Vio, etc.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
Papers can pertain explicitly to commentaries on the Categories or to the use of, and reference to, the ten categories in other works. Please submit an abstract of approximately 500 words electronically by September 1st, 2011 to Paul Symington (psymington@franciscan.edu) or Sarah Klitenic Wear (swear@franciscan.edu).
Paris International Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences Research, 24-28 July 2012. The congress will bring together humanities and social sciences (HSS) researchers, scientists, academicians, experts, engineers, developers, administrators and other HSS research-related professionals and practitioners from all over the world. The aims are to promote multidisciplinary dialogue and mutual cross-fertilisation of ideas and methods; to offer a place for participants to present, discuss, and showcase innovative recent and ongoing HSS research works and their applications or development; to update on- and explore new ways and directions; and to take advantage of opportunities for contacts, interaction, international collaboration and networking. All areas of Humanities and Social Sciences research are invited: anthropology and ethnology; applied mathematics, statistics and sciences for HSS research; archaeology; area studies; arts; business administration; classics; communication studies; cultural studies; demography; development studies; economics; environmental studies; epistemology; gender studies; geography; history; information science; international relations; languages and cultures; law; linguistics and language sciences; literature; philosophy; policy, epistemology and methodology of multi-, inter-, trans- and cross-disciplinary HSS research; political science; psychology; religion; research policy, administration and strategies; and sociology. Proposals are in the form of abstracts. Session formats include individual paper sessions, symposia, workshops, roundtables and poster sessions. The languages of the congress are English and French. The deadline for abstract submission is 30 October 2011. The closing date for early registration is 29 February 2012. For more information, submission and registration: http://education-conferences.org/homehss.aspx. Contact: Paris-Conference@analytrics.org
Classical Association of the Canadian West, Victoria, B.C., March 16-17, 2012. No conception, ancient or modern, of the ancient world is entirely objective; every vision of of antiquity carries its own agenda. It is easier to see the prejudices of other eras than it is to interrogate our own. How is our vision of the ancient world affected by our cultural values, prejudices and experiences? How did the cultural, historical and intellectual contexts of previous generations of artists, scholars and intellectuals affect their conception of antiquity, and the uses to which they put it? How did the artists and intellectuals of antiquity themselves envision and make use of their past?
We invite contributions addressing the ways in which scholars and artists, past and present, have constructed their visions and models of the ancient world; the cultural, historical, artistic, economic and intellectual contexts that affected and nourished those visions; and their later influence. Papers on other topics of interest to classicists will also be considered. Abstracts of 100-150 words and a brief CV can be submitted by email to cacw2012@gmail.com. Conference organizers Dr. Laurel Bowman and Dr. Geof Kron can be contacted at cacw2012@gmail.com or at CACW 2012, c/o Department of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria P.O. Box 3045, Victoria, BC CANADA V8W 3P4. The deadline for abstractsisSeptember 15, 2011.
Valuing Antiquity in Antiquity, The Seventh Penn-Leiden Colloquium on Ancient Values, University of Leiden, the Netherlands, June 15-16, 2012. The Colloquia were established as a biennial venue in which scholars could investigate the diverse aspects of Greek and Roman values. Each colloquium focuses on a single theme, which participants explore from a diversity of perspectives and disciplines.
The ‘classical tradition’ is no invention of modernity. Already in ancient Greece and Rome, the privileging of the ancient over the present and future played an integral role in social and cultural discourses of every period. In this colloquium we want to examine this temporal organization of value and the mechanisms by which it was produced and sustained—in other words, ancient valuations of antiquity as expressions of lived value-systems. How did specific Greek and Roman communities use notions of antiquity to define themselves or others? What models from the past proved most acceptable or desirable (or not) for political practice or for self-fashioning? What groups were the main agents, or audiences, of such discourses on the value of antiquity, and what were their priorities and their motivations? What were the differences between Roman and Greek approaches, or between antiquarianism, genealogy, classicism, nostalgia, canonization and their opposites? How did temporal systems for ascribing value intersect with the organization of space, the production of narrative, or the espousal and application of aesthetic criteria?
For the seventh Penn-Leiden colloquium, we invite abstracts for papers (30 minutes) that address ‘the past in the past’ along these lines. We hope to bring together researchers in all areas of classical studies, including literature, philosophy, linguistics, history, and visual and material culture, and hope to discover the significant points of intersection and difference between these areas of focus. Selected papers will be considered for publication by Brill Publishers. Those interested in presenting a paper are requested to submit a 1-page abstract, by email (preferable) or regular mail, by Friday November 18th, 2011, to both of the following organizers:
Dr. Christoph Pieper
Email: c.pieper@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Prof. James Ker
Email: jker@sas.upenn.edu
Phone: +1 (215) 898 3027
Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World X: Tradition, Transmission, and Adaptation, The University of Michigan, June 27-30, 2012. When oral theory first entered classical studies, it concerned itself mostly with the transmission of narratives in verse, and one of its first concerns was the accuracy of this process. It is time to think about transmission in a wider context. Information traveled by a variety of mechanisms in antiquity. Texts, ideas, and practices were all transmitted through time and space. Sometimes both form and content were retained, but were placed in a new context; often both were profoundly transformed. This iteration of the biennial conference on Orality and Literacy will consider the differences between oral and written transmissions, as well as their interactions. When knowledge crosses cultural and linguistic boundaries, does it matter whether it is transmitted orally or in writing? Are written texts always less fluid than oral performances? How should we think about the different kinds of writing as methods of transmitting information, from the wax tablet to the monumental inscription?
We are seeking contributions from classicists as well as scholars in ancient Near Eastern and Biblical Studies. Papers should be 25-30 minutes in length. There will be ample time for discussion. The conference will include an excursion to Detroit and a session introducing Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe) oral tradition, and an opportunity to visit the University of Michigan's renowned papyrus collection.
Those interested in presenting a paper should send a one-page abstract to Orality2012@umich.edu by November 25, 2011. Inquiries to rscodel@umich.edu.
Poetic Language and Religion in Greece and Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, May 31-June 1, 2012. We welcome paper proposals for the conference organized by the Research Group on Classical Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela. A maximum of 20 proposals will be included in the Conference programme. Studies on the ‘Indogermanische Dichtersprache’ (‘Indo-European poetic language’) have proved fruitful thanks to the successful combined application of philological and linguistic methods when researching the spiritual background of ancient peoples, especially in Greece and Rome. This Conference intends to benefit from this methodological tradition to incorporate the new approaches to the analysis and exegesis of poetic texts, as privileged bearers of the religious thought of Greece and Rome.
Our aim is to join researchers in the fields of classical studies and linguistics to discuss key issues such as:
Communications should not exceed 25-30 min. We welcome abstracts addressing, among other topics:
Titles and abstracts (about 200 words) should be sent to J. V. García Trabazo [josevirgilio.garcia@usc.es] or A. Ruiz Pérez [angel.ruiz@usc.es] before 27 November 2011. Answers on the acceptance of paper proposals before 01.20.2012. Postal address and Conference Venue: Departamento de Latin y Griego, Facultad de Filología, Universidad de Santiago, E-15782 Santiago de Compostela, SPAIN.
41st Annual Meeting of the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 13-14 June, 2012. Papers on a wide range of classical subjects, including but not limited to history, philology, philosophy, and archaeology of Greece and Rome and neighboring countries are welcome. The time limit for each lecture is 20 minutes. The official languages of the conference are Hebrew and English. Sessions where Israeli scholars present their papers are held in Hebrew; sessions where foreign scholars deliver their lectures are held in English. Proposals, abstracts and other correspondence may be forwarded to Dr. Sonia Klinger, Secretary of the ISPCS, email: klinger@research.haifa.ac.il, or regular mail:
The Secretary, ISPCS
office telephone: +972-4-8240567
All proposals should be accompanied by a one page abstract (about 250-300 words). Proposals in Hebrew should also be accompanied by a one page abstract in English to appear in the conference brochure. All proposals should reach the secretary by 18th December, 2011. Decisions will be made after the organizing committee has duly considered all the proposals. If a decision is required prior to late January, please indicate this in your letter and we will try to accommodate your needs.
Stereotyped Thinking in Classics: Literary Ages and Genres Re-Considered, University of Vienna, May 30-June 1, 2012. This conference is intended to be the first of a series of conferences or workshops (and publications) on the present, 21st century, condition and self-conception of Classical Philology. ‘Stereotyped Thinking in Classics: Literary Ages and Genres Re-Considered’ is primarily meant to critically examine the long-lasting problem(s) of categorizing literature according to ‘ages’, ‘genres’, etc. At first sight, the advantage of such classifications in various categories seems to be evident, for they purport to lend stability and clarity to otherwise chaotic forms. This includes purely temporal classifications by historical and literary ages, systematic ones by ‘genres’ or ‘types of texts’. Often enough, such simplistic concepts result in aesthetic judgments, such as ‘high/low’, ‘good/bad’, etc., which entail the development of canons or lists (e.g., ‘must-reads’ vs. ‘don’t-reads’). The standard companions to, and histories of, Greek and Latin Literature are full of classifications and simplifications that are for the most part handed over from one generation to another. It is the aim of this conference to critically re-assess the pros and cons of such categorizations and to bridge the undeniable gap between traditional philology and modern literary theory. Conference languages: German and English.
Individual talks: 30 minutes plus ca. 15 minutes of discussion each. Those who wish to contribute a paper should send an e-mail to Farouk F. Grewing (farouk.grewing@univie.ac.at) and/or Christine Walde (waldec@uni-mainz.de). Please include a brief abstract in your mail.
The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) will open its 2011-12 competitions at the end of July. Updated program descriptions and application information will be posted at www.acls.org/programs/comps.
The Princeton University Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts announces postdoctoral fellowships in the humanities and social sciences for 2012-2015 for recent PhDs (from January 2010) in the humanities or allied social sciences. Four fellows will be appointed to pursue research and teach half-time. The stipend for 2012-13 will be approximately $76,000. The postmark deadline for applications is September 30, 2011. For eligibility, fellowship and application details, see www.princeton.edu/sf.
American Academy in Rome, Rome Prize 2012. The American Academy in Rome invites applications for the Rome Prize competition. One of the leading overseas centers for independent study and advanced research in the arts and the humanities, the Academy offers up to thirty fellowships for periods ranging from six months to two years. Rome Prize winners reside at the Academy’s eleven-acre center in Rome and receive room and board, a study or studio, and a stipend. Stipends for six-month fellowships are $14,000 and stipends for eleven-month fellowships are $26,000. Fellowships are awarded in the following fields: Architecture Design (including graphic, fashion, interior, lighting, and set design, engineering, urban planning, and other related design fields), Historic Preservation and Conservation (including architectural design, public policy, and the conservation of works of art), Landscape Architecture, Literature, Musical Composition, Visual Arts, Ancient Studies, Medieval Studies, Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, and Modern Italian Studies. For further information, or to apply, visit the Academy’s website at www.aarome.org or contact the American Academy in Rome, 7 East 60 Street, New York, NY 10022, Att: Programs. 212-751-7200
Competition Deadline: 1 November 2011.
American Philological Association Membership Services
Telephone (U.S. and Canada only): 800-548-1784; (other countries): 410-516-6987
FAX: 410-516-6968; E-mail: jrnlcirc@press.jhu.edu
(All deadlines are receipt deadlines unless otherwise indicated.)
http://www.apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/2011OffCommSurvey.pdf
The APA’s Campaign for Classics in the 21st Century has received pledges worth close to $2.1 million from more than 800 different donors. We are well on our way to meeting our goal of raising $2.6 million by the deadline of our National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Challenge Grant: July 31, 2012. While the Campaign is ongoing, the funds that it is establishing are already beginning to support important Association programs. The work of the American Office of L’Année philologique is continuing without interruption although its final year-to-year grant from the NEH ended last month. Major grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Classical Association of the United Kingdom, along with many gifts from APA members, made this smooth transition possible.
This summer, thanks to an early grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, we provided an additional full minority scholarship. The Delmas Foundation has recently made a generous addition to this grant which will allow this stipend to increase in the future. The generosity of Daniel and Joanna Rose will allow the APA to improve our collegiate and precollegiate teaching awards this winter by increasing the amount given to each awardee and adding a new grant for teaching materials to their institution. During the fiscal year that begins in July 2012, several gifts in support of teacher training will fund the professional development of Classics teachers, especially efforts to obtain certification to teach in public primary and secondary schools.
The successful completion of the Campaign to secure the full $650,000 from the NEH will require additional gifts of all sizes. In order not to leave any money “on the table,” we urge members who made their last Campaign gift several years ago or who have not yet made a gift to the Campaign to give serious consideration to a donation that will enable the APA to raise the necessary $500,000 well before next July’s deadline. Please don’t wait to click on one of the links below to make your donation.
Donate online: https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/AmericanPhilologicalAssociat/OnlineDonation.html
Print out a donation form: http://www.apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/pledge_form_revised_10-10.pdf
Doing things at night in the ancient world meant doing them in private, so that nobody else would know. Nicarchus (AP 11.74) appeals for help in getting rid of a deaf old slave-woman who, instead of τυροί (cheese), brings him πυροί (wheat); instead of πήγανον (rue—for his headache), τήγανον (a frying-pan); instead of λάχανον (greens), λάσανον (a potty); etc. To make himself heard in her presence, Nicarchus does not want to have to develop the lungs of a towncrier, which would require him to get up at night in order to practice outside. The same motif is anthropomorphically transferable: according to Plutarch, an elephant that was constantly being punished for forgetting its moves in a dressage routine could be seen rehearsing all by itself in the moonlight (Moralia 968C); it cloaked its shame in darkness.
Doing by night what there was no reason to avoid doing by day was, correspondingly, both pretentious and perverted, at least in terms of the Stoic code of living in accordance with nature, as expressed by the younger Seneca. As he puts it, sunt qui officia lucis noctisque peruerterint nec ante diducant oculos hesterna graues crapula quam adpetere nox coepit, “There are people who invert the activities proper to day and night, and don’t open their eyes, bleary with yesterday’s binge-drinking, until night has started to come on” (Epist. 122.2). Quoting the disapproval of Cato the moralist, Seneca has a term for these people: antipodes. He harnesses the power of anaphora to emphasize a series of forceful rhetorical questions (non uiuunt contra naturam qui . . . ?), putting those who exchange day for night in the same category as transvestites, eunuchs, and people who force roses and lilies in winter, or grow trees on their roofs, or so design their seaside homes that the foundations for their hot baths are actually sunk into the sea.
Mr. Edison blurred the boundary between day and night. The electric light made it possible to treat night as day. It would be harder for Seneca to make his point, now that it is not just unreformed party-goers who are up all night, but also conscientious students and professors, toiling away at their papers and reports and letters of recommendation. Martial could suggest that even the workaholic Pliny would put down his pen late in the evening to receive a visit from the Muse of light verse (Epigr. 10.20 (19)); Pliny evidently took this as a compliment, since he quotes it in the letter marking Martial’s death (Epist. 3.21). His even more workaholic uncle, whose motto was uita uigilia est (NH praef. 18), admittedly used to start work long before it was light (a nocte multa), but he left the dinner-table before nightfall in summer or just as night fell in winter, presumably to go straight to bed; he had to be up before dawn to call on Vespasian, who also “made use of the night” (nam ille quoque noctibus utebatur, Plin. Epist. 3.5.9).
We may feel nostalgic about those simpler days, when the rhythms of the seasons constrained human activity, and the inadequacy of lamplight kept all but the most conscientious imperial servants or obsessive-compulsive authors from working after dark. But, of course, the modern transformation of night into day has given us a freedom to arrange our lives that in Antiquity would have seemed so contrary as to amount to perversion. It may be harder to do things unnoticed, when the cover of darkness is inconveniently illuminated by electricity; the owner of Plutarch’s elephant would now set up a searchlight outside the tent and a two-way mirror, and charge a fee for the public to watch the poor beast lumbering around, conscious of its own inadequacy. But, if privacy needed darkness as its guarantor in Antiquity, it can be secured by other means today, at least in the West, where having one’s own room is no longer a guilty ambition or an impossible dream.
The hardest part about access to perpetual illumination is exercising the self-control to switch off the computer and go to bed; if Mr. Edison blurred the boundary between night and day, Mr. Gates, assisted latterly by Mr. Zuckerberg, has erased it altogether. Seneca would have reveled in the moral lessons he could draw from the ubiquity of temptations to keep us from admitting that we are creatures of the animal kingdom ruled, ultimately, not by technological advances but, simply, biology. I don’t long to be transported to Pliny’s smelly, dangerous, hierarchical Rome, where I would probably have been his slave and would have spilt oil on my tunic fetching the master another lamp and had to endure hours of boredom waiting behind his couch while he caroused decorously with the Muses. But I do sometimes wish that the modern city would settle into darkness for eight hours a night and remove the element of choice from the patterning of our daily lives.
Kathleen M. Coleman
Members are reminded that it is possible to nominate additional candidates by petition. Nominations of candidates not proposed by the Nominating Committee shall require the signature of twenty members in good standing (2011 dues must be paid) and must be reported to the Executive Director by April 15, 2011. A current curriculum vitae of the candidate, who must also be a member in good standing, should be submitted by the same deadline.
The APA has responded in several ways to recent events in Mediterranean countries that have posed threats to important ancient sites. In late January, at the invitation of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and with the approval of our Board of Directors, President Kathleen Coleman signed a statement calling on Egyptian authorities to protect their antiquities (http://www.archaeological.org/news/aianews/3936). She also signed a subsequent letter, circulated by the Capitol Archaeology Institute at George Washington University, asking other organizations around the world to take action as well: http://archaeology.columbian.gwu.edu/home/call-for-action-to-protect-egyptian-antiquities/. In addition, we now have on our web site a link to a Pleiades Project map of important ancient sites in Libya: http://tinyurl.com/4jlcl96.
Visit the web site regularly for new information about APA efforts concerning ancient sites.
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the Radisson Plaza – Warwick Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, on October 1, 2010. Those present were Profs. Dee L. Clayman, President, Ronnie Ancona, Roger S. Bagnall, and Peter Bing, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Barbara Weiden Boyd, Kathleen Mary Coleman, Bruce W. Frier, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, John Marincola, James M. May, Carole E. Newlands, Josiah Ober, and Ann Vasaly. Profs. S. Georgia Nugent, and James J. O’Donnell were absent.
Prof. Clayman called the meeting to order at 8:15 p.m. She asked Directors to discuss the current academic job market and actions the APA could take to assist Classics Ph.D.’s who do not obtain tenure-track teaching positions. The Placement Service had provided statistics that appeared to show that there were about four candidates for every teaching job available, and the number was considerably higher when only tenure-track jobs were counted.
Directors discussed the possible alternative career paths for classics Ph.D.’s and the drawbacks to each of them. Postdoctoral fellowships offered the chance to conduct scholarship while building up teaching credentials, but colleges were less able to host fellows during the current economic crisis and the fellowships that did exist might become substitutes for tenure-track jobs. At a minimum, the Association needed to develop a better list of the existing postdoctoral fellowship opportunities.
There were numerous opportunities for classics Ph.D.’s to teach at the K-12 level, but the individual candidate had to be comfortable working in that environment and had to be willing to secure the additional training necessary to do so. Classics Ph.D.’s regularly secured careers in academic administration and in some areas completely outside of academia, but it would take considerable research to identify promising areas and many institutions would be reluctant to encourage their graduate students to seek such career paths. The APA should obtain information about the programs sponsored by the Modern Language Association in the 1970’s to direct humanities Ph.D.’s to nonacademic jobs.
Action: In the Winter and Spring the APA should survey Placement Service candidates from the five previous academic years and ask them the following questions:
The goal of the survey would be to determine the number of Ph.D.’s the field had produced, how many had failed to obtain the doctorate after advancing far enough in graduate study to enter the job market, and where this cohort of graduate students was now working.
Action: The Association should revise its Careers for Classicists pamphlet and publish it on the web site.
The Board then adjourned for the evening at 9:50 p.m.
The Board resumed its meeting on October 2, 2010. Prof. Clayman called the meeting to order at 8:35 a.m. All Directors present on the previous evening plus Prof. Nugent were in attendance. In addition, Mr. Carl Hogan, of Briggs, Bunting & Dougherty, the Association’s auditors, was present by invitation. The Board had received an agenda for the meeting as well as minutes of its conference call of June 10, 2010.
Action: The Board approved the agenda for the meeting.
Action: The Board approved the minutes of its conference call on June 10, 2010.
The Directors had received the report of Briggs, Bunting & Dougherty, the Association’s auditors, for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2009. Mr. Hogan reported that he had met with the Finance Committee in May and had reviewed the report in detail. That discussion had included a review of the financial controls which the Association had in place, controls with which the auditors were satisfied.
Turning to the report, Mr. Hogan pointed to language stating that the auditors had reasonable although not complete assurance that the financial statements developed by APA staff were accurate. This was the highest level of assurance that the audit process could provide, and the Briggs firm had had to make no significant corrections to the figures provided by staff, had not needed to issue any letter describing deficiencies in financial controls, and had received good cooperation from staff.
Mr. Hogan described the changes that had taken place in the Association’s assets during the fiscal year. He noted that as a result of declines in the value of investments, several funds had fallen below the levels that were considered permanently restricted. For the purposes of the financial statements, however, the permanently restricted value did not change, but the level of unrestricted assets fell by the amount of the loss.
Action: The Board asked Dr. Blistein to consult with the Association’s attorney to determine whether the APA needed to keep permanently restricted assets at a fixed amount even if the endowments in which they were invested fell below this level.
Mr. Hogan compared income and expenses for the 2009 and 2008 fiscal years and pointed out that while income levels changed significantly because of different amounts of grants and contributions received, expenses were very similar for the two years. The investment losses that the APA had suffered during the fall of financial markets in late 2008 and early 2009 were similar to those at comparable organizations. Mr. Hogan also reviewed the way in which the statements showed the division of the Association’s expenses into its various program areas as well as the assumptions that staff used to make those divisions.
Mr. Hogan then absented himself from the meeting.
Directors had received a report showing the performance of investments during the fiscal year that had ended on June 30, 2010. Each of the four funds had grown between 9% and 12% during the year. Prof. Nugent noted that the portfolio had made a modest recovery and that the Finance Committee was satisfied with the work of the investment advisors managing the portfolio.
Dr. Blistein had distributed to Directors a preliminary financial statement for the fiscal year that anticipated a final deficit of about $42,000. The Association had not been able to claim the final installment of matching funds from its NEH Challenge Grant, $80,000 of which it had planned to retain to offset fund-raising expenses. In addition, legal expenses had been higher than expected because of a case in which the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics had recommended a public statement.
During their conference call in June 2010 the Directors had approved a budget for the current year. Dr. Blistein had updated this document to reflect any changes in the underlying assumptions produced by better data from the previous fiscal year and the results of the move of the Association Office. Dr. Nugent noted the budget’s provision for a $15,000 set-aside to improve the APA’s web site. It was not yet clear whether these funds were still required, or, if they were required, how best to sequester them. Dr. Blistein described the financial implications of moving the office out of the Penn Classical Studies Department but still into a University of Pennsylvania building. The Directors also discussed the calculation of salaries for Association staff and of course release funding for the Editor of Transactions.
The Directors had received a statement comparing annual giving results for the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years. Although the number of donors was about the same in each year, the total amount given had decreased by $7,000, possibly because members were being asked to contribute to both annual giving and the capital campaign.
A capital campaign statement showed that the Association had received almost $1.9 million in pledges from 635 donors, and that almost $1.6 million of that amount had been received. The statement also showed the amounts received in each of the “Friends” campaigns soliciting contributions from the students of a specific teacher. Directors put forward the names of other teachers who might be the focus of such campaigns and suggested that nominators of teaching award recipients be asked to suggest the names of at least five students to whom appeals could be made.
Prof. Clayman described the good progress being made on the organization of a fund-raising event to take place at the end of October at New York University. The University was providing a great deal of assistance to the Association, and it seemed likely that the event would generate a significant surplus for the campaign.
The Board also reviewed the case statement for the campaign that had been approved in 2006. It felt that the Association should revise this document in early 2011 once it had developed more programs to implement the Gateway concept. In particular, the statement needed to make a better connection between the continued operation of the American Office of l’Année philologique and the Gateway effort.
The Directors discussed the report of the National Research Council that had just been published. Because of a change in the inclusion criteria established by the Council, a number of doctoral programs in classics had been excluded from the report. The Education and Professional Matters Divisions were already working on a proposal to collect and publish more detailed information on doctoral programs in the field and were planning to publish this data on the Association’s web site without creating any rankings.
The Board discussed the recommendation of the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics that it issue a public statement about a specific matter. It also discussed a memorandum by the Association’s attorney about the matter.
Action: The Board approved several disciplinary steps to be taken against one of the persons involved in the matter reviewed by the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics and then agreed on several steps that Prof. May, as Vice President for Professional Matters, should take in communicating this decision to the parties involved. Dr. Blistein was also asked to raise some relevant issue with the APA’s attorneys.
Prof. May reported to the Board about the successful resolution of another case that the Subcommittee had reviewed. He stated that the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (CSWMG) expected to produce draft reports for placement and journals by the time of the San Antonio meeting although it was encountering some difficulties with slow responses to the latter survey.
Action: The Board did not accept the suggestion of the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics for a change in the language about reviewers of manuscripts in the Statement on Professional Ethics.
Prof. Kaster noted that the number of individual abstracts submitted to the Program Committee had increased by 30% over the previous year. He felt that the new online submission system was responsible for some of this growth. The system had presented some difficulties to the Committee and to the office staff but had clearly not deterred presenters. At its April meeting the Committee had discussed at the Board’s request possible changes to the format of the Plenary Session designed to increase attendance.
Action: The Board enthusiastically approved the Committee’s recommendations for changes in the format of the Plenary Session. It agreed that award decisions and citations should be published in advance of the annual meeting so that full citations did not need to be read at the Session. Staff was asked to solicit copies of the book being recognized by the Goodwin Award to be used as door prizes and to make a cash bar available at the back of the session room.
The Board reviewed a written report submitted by Prof. O’Donnell.
Action: The Board approved the appointment of Samuel Huskey to be the Association’s Information Architect for a four-year term beginning in January 2011. Prof. Huskey would oversee the Association’s web site and its other efforts to publicize its activities via the internet. The Board expressed its profound gratitude to Prof. Robin Mitchell-Boyask for his service as Editor of the Web Site from 1998 to 2011.
The Directors discussed with Prof. Bagnall the work of the eight task forces that had been formed after a Research Division retreat in September 2009. The report of one of those groups, on performance archives, required immediate action by the Board.
Action: The Board approved the publication of the report of the Task Force on Performance Archives which included a request for proposals by institutions interested in hosting such an archive. The Task Force was authorized to evaluate proposals received.
Prof. Ancona described the distribution and discussion of the new Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation which the APA had issued in collaboration with the American Classical League. She also described material on Caesar that had been posted on the APA web site that would help secondary school teachers to incorporate that author into the forthcoming advanced placement curriculum. Prof. Vasaly described her work as a liaison to the advanced placement committee preparing that new curriculum. Prof. Ancona also reported that Hunter College had funded the work of two of her students to update the links on the APA web site to teacher certification criteria in individual states.
Prof. Hallett described the Division’s efforts to help Prof. Peter Meineck of the Aquila Theatre Company to recruit scholars for its new Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives program. During the Fall the Committee on Outreach wanted to develop a Facebook page for the Association.
Action: The Board approved the establishment of a Facebook page for the Association.
Dr. Blistein reviewed the complicated series of events that led to the identification of very suitable office space four days before the APA was scheduled to leave Cohen Hall. The rent for the space was considerably higher than the amount it currently paid but lower than had been anticipated. He reported that staff was settling into its new offices after some delays in installing phones and building shelves. APA had been welcomed to the building by tenants of other offices, one of which had provided access to its high-speed copy machine at a very reasonable cost.
The total number of members was at about the same level (3,100) as it had been the previous October. It was not yet clear whether the increased dues for 2011 would have any impact on membership.
Information on hotel reservations for the 2011 meeting in San Antonio had been posted on the APA web site in mid September. APA and AIA were using a new registration firm for the 2011 meeting, and online registration had been made available earlier in the week. The 2012 annual meeting would again take place in Philadelphia.
APA and AIA were in the process of negotiating contracts for meetings to take place in 2013 and beyond. Dr. Blistein reported that hotels were offering better proposals than he had expected, and some of those proposals included possible support for meeting planning help that would need to be retained because the societies were no longer using an outside firm to negotiate the contracts. Not having the outside firm increased the staff time needed to review proposals which always required several revisions. The societies had just signed contracts to hold the 2013 meeting in Seattle and the 2014 meeting in Chicago. There were promising negotiations taking place in attractive cities for the years 2015-2018.
Staff had become more familiar with the new content management system the APA had purchased earlier in the year. This increasing expertise at handling routine work on the site would allow the new Information Architect to spend time on higher level work on other initiatives.
A service offering online voting (Vote Now) was again conducting the Association’s election. The APA’s attorney had expressed an opinion that the Association could notify members about the Summer’s election by e-mail provided that it sent ballots by regular mail to members without valid e-mail addresses. Also, members who received electronic notices could request paper ballots. Because of the APA’s uncertainty about its new office address, the initial mailing and e-mailing of the ballot did not take place until August 30. The response deadline was therefore made October 8 rather than the customary October 1. With polls open for another week, overall participation was down about 250 from last year’s total, and almost 500 fewer members had gone on to the second page of the online ballot to make choices on the three slates (Board of Directors and Nominating and Program Committees) being decided by preferential ballots instead of a simple choice of one of two candidates. On the other hand, the response to date was still almost twice as high as when the Association offered only paper ballots. [The final participation figures showed a decline of 100 members overall and of 400 preferential ballots cast.] Directors discussed ways to improve the presentation of ballot so that more members would vote in all contests.
Dr. Blistein described for the Board an online survey of conditions experienced by adjunct faculty that would be conducted during the Fall by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce. He would notify APA members about this survey.
During the Summer the Board had approved by mail ballot the Executive Committee’s recommendation that Prof. Garry Wills receive the first APA President’s Award. Dr. Blistein reported on the choice of the Goodwin Award Committee and had circulated to the Directors the report of the Outreach Prize Committee.
Action: The Board approved awarding the 2010 Outreach Prize to Peter Meineck of the Aquila Theatre Company for the Company’s program, Page and Stage: The Power of the Iliad Today.
Dr. Blistein stated that the Board would meet next in San Antonio on January 6, 2011, from 3:30-6:30 p.m. and on January 9, 2011, from 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. [The closing time of the latter meeting was subsequently changed to 3:00 p.m.]
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 3:35 p.m.
The Division of Education has been quite busy. In a variety of ways, the Division has been supporting classics education through its awards, through its panels and workshops, and through additional projects. Before outlining those activities, let me thank those divisional committee members who are completing their terms and welcome those who are starting to serve. Thank you to retiring committee members Martha Davis (Education), Jackie Murray (Minority Scholarship), Celia Schultz (Ancient History), Henry Bender (Coffin Fellowship), Kathryn Morgan (Teaching Awards). Welcome to new members Nigel Nicholson (Education), Kristopher Fletcher (Minority Scholarship), William Bubelis (Ancient History), Bronwen Wickkiser (Coffin Fellowship), Gregory Aldrete (Teaching Awards). Georgia Tsouvala takes over as Chair for Ancient History, replacing Carlin Barton; Eric Dugdale takes over from Henry Bender as Chair for Coffin Scholarship; Sanjaya Thakur remains APA Co-Chair for Minority Scholarship; Elizabeth Vandiver replaces Kathryn Morgan as Chair for Teaching Awards. The Division appreciate the hard work of the outgoing Chairs and welcomes the new and continuing ones. In addition, I would like to thank Adam Blistein and the entire APA staff for the many ways they continually make our work so much easier.
The new Ancient History Committee Chair kindly agreed to step in as chair a few months early at the request of the outgoing chair and the Education VP. The Committee co-sponsored a panel, “What Became of Lily Ross Taylor? Women and Ancient History in North America, at APA in San Antonio with the Women’s Classical Caucus. Organizers were Celia Schultz and Michele Salzman. Speakers were: Celia Schultz, Nathan Rosenstein, Elizabeth Carney, Sara Forsdyke, and Ellen Bauerle. The panel was very well attended and the papers sparked lively discussion. Papers will be posted on the APA website. There was consensus that acquiring better data on women and ancient history in terms of graduation, promotion, tenure, and publication rates would be very useful. Ancient history statistics can be difficult to obtain because training may be in history or classics and jobs may be in either as well. The panel for APA 2012 will be organized by Celia Schultz and Serena Connolly and the topic will be Teaching Ancient Law. The panel will be dedicated to the late Ernst Badian. The Committee has lined up an excellent group of speakers. Tentative topic for the panel at APA 2013 is epigraphy and history. The committee is continuing discussions about the best ways it can serve the APA in terms of addressing issues related to ancient history. There have been renewed talks with the Association of Ancient Historians (AAH) and the American Historical Association (AHA) in an effort to address the fact that some ancient historians feel marginalized. The Committee plans to contact the APA Program Committee to address the breakdown into subfields for abstract submissions to APA in an effort to increase the categories that include ancient history and to recognize such subfields as the study of women in history and literature. The Committee also plans to update its presence on the APA website.
The Joint Committee (with AIA) on Minority Student Scholarships will be able to fund two winners this year, thanks to additional support from the Delmas Foundation, for which the Committee is very grateful. The Committee held its annual Raffle to help raise additional monies. The Committee is very appreciative of those organizations that donate materials for the raffle. The total of the two awards together this year will be $6500. The Committee has been very eager to have more funding available because summer programs tend to be very expensive and even this higher amount typically would not cover all of a student’s expenses; in some cases, it may be only about half. There was continued discussion about how to publicize the scholarships. It was decided that Committee members writing to people they knew in the profession might generate more applications than the regular official announcements do alone. In addition, the APA VP for Education said she could blog about the scholarships as well on the APA blog. The Committee’s handsome booklet has been produced in recent years by Tulane University, for which APA offers thanks. AIA has kindly offered to take over this task now from Tulane.
The APA Education Committee and Joint Committee on Classics in American Education met jointly at APA since many of their interests and concerns overlap. (The JCCAE consists of the APA Education Committee plus the ACL President and four ACL-appointed members.)
Update on Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation. The APA Education Committee sponsored a workshop at APA in San Antonio on the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation, organized by Lee Pearcy, former APA Vice President for Education and Co-Chair of the joint APA-ACL Task Force that wrote the Standards. Speakers were John Gruber-Miller, Ronnie Ancona, Sherwin Little, Susan Shelmerdine, and Lee Pearcy, all members of the Task Force. Each speaker provided a brief provocative comment on one aspect of the Standards before taking questions. The session was very well attended and lively discussion took place after each presentation and at the panel’s conclusion. The purpose of the panel was to educate APA members about the Standards and to discuss ways in which the Standards could and/or should affect the teaching of Latin and the training of Latin teachers at all levels.
Plans for further dissemination of Standards. The Committee decided that renting the AACTE (American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education) mailing list and having a work-study student in the APA office cross check it against schools that offer Latin and Latin teacher certification could pare the number down to the best target group for further dissemination of hard copies. It was thought that copies should also be sent to all Classics Ph.D. programs and to all Classics terminal M.A. programs as well as to the Modern Language Association.
The updated state-by-state information on Latin Teacher certification will appear on the APA website sometime this winter. A short description of college teaching careers vs. pre-collegiate teaching careers and the typical pathways to each will also be posted.
The committee discussed how it would like to spend the funds from the APA Gateway Campaign for Teaching Awards (college and pre-collegiate) and other pedagogical awards, including Teacher Training and Certification Awards (as follow-up to the Standards). With the new funding available from the gift of Daniel and Joanna Rose, the Teaching Award amounts (for both college level and pre-collegiate) will be raised for 2011 to $500 per award, with an addition $200 for the winner’s institution for materials to be chosen by the winner. This is a considerable jump from the current level of $300 per winner with no added institution funding. The Committee is very grateful to the Roses for their generous support. We hope in the future to provide more information about the award winners on the APA website, to include links with their institutions, pictures, etc. in an effort to have both outreach to winners’ institutions and links back to APA.
The committee suggested a new award category of funding be set up for pedagogy development, open to both college and pre-collegiate teachers. Funding would ideally be a minimum of $500 and a maximum of $2500, depending on the nature of the project to be funded. A second new award category proposed would be used for Latin teacher training leading towards certification. A possible funding level of up to $1500 was discussed. Necessary funding would have to be in place for these awards to be initiated and amounts for awards would depend upon specific monies available.
A Committee sponsored panel or workshop for APA 2012 in Philadelphia will be submitted to the Program Committee. Eric Dugdale and Ronnie Ancona will be co-organizers and the topic will be Teaching about Pedagogy for the 21st Century. The focus of the panel or workshop will be what students and teachers of classics should know about pedagogy. This will be a useful follow-up to the committee-sponsored APA San Antonio workshop on the Standards. Issues to address will include what is currently done to train students to teach and what kinds of basic information about methodologies, textbooks, etc. for classics courses should be known to teachers and potential teachers.
As a follow-up to a letter received by the APA VP for Education, the committee discussed ways to encourage cross-level classics activities, such as Latin Days for high school students at college campuses. In addition, we hope that the APA website may be able to create an interactive map with links to allow people to click on a particular geographical area for relevant classics information. This would be a particularly useful form of outreach and education for those who may not attend annual meetings and may be looking for more local classical connections.
A response written by Ronnie Ancona, Lee Pearcy, and Sherwin Little was posted to Latinteach. The response emphasized APA’s interest in teachers at the secondary school level, in general, and within the Capital Campaign, in particular.
The value of undergraduate peer teaching, in which undergraduate students attend a professor’s course and do some of the work one would typically have a teaching assistant do in a graduate program, is something for colleges to consider as a way to generate interest in teaching among our undergraduates.
The APA VP for Education was pleased to attend the panel on APA’s opening night, sponsored by the APA Placement Committee and organized by Matthew Roller, whose topic was Classics Ph.D.s and Secondary Teaching: Challenges and Opportunities. Excellent information was presented from a variety of perspectives. The Education Division is delighted to see other parts of APA addressing issues of education and, in particular, diverse career choices, especially in a time when the secondary school job market offers more jobs than the college one.
This year’s Teaching Awards were presented at the Plenary Session at APA in San Antonio. For the first time, winners were announced before APA so that colleagues, friends, or family could share in this knowledge ahead of time and could plan to come to the Plenary Session. Full citations about the winners were available in print format and brief remarks were made about the winners. The winners of the 2010 Awards for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level were Peter Anderson of Grand Valley State University and Nita Krevans, of University of Minnesota, both of whom were present at the Plenary. The 2010 Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Precollegiate Level went to Max Gabrielson of Wilton High School. The Precollegiate Award winner will receive his award at the Annual Institute of the American Classical League, the alternative occasion at which that award may be presented. Citations for the winners can be read on the APA website.
Respectfully submitted,
Ronnie Ancona
The 2011 APA meeting in San Antonio afforded the Division of Outreach many opportunities to fulfill its mission of expanding the study of classics beyond traditional confines, and of representing classical antiquity to a wide and diverse audience. They included its committee meetings and committee-sponsored panels, a live (and lively) performance of an adapted Aristophanic comedy, and organizational gatherings of program scholars chosen for a new public humanities initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Outreach publicized not only its own activities but also the annual meeting itself through a newly launched Facebook page as well as through more established channels. Soon after the meeting, the APA posted rosters of “musical classicists” and “performance classicists” —established by Outreach in 2010—on its website, and began the search for an Editor and Assistant Editor of Amphora, which is published under the Outreach aegis.
I am deeply grateful for the expertise and enthusiasm of my colleagues who lend their time to Outreach initiatives. Some serve on the Outreach Committee itself; others on what has heretofore been called the Committee on the Classical Tradition (COCT), and on the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (CAMP). Some edit and advise the APA Outreach publication Amphora, chief among them T. Davina McClain, of Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University, its Editor, and Diane Johnson, of Western Washington University, its Assistant Editor, and the Amphora editorial board. Special thanks go to APA Executive Director Adam Blistein, Heather Hartz Gasda of the APA Office, our outgoing webmaster Robin Mitchell-Boyask of Temple University and our new information architect Samuel Huskey of the University of Oklahoma.
NEH Grant of $800,000 for Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives. As reported in the last newsletter, Peter Meineck, Artistic Director of the Aquila Theatre Company and clinical professor at New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies, has received a Chairman’s Special Award of $800,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award is funding “Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives”, a major national humanities program slated to travel to one hundred public libraries and arts centers across the USA. Meineck is overseeing this program in conjunction with the American Philological Association, the Urban Library Council, Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. and New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies.
“Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives” will focus on the staging of scenes from the Homeric epics and Athenian tragedy that treat themes of special relevance to modern Americans, and in particular address issues faced by military veterans and their families. CAMP, chaired through the 2011 annual meeting by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz of Hamilton College, helped to recruit 31 program scholars so far to present lectures, coordinate reading groups, and chair discussions at 41 venues. These program scholars, solicited by a widely circulated call for self-nomination, were selected on the basis of such criteria as area of academic specialization, teaching experience, record of involvement in public outreach, and geographic proximity to program sites. There will be another call in the spring of 2011.
The list of those chosen as program-scholars so far is: Jana Adamitis, Christopher Newport University; James Andrews, Ohio University; Randall Childree, Union College; Dorota Dutsch, University of California, Santa Barbara; Jaclyn Dudek, Wayne State University; Eric Dugdale, Gustavus Adolphus College; Anne Duncan, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Emily Fairey, Queens College; Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California, Santa Cruz; Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park; Daniel B. Levine, University of Arkansas; Mike Lippman, University of Arizona; Sally MacEwen, Agnes Scott College; Laura McClure, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Temple University; Timothy Moore, University of Texas, Austin; Corinne Ondine Pache, Trinity University; Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Hamilton College; Patrice Rankine, Purdue University; Diane Rayor Grand Valley State University; Brett Michael Rogers, Gettysburg College; David Schenker, University of Missouri; Niall Slater, Emory University; Nancy Sultan, Illinois Wesleyan University; James Svendsen, University of Utah; Gonda Van Steen, University of Florida; Timothy Wutrich, Case Western Reserve University.
Those selected as program scholars underwent training at the 2011 APA annual meeting and through a web tutorial. They are receiving a $2000 stipend, which includes a subvention to assist with travel to San Antonio. The program consultants have also produced and distributed a scholars’ guide. In their own communities, program scholars will work closely with both the sponsoring libraries and the program directors on developing and implementing this ground breaking new public program in classics. I myself look forward to my assignments with the Washington, DC Public Library and the Public Library of Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Congratulations are in order for Peter Meineck, winner of the 2011 APA Scholarly Outreach Award. Thanks are in order to Peter and Aquila as well: the performance of scenes from Greek epic and tragedy by Aquila actors made the fundraising event for the APA Campaign for Classics, held at NYU in October, what is called—in theatrical parlance— a smashing commercial and critical success.
Classics and Social Media. In early December, owing to the creativity and labors of Heather Hartz Gasda and Samuel Huskey, Outreach launched an APA Facebook page. I have asked several Outreach Committee members, the APA Vice-Presidents, and the Amphora editors to work with us in supplying and posting information for the page on a regular basis. The description of the APA posted on the page is based on a Wikipedia article written by Ruth Scodel, University of Michigan, with the approval of the APA Board, during her APA presidency. We have nearly 600 daily post views, and over 200 Facebook users who “like” the page.
Speakers’ Bureau; Musical and Performance Classicists Rosters. I will be updating the Outreach Speakers’ Bureau over the next few months. Meanwhile, Outreach has launched two, ever-expanding rosters, both on the APA website, which the APA Executive Director announced to the membership in mid-January: a roster of classicists with backgrounds in musical performance and the history of music; and a roster of classicists with backgrounds in theatrical performance and in classical performance receptions. The roster of “musical classicists” includes colleagues willing to share their knowledge of both music and classical antiquity with individuals writing or performing works that are set in the ancient Greco-Roman world, draw on ancient Greek and Latin literary texts, or feature classical figures and themes.
The roster of “performance classicists” lists colleagues willing to share their knowledge of classical antiquity and performance with individuals who are considering staging works that are set in the Greco-Roman world, draw on Greek or Latin literary texts, and/or feature classical figures and themes, in the areas of drama, music and dance. I am indebted to Ted Gellar-Goad, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for helping conceptualize, publicize and coordinate these two new rosters.
Programmatic Outgrowth of Outreach. The organizers of the 2011 Outreach panel on the musical reception of classical texts—Robert Ketterer, University of Iowa, and Andrew Simpson, Catholic University of America—are holding a conference at the University of Iowa from October 27-29, 2011. Entitled “Re-creation: Music and the Reception of Classical Antiquity,” the conference will explore the reception of Greco-Roman and other ancient literature, theory and culture in musical works composed for various venues, among them silent film scores, the musical stage (as operas, operettas, oratorios, and “musical comedies”), instrumental pieces, and pop music in a general, inclusive sense. A concert by the Center for New Music will open the conference; a concert staging the first extant opera, Jacopo Peri’s Euridice, based on the Orpheus legend, will be the central conference event. Simpson will also compose and perform new music to accompany the showing of one or more Italian silent films on classical topics. The call for papers was issued in early January; the organizers are working with Outreach to plan the selection process. Invited speakers so far include Many Kay Gamel; Wendy Heller; Simon Goldhill, University of Cambridge; Jon Solomon, University of Illinois; and Reinhard Strohm, Oxford University.
Amphora. Amphora, which will publish its next issue this coming spring, is seeking a new Editor and Assistant Editor, to assume their positions in January 2012. Advertisements for these positions were posted on the APA website and Facebook page, and on various email lists (Classics, Women’s Classical Caucus, LatinTeach) at the end of January; applications are due on March 15.
I am chairing the Search Committee; Adam Blistein and T. Davina McClain are members ex officio. Two of the members—Barbara Weiden Boyd of Bowdoin College and Kathryn Morgan of the University of California at Los Angeles—were chosen from the past and current APA Board of Directors; Two—Matthew Dillon of Loyola-Marymount University and John Gruber-Miller, Cornell College—come from the Amphora Editorial Board.
Committees. At the San Antonio meeting, the three committees in the Outreach division bade farewell to their outgoing members. Judith Sebesta, University of South Dakota, and Benjamin Stevens, Bard College, are leaving the Committee on Outreach. Nancy Rabinowitz, the committee chair, Kathryn Bosher, Northwestern University and Wilfred Major, Louisiana State University, have completed their terms on CAMP. Dirk Held, Connecticut College, the committee chair, and Caroline Winterer, Stanford University, are stepping down from COCT. I would like to express my appreciation for their efforts, ideas and above all patience and good humor.
The Committee on Outreach has welcomed two new members: Luca Grillo, Amherst College, and Jenifer Rea, University of Florida. Madeleine Henry, Iowa State University, will replace Barbara McManus, College of New Rochelle, who has resigned from what has been known as COCT. Konstantinos Nikoloutsos, St. Joseph’s University, and David Scourfield, National University of Ireland at Maynooth, have joined COCT as well,. Finally, the three new CAMP members are Ruby Blondell, University of Washington; Amy Cohen, Randolph College; and Andrew Simpson.
Each of the three committees presented a panel in San Antonio, and is planning another for 2012 in Philadelphia. Each, moreover, has other activities to report.
Outreach Committee. The Committee on Outreach sponsored a panel, organized by Robert Ketterer and Andrew Simpson, on “The Children of Orpheus: How Composers Receive Ancient Texts.” It featured the following papers:
As the author of the fourth paper selected, on Mendelssohn, was unable to attend at the last minute, Andrew Simpson provided a response instead.
The topic of the Outreach panel for the 2010 APA meeting in Philadelphia will be “Black Classicism”, organized by Kenneth Goings, Ohio State University; Denise McCoskey, Miami University; and Eugene O’Connor, Ohio State University Press..
Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance. Dorota Dutsch has succeeded Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz as chair. The 2011 panel, organized by Dutsch and Rabinowitz, was entitled “Democratic Inflections”. It sought to engage in the international debate on the notion of a “Democratic Turn” in classical reception. In their view, the word “democratic” draws attention to the ways in which performances of classical texts have been appropriated by diverse cultural groups and segments of society, both those in dominant positions but more particularly those that define themselves as disenfranchished. It featured an international panel of presentations and speakers.
A call for papers for the CAMP panel at the 2012 APA meeting in Philadelphia, on traveling performances, was issued in December. Andrew Simpson will coordinate the 2013 panel, which will have a musical focus. Randolph College is now hosting the journal Didaskalia, an online publication about ancient Greek and Roman drama, dance and music as they are performed today. An informal organizational meeting of prospective contributors took place at the APA. It is hoped that an official affiliation with CAMP can be forged over the coming year.
Following up on a roundtable, attended by several CAMP members, about assessing performance work as research in connection with tenure and promotion reviews, CAMP is investigating criteria applied in the fields of theater, music and dance to evaluate faculty members involved in staging productions of classical drama on and beyond their campuses. It hopes to collaborate with the APA Division of Research, and with a North American Performance Archive under consideration by a Research subcommittee, in adopting and promulgating guidelines for evaluations of this kind. The topic will be discussed further at a “satellite” CAMP discussion during the 2012 meeting.
Members are eager to see the new rosters of “musical” and “performance” classicists shared widely with the academic and non-academic theater communities. They also hope it will be possible to consider replicating, for North American classicists at all stages of their careers, a newly funded British public engagement training program designed for classics doctoral students. The program features sessions on print, broadcast and digital media; public programs at museums and in the heritage sector; schools and the creative industry.
This year’s CAMP production featured a dramatic reading of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, as translated, adapted and directed by Bella Vivante of the University of Arizona. Like all CAMP productions, the cast included classics faculty and students from across North America as the performers, who were, in the director’s words, eager “to entertain APA-AIA conference-goers with a lively, comedic romp”. In her words as well, the performance involved “pratfalls, slapstick, stock jokes about chicks, dudes, sex, and drinking, singing, dancing, celebrity impressions, cinematic parodies, good shticks, bad puns and more.” Finally, to reproduce this play’s Old Comedy features within the constraints of modern society, its APA performance was “for Mature Audiences only.”
The members of the cast were Krishni Burns, Amy Cohen, Justin Dwyer, Alison Futrell (doing a brilliant imitation of television personality Barbara Walters), John Given, Emily Jusino, Mike Lippman, Wilfred Major, Catie Mihalopoulos, Sara Saenz, Eiizabeth Scharffenberger, Andrew Simpson (piano accompanist), David J. White and Timothy Wutrich; Andrew Reinhard was the musical consultant.
Members requested that the APA program in future try to schedule the play before the CAMP panel, so that the panel might offer those who performed and attended a chance to share feedback about the production and to participate in the program. CAMP is also greatly appreciative of the efforts by the APA office to integrate the play into the complex annual meeting program; it will work closely with the office to insure adequate rehearsal time and appropriate space for the 2012 production, when Amy Cohen will be the director.
Committee on the Classical Tradition. Thomas Jenkins, Trinity University, has succeeded Dirk Held as chair. At the 2011 meeting COCT sponsored a panel entitled “New World Classics: Receptions of Antiquity for Modern Children.” Organized by Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania, and Deborah Roberts, Haverford College, the panel addressed American versions of antiquity from Hawthorne to the present day. The papers and presenters were:
The 2012 panel, organized by Thomas Jenkins, will explore the significance and implications of the terms “tradition” and “reception,” for the study of the influence of, and later responses to, works from classical antiquity. The 2013 panel, organized by Paul Kimball, Bilkent University, will be on Classics and Islam.
In response to a request by Barbara Weiden Boyd, the APA liaison with the Modern Language Association, the committee will explore allied status with the MLA, since affiliate status, which the APA currently holds, is being phased out. The committee is eager to remain allied with the MLA, even though the MLA and APA now meet at the same time, making it difficult for the APA to organize sessions at the annual MLA meeting.
Finally, I am pleased to announce a development to which I alluded earlier in my report. In response to requests by members of the Outreach Committee as well as the COCT Committee itself, committee members discussed the importance of including the word “Reception” as well as “Tradition” in its name. They seek to recognize the important body of research being presented and published under this rubric, inter alia at the annual APA meeting itself. It was voted to change the name of the Committee on the Classical Tradition to the Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception; the APA Board of Directors approved this change at its meeting on January 9, 2011.
Respectfully Submitted,
Judith P. Hallett
February 2011
The Division of Professional Matters includes under its jurisdiction the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics, the Committee on Placement, the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, and the Classics Advisory Service. Here follow brief reports from each committee, covering matters that were discussed at the annual APA meeting in San Antonio.
Subcommittee on Professional Ethics. Various questions were presented for consideration by the committee; as always, our deliberations are strictly confidential. The communication of outcomes is still pending in one case that has occupied the committee for the past year.
Professional Matters Committee. The majority of the meeting of the corporate Professional Matters Committee was spent hearing reports from the committees under its purview (see below for details) and discussing more effective methods for data collection. The next version of theAPA Guide to Graduate Programs will be placed online, a move that should greatly increase its availability and use. The next APA census, scheduled for this spring, will be conducted electronically. The online version of the census form should simplify distribution, completion, as well as collection and tally of results. The Committee is hoping that it will also dramatically raise the response rate, which, for the last census, was deplorably low (below 50%). A recommendation was made to appoint ad hoc committees to reconsider in a general and comprehensive way all of our current informational surveys, their methods and purpose.
Committee on Placement(Submitted by Erich Gruen). The Placement Committee received only one seriously troublesome complaint this past year. It involved mutual charges of impropriety between members of the same department regarding the search for a senior appointment. We considered carefully the allegations made, sought additional information from both parties and from the dean, exchanged a number of e-mails, and reached a unanimous conclusion. We sent a letter of disapproval to one of the parties, while cautioning the other against registering grievances against irregularities that could not be established. This may not be altogether Solomonic, but the issue was resolved and both parties acknowledged acceptance of the verdict. The matter did, however, raise larger issues, which the committee continues to pursue. A few other, lesser points of contention or inquiries were settled through correspondence by the chair.
The Committee meeting in San Antonio produced discussion of several items that remain part of our agenda through the coming year: increased automation for scheduling of interviews, new regulations for searches that involve senior candidates, interviewing by Skype, undue pressures on candidates to make early decisions, and the continuing effort to encourage PhDs to consider careers in secondary schools. This last was the subject of our panel in San Antonio. And there is strong sentiment to continue this in another form in the next APA Annual Meeting.
Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (Submitted by Stephen Trzaskoma). At its meeting in San Antonio, the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups chiefly dealt with draft reports on the Placement and Journals Surveys and the Departmental Census, all of which after a delay of some years were very near to completion aside from some minor technical matters. CSWMG members had worked on Placement and Journals with members of the Placement and Publications Committees, respectively, and everyone had been charged with not only the traditional duty of analyzing the data as it had been collected but also evaluating the process from data collection to interpretation. Those who had been directly involved in the process made various recommendations based on their concerns that the bulk of the data had little to do with tracking the status of women and minorities in the profession, that the procedures for collecting data were awkward and inefficient, and that interpretation was hampered by low response rates and lack of methodological rigor.
The new Placement Report benefited greatly from the (pro bono) involvement of an outside professional consultant and points the way toward better methods. Because we will rarely have such unremunerated outside help, it was strongly urged that the APA hire consultants to analyze the data we collect and to make recommendations about what data we ought to be collecting in the first place to answer the questions we would like to have answered. Streamlining the data reporting process should allow CSWMG in the future to return to a greater advocacy role and focus its energies on its immediate charges. To those ends, the committee recommended to the Vice President for Professional Matters that he appoint three ad hoc committees to continue the process of looking into the three areas of reporting and, with input from CSWMG and the other relevant committees, to redesign completely the way in which they are handled.
Classics Advisory Service (Submitted by John F. Miller).
Respectfully submitted,
James M. May
The Division of Publications welcomed the inaugural meeting of theAssociation's first Web Architect, Professor Samuel Huskey of Oklahoma. His presence in all our meetings and his active engagement in the coming years bode very well indeed for the Association and its ability to communicate its business and its mission to many audiences. He will take immediate charge of the Association's website, now empowered by a new "content management system" to be a more flexible and attractive tool for our various communications purposes. In conjunction with VP Hallett of the Division of Outreach, he is already exploring the possibilities of the new social media to our benefit, but he is as well taking a reflective and longer look at the future. He will be engaged during 2011 in various virtual and corporeal meetings and discussions, both within the Association, with other scholars of the ancient world, and with colleagues from the American Council of Learned Societies and its constituent organizations.
One valuable activity at the annual meetings in recent years has been an informal gathering called "the website meeting", when the Executive Director, the sitting Presidents (praesens, quondam, et futurus), and the Vice Presidents meet together with the "website editor" to discuss common issues. This has been chaired by one or another of the sitting officers, but we propose now to regularize the meeting and place it under the chairship of the Information Architect as the place where our Associations' overall communication strategy is reinterpreted, reshaped, and enacted.
The search for an editor of our monographs series has not yetsucceeded; expressions of interest and nominations are still welcome. In the meantime, outgoing editor Kathryn Gutzwiller received the warm thanks of the Committee and the Vice President. She reports that since last year's report, two manuscripts have been published: Bob Kaster, Studies on the Text of Macrobius’ “Saturnalia” (companion piece to his just-published Loeb of the Saturnalia and forthcoming OCT) and Scott Garner, Traditional Elegy: The Interplay of Meter,Tradition, and Context in Early Greek Poetry. One further manuscript has gone into production: Sean Gurd, Work in Progress: LiteraryRevision as Social Performance in Ancient Rome. Of two proposals received, one was accepted and one rejected on the basis of length. One manuscript is currently under review. As Vice President, I will be meeting with OUP representatives in New York in March to discuss the terms of our continued relationship; and will also serve adinterimas editor for all purposes of works in progress, supported by various colleagues.
Professor Katharina Volk is well in to her term as editor of TAPA. In 2010, the journal published two issues, 140.1 (spring; containing an Editor's Note and papers by Ruby Blondell, Victoria Wohl, Edwin Carawan, Rana Saadi Liebert, Kathy L. Gaca, Sara H. Lindheim, and Emma Scioli) and 140.2 (autumn; containing Josiah Ober's Presidential Address and papers by Alex Gottesman, Alex C. Purves, Owen Goslin, José M. González, William Hutton, and Dunstan Lowe). Issue 141.1 (containing papers by James I. Porter, Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, John Heath, Mary T. Boatwright, Randall J. Pogorzelski, Tim Stover, and Giovanni Ruffini) is currently in press and expected to be published in late spring.
During the year, TAPA received 42 submissions, of which two wereresubmissions. Four were not sent out for review, 17 were rejected, 11 were accepted, four were invited to revise and resubmit, and 6 were still sub iudice at the time of our meetings. Thirty of the items were primarily literary (13 Greek, 17 Latin), seven historical (four Greek, three Roman), 2 archaeological, and 3 from the domains of philosophy and law. 25 were authored by males, 18 by females (one paper co-authored).
Professor Sander Goldberg serves as editor for textbooks, taking anambitious and appropriate view of the need to make each contribution count. He reports that George Sheets' translation of the Hausmaninger-Gamauf Casebook on Roman Property Law is now in production at OUP. In addition, Prof. Sheets has provided extensive supplementary classroom material that will be available on an accompanying website hosted by the press. A commentary on Cicero, Pro Murena is currently out with two referees. Pending submissions to the Textbook Series include Lucian's True History and an anthology of Greek lyric.
Two electronic projects are also in the active planning stage: a self-styled 'multimedia commentary' on Martial's epigrams under the auspices of APA Textbooks and a full-functioned, web-based version of T.R.S. Broughton's Magistrates of the Roman Republic under the auspices of APA Classical Resources.
In the wake of the retreat conducted with members of the PublicationsCommittee, selected VPs and other invitees in Chicago in December 2009, we continue to explore ways in which the Association can best serve the needs of the profession and the Association's members. We are more in consensus now than perhaps before on the value of editorial mentoring that our monograph series provides and have renewed our search for an editor in that spirit; but we are also well aware of ambitions for more transformative change and were glad to welcome to the Committee's meeting former editor and board member Don Mastronarde, who reported on conversations that he has been having about bringing under way a series of "California Classical Monographs". We look forward to discussing further whether and how the Association could participate in that undertaking.
In closing, I can only salute with great warmth and great butinsufficient gratitude the services to the Association of two splendid colleagues. Professor Robin Mitchell-Boyask has served for twelve years as Web Editor, seeing us through from quite primitive times to the successful transformation to "content management" mentioned above. Few members of the Association can have spent anywhere near as much time doing work in itself often repetitive and niggling and yet of the highest value to our ability to operate in a way that serves the profession and our members. I do not know whether to admire more his intelligence or his collegiality, so I will settle by simply thanking him for his friendship.
Professor Kathryn Gutzwiller, meanwhile, steps down as editor formonographs after a term extended by a year for no better reason than because we asked her and she was unaccountably generous with her time and thought. She has been an exemplary model of what an Association editor should be: learned, exacting, kind, patient, collegial -- and ever in cheering good spirits. She too has my warmest thanks.
James J. O’Donnell
I report first on the existing committees and projects reporting to the division, then on the group of exploratory task forces appointed early in 2010 after the Directors’ approval last year.
1. American Office of L’Année Philologique. Following the discussion at the October board meeting, where concerns were expressed about the methods of producing APh, the large share of the endowment resulting from the capital campaign that will be devoted to maintaining the American Office, and changing patterns of use of APh, a small group met in New York on October 20 (the President, Dee Clayman, the Executive Director, Adam Blistein, the Director of the American Office, Lisa Carson, the director of the APh website, Eric Rebillard, and myself, with Samuel Huskey joining us by phone for part of the meeting as incoming Information Architect). We talked about every aspect of the way APh is produced, how it is made available, how we train students in using bibliographies, and how the Association promotes APh to its membership and the larger community. This discussion continued at the Advisory Committee’s meeting in San Antonio, where Margarethe Billerbeck, president of SIBC, joined us.
In the area of access, APh will now make free trial subscriptions available to both individuals and institutions (the latter has been possible in the past but poorly publicized). The committee has also suggested creating a less expensive lowest-tier institutional subscription for small colleges. The evolution of the APA web site in the coming year, as well as its use of media like Facebook, will aim at much more aggressive promotion of APh, and a display at next year’s Annual Meeting is planned to show off the recently added features of APh, which we believe are poorly known to our constituency. The low levels of subscriptions (< 1000 for institutions and individuals combined) compared to the numbers using resources like the TLG suggests there is much room for improvement.
Discussions about how APh is produced and the costs that result from these methods are at a less conclusive stage, but such obvious moves as using author abstracts from journals rather than redoing them all from scratch are at present not supported by the Paris office. There is still significant work to be done in ensuring that the funds put into APh result in enough value added to justify themselves. There is considerable diversity of opinion about the possibility of crowd-sourcing of part of the content; those inside the project are generally negative. This is not a closed conversation, however. Our committee tends to favor ending production of the now unwieldy print version, which continues to drive many practices that add time and cost to the production of the database but which now generates a minority of the income and is neither the most up-to-date version available at any given moment nor the easiest to use.
We have made still less progress on thinking about derivatives of APh that might offer added value to our membership and be made available on the Web under open access terms. The major difficulty here is simply a lack of practicable suggestions of what might be useful, and we welcome ideas from the Directors and others. We have, however, come up with some suggestions for further enhancements in the use of APh. An underlying question is whether future scholars will actually use it extensively in their research, or whether they will begin with JSTOR or Google. There is much to be said for APh, including its international and multilingual character, and we all probably need to do better at teaching our students that an English-only, online-only approach to scholarship just isn’t acceptable.
The fall meeting also produced the recommendation (acted on at the Directors’ meeting on January 6) for the creation of a position of Chair of the advisory committee, separate from the Vice President. I would be very grateful for suggestions of possible candidates for this office, who should be distinguished and well-known scholars, passionate about bibliography, wise, diplomatic, fond of Paris, and fluent in French.
In conclusion I should say that the American Office has done an excellent job of keeping up with the routine work, with its ever-increasing pace of publication, and even in erasing part of the backlog from multi-author volumes and from Canadian material, a large backlog of which was dropped into their laps unexpectedly when the Canadian Office dematerialized.
2. TLL Fellowship Committee. Not much needs to be said on this subject at present. The committee continues to do its job in an exemplary fashion. Again this year, but in contrast to the situation in the rather recent past, there was a healthy crop of applicants, 16 by the deadline and 3 more after it. Moreover, Anthony Corbeill, the chair, reports that fully eight of the applicants were of a quality that they would cheerfully award them a fellowship.
3. The Task Forces. In October I was able to report on significant work done by some of these. There is now more to be added on some of those and there are reports by some groups we did not hear from in the fall.
3.1. Translations
There was a full, largely descriptive report in October by this group, chaired by Susanna Braund. I asked the group to think further about what the APA should do, and a follow-up report received just before the meeting recommended five actions.
It will be evident that the first few tasks are essentially research work and the latter ones essentially publication.
Action item: Create a standing Committee on Translations of Classical Authors, reporting jointly to the Research and Publication Divisions, and charge it with carrying forward the proposals of the task force in cooperation with the respective vice presidents.
3.2. Latin Textual Corpus
There has been no report from this task force, mainly because of the serious illness of the co-chair’s father. We hope in 2011 for more activity here.
3.3. Summer Programs
There was a report in October from this group. I reported back to it the contents of the Directors’ discussion and asked for further consideration. A meeting of this task force was to take place in San Antonio.
3.4. Ancient Biography/Prosopography
There was a report in October from Richard Talbert on behalf of this group, indicating that there was no scope for any APA project in this area at present. That continues to be present, although there have been more recent developments with various of the European projects in the area of prosopography, and Vice President for Publications James O’Donnell reports that a project for turning Broughton’s Magistrates of the Roman Republic into a database is under consideration.
Action item: Dissolve the Task Force on Ancient Biography and charge the Committee on Research with continued monitoring of this area.
3.5. Biographical Database of Classical Scholars
Ward Briggs has followed up his earlier report with further progress. The template, with model content, is now fully developed, and the project is prepared to start adding significant bodies of material if funding can be found for the clerical and research assistance necessary. It is now the appropriate time to create a formal framework for this project. The Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina is prepared to be the host for the database, and it seems appropriate, along the lines of previous APA projects, for the USC to be the home of the project under the supervision of an APA committee.
Action item: Turn the task force into a standing Advisory Committee for the Biographical Database of Classical Scholars, and authorize the Executive Director to negotiate an agreement with the Center for Digital Humanities of the University of South Carolina for APA sponsorship of this project under the University’s management.
3.6. Performance Archive
Following the report of this group that I presented in October, a posting on the web site invited proposals to create such an archive. Several preliminary inquiries were received, and one pre-proposal, from the Center for Ancient Studies and the Aquila Theatre at NYU. The task force received this pre-proposal favorably, and the committee now recommends that we solicit definitive proposals for a March 31 deadline, keeping open the possibility that one or more other proposals might emerge in that time.
Action item: Authorize the setting of a March 31, 2011, deadline for receipt of detailed proposals by the Task Force, and authorize the Task Force to accept a proposal and work with an institution to develop a full project based in an institution and sponsored by the APA.
3.7. Research and the Profession
Barbara McManus recruited a task force to be chaired by Michael Gagarin.
3.8. Digital Peer Review and the APA Portal
Just before the meetings I received a detailed and thoughtful report from Cynthia Damon on behalf of this task force. They took up three topics that had been raised at the Research Committee’s retreat in September, 2009.
The Research Committee was not entirely of one mind in responding to this part of the report. The most important question, in my view, was whether this was the APA’s concern or belonged in the world of reviewing generally. BMCR’s attempt to do this some years ago was regarded as a failure, mainly for lack of willing reviewers. On the other hand, the world has changed quite a bit since then, and it is not self-evident that an attempt today would meet the same result, especially if it solicited reviewers in an activist fashion. It is possible that this is an area where the APA might collaborate with BMCR, combining capabilities to provide an important service to the profession and to higher education.
Respectfully submitted,
Roger S. Bagnall
January 2011
The APA held its 142nd Annual Meeting in conjunction with the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in San Antonio, Texas, from January 6-9, 2011. About 2,300 members, guests, and volunteers from both societies registered. Erwin Cook chaired the APA's Local Arrangements Committee, and with his colleagues provided extremely valuable support to the staff and made it possible to carry out the many tasks associated with the meeting.
The APA Program consisted of 58 paper sessions. Twenty-nine of these were developed by the Program Committee from submitted abstracts. Panels proposed by APA committees, affiliated groups, and individual APA members were also presented. APA once again collaborated with AIA in presenting Roundtable Discussion Sessions.
Dee Clayman’s Presidential Panel was entitled, "New Chapters in Recovering Greek and Latin Literature". The following day at the Plenary Session President Clayman gave a Presidential Address entitled "Berenice II, Lady of the Lock". The Plenary Session also featured the presentation in absentia of the APA’s first President’s Award to Garry Wills.
The Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance returned to its practice of offering a staged reading of a play with classical content; this year, under the direction of Bella Vivante, members offered an authentically bawdy version of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae. Four members won prizes consisting of books donated by exhibitors at the Minority Scholarship Committee's annual raffle.
Once again, the Executive Director's report, normally presented at the annual business meeting, was published in advance of the annual meeting and can be found on the web site http://apaclassics.org/index.php/about_the_APA/director_report/executive_directors_report_for_2010/ and in this Newsletter. The briefer business meeting was devoted to a short report from President Clayman, the announcement of election results (see page 3 of the Summer/Autumn 2010 Newsletter), and a brief report by Executive Director Adam D. Blistein (see next item) acknowledging the contributions of both members and nonmembers to the success of the annual meeting and to the operations of the Association during the past year. The business meeting concluded with the transition of the Presidency from Prof. Clayman to Prof. Kathleen M. Coleman.
As has become traditional, the list of APA members whose deaths were reported to the Association during the past year was read at the Plenary Session. That list was published on page 35 of the Summer/Autumn 2010 Newsletter.
Many people contributed to a very successful 142nd meeting of the Association here in San Antonio, and, in addition, a number of people conclude significant terms of service to the Association at this meeting. We need to thank each one.
Erwin Cook of Trinity University served as Local Arrangements Chair and recruited the volunteers that we need to run the meeting. He also prepared a wonderful guide to the city for us.
The San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter and Riverwalk provided sleeping and meeting rooms and an enthusiastic staff that made us very welcome. The staff of Experient, Inc., Linda Walter and Molly Witges, helped us and the AIA to negotiate contracts for this meeting, and they provided extremely valuable assistance in both making arrangements in advance of the meeting and in handling events here.
Andri Cauldwell, AIA meeting coordinator, successfully managed the book exhibit and organized the opening reception at the San Antonio Museum of Art.
Heather Gasda, as usual, successfully attended to all the details of the meeting.
Renie Plonski made the Placement Service as welcoming as possible in a bad job market and was again able to notify all candidates in advance of the meeting whether any institutions had requested interviews with them.
Julie Carew, our Development Director, was an extra pair of eyes and ears for me here at the meeting and has been essential to the progress we have made in annual giving and the Gateway campaigns.
This year's Program Committee consisted of Robert Kaster, Chair, Elizabeth Asmis, Maud Gleason, Steven Oberhelman, and Jeffrey Rusten. Steve and Jeff complete 3-year terms on the Committee at this meeting, and we appreciate their hard work on the last 3 programs.
Bella Vivante directed the traditional CAMP performance, a reading of her version of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae to an enthusiastic audience.
The Presidential Panel was entitled "New Chapters in Recovering Greek and Latin Literature" Dee invited David Sider, Kathryn Gutzwiller, Richard Janko, and Dirk Obbink to give some valuable updates on their work with both new and familiar texts. Dee's Presidential Address, "Berenike II: Lady of the Lock", took us through all the disciplines available to our field to illuminate the life of a remarkable historical figure and the work of two of our favorite poets.
Two members conclude lengthy terms of dedicated service to the Association's publications program at this meeting. First, Kathryn Gutzwiller has been Editor of our monographs series for the last five years. We appreciate her efforts to produce a number of excellent books and particularly her willingness to stay in this position for an extra year as we sought her successor.
Second, Robin Mitchell-Boyask completes his term as our first Web Editor after an astounding twelve years of service. Up until very recently Robin was the only person able to add material to the site, and we in the office and the members at large owe him much gratitude for keeping the site up to date so conscientiously and for so long.
Finally, a number of officers conclude terms of service on the Board of Directors as this meeting. They are
We are grateful to all of them for their dedicated service.
And, thank you all for attending this meeting in a time of reduced support for travel, extreme weather, and unsettling new approaches to airport security. Please join me in thanking the people I have listed for their contributions to this meeting and to the Association.
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
This is a report on activity in the Association Office during 2010. It is intended to supplement information about Board and committee meetings and especially the reports of our very hard-working vice presidents that appear regularly on the web site and in the Newsletter. The following paragraph appears, with few changes, in each of my annual reports, but it bears repeating at least once a year if not more often.
The APA is ambitious in that it operates programs that are similar to and sometimes even more sophisticated than those of much larger learned societies. If Classics is to continue to be a core discipline of the humanities, we have to do the kinds of things that MLA, AHA, College Art, and Religion do for their fields with a third or a fifth as many members. Volunteer labor, substantial amounts of it, is the only way we can provide the kinds of essential services that our bigger sisters do, and I am grateful to the many APA members who take on our work without compensation and sometimes without reimbursement of expenses.
Financial. Our fiscal year ends on June 30 of each year, and our auditors, Briggs, Bunting and Dougherty of Philadelphia, completed their audit of our financial statements for the 2009 fiscal year last Winter. The Spring Newsletter contained a summary of that report, and you can obtain the complete report on the APA web site at http://apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/FY09_Financial_Statements.pdf or from my office.
Auditors, like Classicists, have their terms of art that may seem opaque at first glance. Once deciphered, however, they can give a good picture of our operations. The three asset categories (unrestricted, temporarily restricted, permanently restricted) are good examples. Permanently restricted assets are gifts that the donor expects us to keep in perpetuity and invest so that we can use the proceeds of that investment for one or more of our programs. Temporarily restricted assets consist of the investment income generated by the permanently restricted assets plus any grants we receive from the NEH or a foundation to carry out a specific project, and unrestricted assets are funds we can use for any Board-approved purpose.
What Page 3 of the 2009 report tells you is that during the 2009 fiscal year we acquired about $676,000 in new permanently restricted assets, all of which consisted of gifts to the new Gateway endowment. In addition, the temporarily restricted column tells you that we acquired about $49,000 in new grant money (this was a grant from the Mellon Foundation to explore improvements to l'Année philologique on the Internet) and spent about $270,000 of previously received grant money or investment income to fund, for example, the American Office of l'Année (still operating on its traditional NEH year-to-year funding through June 2011) or the Pearson Fellowship (investment income from Lionel Pearson's gift). Note that in the Unrestricted column the positive figure in the row "Net Assets Released from Restrictions" equals the negative figure in the Temporarily Restricted column. Once we spend grant money or investment income in accordance with donors' wishes, it becomes ordinary income to pay expenses, and needs to be treated like dues revenue or annual meeting registration fees.
The subsequent rows show the program areas in which we spend our income, and it's no accident that most of those rows correspond to our division names and other major activities. While Page 4 of the report will tell you what we spent in typical expense categories like salaries, travel, and insurance, auditors want in the first place to show the extent to which a not-for-profit organization is using its funds for its programs as opposed to "supporting services" like fund raising, general administration, and member services. In fiscal 2009 supporting services represented about $230,000 out of $1,225,000 in total expenditures, or roughly 19%. Our auditors consider a supporting services percentage of 25% or below to be reasonable and in one year cautioned us when they thought the figure (12%) might be too low.
The expense section needs two more comments. First, as noted, you can connect the expense headings to our regular programs and divisions except that "special projects" will not immediately be clear. We use the special projects line to show expenses from one-time grants to carry out a task over a specific time period. Over the past seven years we have received a number of these grants from the Mellon Foundation and in the 2010 fiscal year, we also received them from the Packard Humanities Institute and the Kress Foundation. All of these grants had something to do with l'Année philologique, and so we might have included the expenditures funded by these grants in the Research Division line where we show, among other things, the ongoing costs of running the American Office of APh. However, the grants come and go, and they generate substantial expenditures in one year and very modest ones in the next. By segregating their expenses into the Special Projects line, we get a truer picture of ongoing operations in the Research Division.
Second, while I am your chief administrator, not all of my salary goes into the three supporting services lines (although some of it does). I estimate how much time I and my colleagues in the APA Office spend on each program area and allocate appropriate percentages of not just our salaries and benefits but items like the rent we pay to the University of Pennsylvania, photocopying expenses, and depreciation of computer equipment to those program areas. I periodically review these allocations with the auditors and the Finance Committee, and any major change in our operations (like hiring Development Director Julie Carew in 2007) generates a complete revision of those allocations. Accounting deals mainly with numbers, and its practitioners (and I consider myself a low-level accounting practitioner) try to be as scientific as possible. Sometimes, however, accounting is an art and not a science.
Because the APA is a not-for-profit organization, our "bottom line" is called "Change in Net Assets", and the way our auditors show these figures is another area where some explanation of terminology would be helpful. First, the auditors provide a figure they call (somewhat opaquely) "Change in Net Assets Before Other Changes", but which you can think of as an individual year's operating budget: i.e., all the income and expenses I have discussed above. The "other changes" to which this heading refers are investment activities in the General Fund. (As previously noted, investment activities in the Coffin, Pearson, and Research and Teaching Funds appear under Temporarily Restricted Net Assets, and when proceeds from those Funds are spent, they appear in the "Net Assets Released from Restrictions" line.) These "other changes" include money drawn down from the General Fund, dividend income, capital gain distributions, actual gains and losses on instruments bought and sold, and, perhaps most important, changes in the value of funds we continue to hold. You can see details of these calculations on pages 10 and 11 of the auditors' report.
In my opinion the section about changes in net assets are some of the most meaningful lines in the financial statements because they give a snapshot of both how we were able to fund our activities from our regular sources of income (Changes . . . before Other Changes) and how much we relied on income from the General Fund (Changes in Net Assets). And please keep in mind that the General Fund was itself produced by an NEH challenge grant campaign in the 1980's overseen by Roger Bagnall.
Of course, June 30, 2009, was just a few months after a very low point for financial markets. Like almost everyone else's, the Association's endowments began to lose value early in 2008 and the declines continued through early 2009 before starting a slow recovery. Therefore, this auditors' report shows a much greater loss than in the previous year (although I am happy to report that a preliminary draft of the 2010 audit shows a recovery of about two thirds of what was lost in 2009). In my previous report I described steps the Finance Committee and Board took in 2009 to reduce expenditures and thereby reduce our draw on the endowments when they were at a low level. We were successful in that regard. During the 2009 fiscal year we drew down only 3.4% of the average value of the General Fund over the previous three years when our general policy is to draw 5%. This left more of the Fund available to participate in the recent recovery, but you should be aware that we draw on these funds even when they are in decline. We can do this without exhausting the fund by limiting our draw to the customary 5% in years when the endowments are appreciating. When there is a positive change in net assets in the Unrestricted column (and I expect to see one in the 2010 auditors' statement), that means that the General Fund has grown in value even after withdrawals from it to pay ongoing expenses.
Finally, on Page 3 of the auditors' report, please look at the Total Expenses line. For 2008 it was $1,227,000; for 2009 it was $1,225,000; and the preliminary figure for 2010 is $1,250,000. Overall expenses declined slightly from 2008 to 2009 despite the fact that we had $44,000 in special projects expenses in 2009 versus none in 2008. Expenses appear to have increased by $25,000 in 2010, but special projects expenses have grown in that period by $57,000. You can be confident that we are doing our best to find economies wherever possible.
Capital Campaign and Annual Giving. I am very grateful to the members who came forward this year with generous gifts not only to the campaign but also to annual giving. Particularly in difficult financial times it is unpleasant to have to ask you to support two different fund-raising goals, but it is necessary. Annual giving is about our present. Unrestricted gifts reduce the deficit in the "Changes . . . Before Other Changes" figure. The current NEH grants supporting the American Office and the TLL still have matching gift requirements fulfilled by annual giving designations. The Minority Scholarship is particularly dependent on annual giving designations.
The Gateway Campaign is about our future: our ability to maintain the American Office of l'Année philologique after the current (and final) NEH grant expires in June 2011 and to fund new projects that we are only beginning to realize that we need. A few campaign donors have already made gifts designated for the other programs described in the campaign case statement (http://www.apaclassics.org/ee/images/uploads/documents/Full_Case.pdf) and during the San Antonio meeting the Finance Committee and Board will discuss how soon we can start drawing down income from the Campaign endowment to fund those projects, and the committees that oversee those programs, especially in the Education Division, will start to think about how best to use gifts like Daniel and Joanna Rose's generous donation of $50,000 to enhance our teaching awards program, and an anonymous donor's gift at the same level to support projects to recruit and train the next generation of outstanding Classics teachers.
Also this January Samuel Huskey begins a four-year term as the APA's first Information Architect. The Search Committee that recommended this appointment thought that he would be the appropriate person to coordinate efforts to fulfill the campaign's promise to make the APA a Gateway to the highest quality scholarship about classical antiquity for the widest possible audience in the format appropriate to each segment of that audience. Sam's vision extends beyond our web site, hence the new title, and the good news is that there is much we can do in this area just by incorporating the work of volunteers who have already stepped forward to make the Gateway promise a reality.
Although we needed to ask the NEH for an extension of time to claim challenge grant matching funds.(which request was granted), the campaign has had a number of successes in the past year. These included a number of new gifts in the $40,000-$50,000 range as well as a very successful fund-raising event held at New York University this October that raised over $40,000. Many people served on a committee that contributed to the success of this event, but the real heroes were committee co-chairs Dee Clayman and Matthew Santirocco (and his staff) as well as Peter Meineck and his colleagues at the Aquila Theatre Company. Peter organized a wonderful series of readings from Greek epic and drama around the theme of homecomings for an appreciative audience that did not largely consist of Classicists. The event was a model for both an APA fund-raiser and an APA outreach effort, and we hope to do something similar in other cities during the coming year.
Another effort that has boosted contributions to the campaign were solicitations of gifts by "Friends" of a number of distinguished Classicists. The appeals currently underway honor
George Goold
George Kennedy
Mary Lefkowitz
Zeph Stewart.
The organizers of these groups felt that soliciting gifts to the campaign for our future was an appropriate way to honor these distinguished Classicists who helped the APA to flourish in the past and whose contributions to the field live on today. As you can see in the acknowledgment list published in the annual meeting Program and on the web site, http://www.apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/FY10RecognitionText.pdf, donations of any amount are ascribed both to the individual donor and to the appropriate Friends group. In addition, as is our custom, a donor of $250 or more may choose to add this tribute to the listing of his or her individual gift. (Please note that not all qualifying donors chose to make such a designation.) I encourage members to start new Friends groups, and ask only that they notify me before beginning solicitations.
As a result of these successes, we now need less than $200,000 by July 2011 to claim the final installment of NEH challenge grant matching funds and an additional $500,000 by July 2012 to retain that amount. During the San Antonio meeting the combined Development and Campaign Committees will develop a plan to reach these two goals. The amphora display in the Exhibit Hall that I wrote about last week is a celebration of the fact that we have managed to raise close to $2 million for this effort and a successful end is in sight. Please visit that display and pick up a button to show your support for the campaign. If you have not yet made a pledge or if it has been some time since you last made one, now is a good time to contribute. Pledges to be paid on any schedule through July 2012 will be particularly helpful at this time.
Communication with Members. The Classical Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania (where we are still housed - at least in spirit and by list serve) regularly brings in speakers from other institutions to give lectures on Thursday afternoon. These speakers are often people whose names I know well from our membership rolls but whom I've never met. Their response when I introduce myself is invariably the same: "Oh, you're the one who sends me all those e-mails." I appreciate that response for several reasons. First, the speaker never seems to be expressing any annoyance (there is even gratitude on occasion), and that reassures me that I'm not abusing the privilege of having your e-mail addresses. More important, it's reassuring to know that in a year when it's been difficult to publish newsletters in a timely fashion and when we've been learning to take advantage of a better but still challenging content management system for our web site, that there is a quick and reliable way for me to get in touch with most of the membership when we need to.
The word "most" appears in boldface above because, in fact, we do not have valid e-mail addresses for about 20% of the members. In some cases these are members without good access to either computer equipment or the internet (or both), and I am committed to keeping them informed as best we can. Particularly in the current financial situation, however, "as best we can" has to be less frequently than before. We obtained much of the expense savings described briefly above and in more detail in this report last year from reducing our printing and postage costs. In the majority of cases, however, we don't have valid e-mail addresses because members do not update them when they move to a different location, or because they are concerned their e-mail addresses will be shared too widely and their spam filters will be overloaded. I want to assure the latter group that the APA never shares e-mail addresses with any other organization, and I limit my e-mails to the membership to one per week, and the frequency is usually much less. It is very easy to add your e-mail address to your membership record. Just send an e-mail to the Johns Hopkins University Press which maintains our membership database (jrnlcirc@press.jhu.edu).
In 2010 we were scheduled to begin producing four newsletters per year (down from the six that we have had for many years). The Board accepted this recommendation both to save money as described above but also because e-mails and the web site have made us less reliant on the newsletter. Still I apologize for the fact that there has been no Summer or Fall newsletter to date although I expect to publish a combined issue on the web site the week after the annual meeting. I think that, thanks to e-mail, the web site, the blog that Robin Mitchell-Boyask set up last January, and the new Facebook page that Judy Hallett launched this Fall with help from Heather Gasda in my office, we've been able to keep members informed of basic activities like the annual meeting and the placement service, but we have not done such a good job of disseminating other newsletter features like officer reports and lists of future meetings, summer programs, and fellowship opportunities. I look forward to getting back on track with newsletter production in 2011 and to post immediately to the web site and some of these other venues more of the information that used to wait for a newsletter.
On the other hand, during 2010 we successfully carried out a great deal of the Association's business online: our annual elections for the second time and, for the first time, annual meeting submissions, the annual survey of placement service candidates last Summer, and collection of candidates' scheduling information this Fall. Members also are increasingly using our online giving mechanisms to make annual giving and capital campaign donations, and we're acquiring the software necessary to create PDF forms that responders can fill out on their computers. We can and will perform all of these functions more smoothly in the future, but this list demonstrates our commitment to exploiting new technologies and making it easier for members to take advantage of Association programs. In 2011 we plan to publish the next edition of our Guide to Graduate Programs on the web site and to add information and search capabilities to it that have not been available in the printed version.
Membership. As of December 31, 2010, our total membership is almost exactly same as it was on that date last year (3,139 versus 3,140). In fact, the decline in total membership represents a modest increase in individual members because the total figure includes 12 institutional subscribers lost during 2010. This is part of a trend that has been going since the beginning of my tenure in 1999, and is now much less of a concern than it once was because we know from the regular increases in royalties we receive from Project Muse and JSTOR, that a growing number of institutions are subscribing to TAPA in electronic form. Further, the number of lost institutional subscribers in 2010 is about half of the amount we've experienced in other recent years.
However, the essentially static membership figure disguises a lot of activity. In 2010 over 300 new members joined the APA, and over 300 did not renew their memberships. Some of the departures are due to "natural causes" as members leave the field or leave us entirely. But, many of the members we lose are relatively senior Classicists still very much active in the field. One of the documents I prepare annually for the Nominating Committee is a list of members who have served the Association in some way in the past. Each year I have to delete a dozen or so names from this list not because of the natural causes mentioned above but because they have either forgotten to pay dues or have decided not to.
We're working with Johns Hopkins Press to provide additional reminders for those who leave us inadvertently, but I appeal to those who leave us on purpose to reconsider. Your career may no longer depend on the placement service or on making a presentation at the annual meeting, but I think that the information in the e-mails mentioned above and access to the Members Only section of our web site where the directory of members resides and you can obtain several publication discounts still makes membership a worthwhile purchase. More important, the APA needs your knowledge of the field particularly at a time when we are likely to see more questions about the value of studying Classics. As usual this Fall, while the Nominating Committee was doing its work, four of our vice presidents were working with President Dee Clayman to fill 10 to 15 upcoming vacancies in the committees in their divisions. I think that this Fall every one of them wanted to appoint at least one person who turned out not to be a current member. I'm glad to report that in all cases the candidate agreed to rejoin the APA, but in 2011 please consider not only what you can still get from the APA at this stage of your career, but also how you can help the field by participating in our work.
I am very grateful to the 59 departments (up from 45 last year) who participated in our departmental membership program in 2010 (see page 67 of the annual meeting Program or http://apaclassics.org/index.php/about_the_APA/departmental). At a time when everyone has to institute budget cuts, even the $100 payments from B.A.-granting departments must have been hard to come by. We rely on the income generated by this program that the NEH will match for both the American Office of l'Année and our TLL Fellowship.
Interactions with Other Organizations. I continue to benefit from my participation in the ACLS' Conference of Administrative Officers (CAO) and in the National Humanities Alliance (NHA). Please see the latter organization's web site (http://www.nhalliance.org/events/2011-upcoming-events/index.shtml) to learn about NHA's Humanities Advocacy Day this coming March. This is a program designed to inform members of Congress about the NEH and other issues of importance to the humanities. I regularly participate in this event and find that it is a useful way of simply making sure that members of Congress know that the NEH exists and what it does. The Endowment's budget is, of course, very important to the APA and to many of its members, but it constitutes a minuscule portion of the entire federal budget and could easily be invisible even to a conscientious legislator. With many new members entering Congress this year, this educational function of Humanities Advocacy Day will be particularly important.
Thisyear as usual, Heather Gasda or I attended all of the other Classics meetings that are regularly on our calendar: CAAS in the Fall, CANE and CAMWS in the Spring, and the ACL Institute in early Summer. In addition, I was invited to the Centennial Meeting of the Classical Association of Virginia to bring greetings from the APA. This was extremely pleasant duty and also gave me a chance to hear some talks during the last day of the CAMWS Southern Section meeting, an event I'd never attended before.
Work of the Divisions. As noted at the beginning of this report, the reports of our vice presidents are the best places to read about the APA's many activities. Those of us in the office support that work as appropriate, and this is a brief list of programs in which we were particularly active.
The graphic designer who also prepares each issue of Amphora for us also designed Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation that we developed along with ACL. My office worked on distributing this document to state foreign language supervisors, and in San Antonio our Joint Committee (with ACL) on the Classics in American Education will talk about the best way to get this document in the hands of the right people at various schools of education. Our hope is that these standards will serve as guidelines that academic institutions can use to develop teacher-training programs specifically for Latin teachers. There are many training opportunities for foreign language teachers in general, but the specific needs of Latin teachers are rarely addressed. The lack of such training opportunities makes it harder for would-be Latin teachers to obtain certification for public schools. More training opportunities, however, will support the capital campaign's goal of eliminating the current shortage of high school teachers, and capital campaign funds will serve as a further incentive for the development of such courses by providing scholarships for participants and stipends for master teachers and scholars from outside of the host institution.
As stated last year, for financial reasons we (I hope temporarily) published only one issue of Amphora in 2010 and will do the same in the coming year. Look for that issue in late Winter or early Spring. My role in the publication is to give a quick read to all articles (as a Classicist who was out of the field for twenty years, I have some characteristics in common with the publication's ideal reader) and to work with the designer and printer. Although nonmember subscriptions remain low, discussions I have had, particularly at other Classics meetings, have convinced me that Amphora has an enthusiastic audience, mainly on the web. It was our Gateway effort before we had a Gateway Campaign, and demonstrates that the APA cares about the field beyond basic scholarship and its own membership,
The other significant work I did with the Outreach Division this year was to publicize various calls for experts. First of all we are again working with Peter Meineck and the Aquila Theatre Company to find APA members who can lead public programs held in conjunction with Company performances. Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives is the much larger follow-up to From Page to Stage: The Power of the Iliad Today. At the San Antonio meeting Peter will be conducting a roundtable discussion session about this program on January 8 from 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in the back of the Exhibit Hall. Visit him there for more information. In addition, the Division is compiling lists of Classicists who are available for consultation about issues relating to performances of Classical texts and the use of Classical themes in music.
An ongoing concern of the Professional Matters Division for many years has been the treatment of adjunct faculty in academia. During his Vice Presidency in the late 1990's Erich Gruen organized an annual meeting session on this topic and initiated APA participation in the Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) (www.academicworkforce.org) which was formed at that time. CAW regularly seeks to collect useful data about the conditions in which adjuncts do their work, and we joined other learned societies in encouraging our members to complete a survey it conducted this Fall. Visit the URL in this paragraph later this Winter to see results of that survey which closed in late November.
Early in the coming year our Professional Matters Division will again conduct its triennial census of enrollments and staffing in classics departments. Current Professional Matters Vice President Jim May expects to make it possible for you to submit responses online which should make this task easier. Please make sure your department completes this census. When programs are threatened, our Classics Advisory Service, currently and ably led by John Miller, can be especially helpful if it can provide staffing and enrollment levels for a large number of departments at comparable institutions. We provide this data only in aggregates; no specific programs are ever named. Still, the more data we have, the better case we can make.
Last year I reported on the work of Eric Rebillard, Editor of the online version l'Année philologique, on a planning grant funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to consider ways to improve APh Online's search interface and to link its citations to both ancient texts and modern scholarship. You have likely already used that new interface, and during 2010 the Mellon Foundation provided a much larger grant of $215,000 that will enable Eric to carry out the work of linking citations and texts. This is another example of APA's long-standing role as an important generator of improvements in the most important bibliography in the field. Please keep this in mind when you consider the major Gateway Campaign goal of building an endowment for the American Office of l'Année. Through its oversight of the Office, the APA not only puts most of the work produced by its members into the field's major bibliography, it is in a position to seek funding from foundations like Mellon and to bring innovative ideas to the Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique, the governing body for APh.
My principal role on the Mellon grant as well as the grants we receive from other foundations and the NEH is to be the responsible administrator, and this year, that task included working with Tony Corbeill, Chair of the Selection Committee to submit an application to renew the NEH grant that supports our TLL Fellowship. We will learn in March whether we will again be able to offer this stipend for the academic years beginning in Fall 2012, 2013, and 2014.
While I was discussing financial matters, I referred to the "art" of estimating staff time on each of the Association's program areas. The allocation of my own time is pretty uniform across the divisions, but there is a blip upwards at the Program Division both because of the three full days I spend each year at Program Committee meetings and because of all the work that goes into preparing calls for abstracts, processing submissions, generating Program and Abstract Book copy, and dealing with meeting logistics. As a result, I get to know Program Vice Presidents pretty well, and I assure you that you have been very fortunate to have Bob Kaster in that position for the last four years. During his tenure he combined a deep and wide knowledge of our field with a commitment to both sound scholarship and broad access to the meeting program. In his final year he helped us to implement online submissions and even - because he was faster to act - did some work we in the office should have done when the "back end" of the submissions process didn't serve the Program Committee well. It has been a great pleasure to work with Bob for the last four years.
Placement Service. We again have about 40 institutions interviewing at this year's annual meeting. This number is probably the best indicator of the job market at this time of the year because it can be compared to the same number last year. (In the Spring, near the end of the academic year, I think it makes sense to compare the number of jobs posted from one year to another.). This figure is, of course, far lower than the numbers just a few years ago (over 70 in 2007 and over 80 in 2008), but at least it has not declined significantly from last year. As noted earlier, we took some first steps into making the service more electronic in the current year by issuing both registration forms and scheduling forms as PDFs that could be completed on a computer. In the process we found that we need to update our software because not everyone could use the "fill-in" feature, and we will take care of this during the next few months.
We appreciate your patience as we automate the service in small steps. Doing so presents a special challenge because it is a joint service with AIA, and only members of one or the other society can register as candidates. (Institutions posting jobs do not need to show membership so that we can make members aware of the largest possible number of opportunities.) In addition, we continue to think that the actual interview scheduling process has to be done by a human being, in large part to keep candidates and institutions from having too many interviews in a row or too close together in too distant places but also to handle special situations that might require negotiating with search committees or candidates to modify their schedules. Placement Director Renie Plonski looks out for the kinds of conflicts that might not be apparent to a computer program and works with candidates who might have interviews scheduled at both APA and AHA and - now that MLA has moved into our dates - that society as well.
Finally on this topic, I want to make my annual appeal that members look past the conventional wisdom about the placement service. The convention wisdom states that the Service only posts jobs on the web site and schedules interviews. In fact, the service sends information about those jobs to registered candidates before they are posted on the site, does all the careful scheduling described just above, and gathers data that the joint APA/AIA Placement Committee can use to monitor trends in the field and serve as a recourse if either candidates or institutions feel that they are being treated unfairly.
Annual Meeting. The meeting in San Antonio will probably attract just over 2,000 paid registrants and be a slightly larger meeting than the one we had last year in Anaheim. This is about the attendance we were expecting in light of cutbacks in travel funds, increases in airfares, and the continued low number of institutions interviewing. We appreciated members' acceptance last year of the one major cost savings we have instituted that did not involved printing or postage: to offer only minimal food service and no complimentary beverage at the President's Reception. The same policy will be in effect this year, and we are looking forward to good attendance at that event and at the preceding Plenary Session with a streamlined awards ceremony, the traditional Presidential Address, and the chance to win copies of John Miller's Goodwin Prize winning book, Apollo, Augustus, and the Muses. We have just learned that, unfortunately, Garry Wills will not be able to attend the meeting to accept the first APA President's Award, but we look forward to honoring him in absentia.
Heather Gasda and I are extremely grateful to Erwin Cook of the Trinity University who chaired the Local Arrangements Committee. Erwin's guide to San Antonio has been posted on the web site for a few weeks (http://www.apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/Localguide.doc), and will also be available at the meeting.
Next year's meeting will take place in Philadelphia. In addition, we have done a lot of work with AIA over the last half of this year to select future meeting sites, and I can now announce the following locations that - in three cases - have always been popular with our members and in one case is a city we have long tried to put on our schedule. Those cities are Seattle (2013), Chicago (2014), New Orleans (2015), and San Diego (2016). I hope to have news about 2017 and 2018 before this Summer.
University of Pennsylvania. As members know, after several false alarms we finally did move our offices this past Summer. An association can hardly complain when its host institution is so successful that it needs its space back, and that is exactly what happened in the Penn Classical Studies Department. We owe the Department a great debt, not only for hosting us in its midst for eleven years but, especially in the last few years, for the extent to which its senior faculty shared and switched offices while one or another was on leave so that we could stay in place.
We are, of course, still at Penn, and only five blocks away from Claudia Cohen Hall. It is therefore easy for me to attend the weekly lectures as described above and to make my annual presentations about the APA and the state of affairs for Classics in American academia to the entering graduate students and postbaccalaureate students in the Department. The new space on 40th Street is - except for the lack of windows - almost ideally designed for us. The space in Cohen Hall was excellent from the point of view of being right in the Classical Studies Department, but anyone who visited us knows how tightly we were crammed in. Our new offices are much easier to work in, and we have found some friendly new neighbors, particularly in Penn's Offices of Equity and Access, who share their copier and are currently taking in our mail while we are in San Antonio.
The new offices, as predicted, come at a higher cost, and not just because they are larger. However, the rent is lower than I had anticipated, and I think it will be possible to sustain the expense of having our offices there for several more years.
Few members are likely aware that one of the many lasting benefits the APA derived from having Roger Bagnall as Secretary-Treasurer in the 1980's is that at the end of his term he set up our archives in the Columbia University Rare Book Room. However, nothing has been added to those archives since 1986, and when I became Executive Director I inherited files belonging to all my intervening predecessors. In 2009 therefore the Board set up an Ad Hoc Committee on Archives to determine what we should retain and where and in what format retained materials should be kept (in my office or in the archive). Ruth Scodel has ably chaired this Committee which met by conference call a number of times during 2010. Having preliminary guidance from the Committee about what we needed to keep was invaluable as I packed up documents for the move this Summer, and we hope that Committee members will be able to come to Philadelphia on several occasions in early 2011 to gather the material that needs to go to Columbia.
Conclusion. I want to conclude by thanking all members, especially those on committees and the Board, for their support of my office's efforts. I look forward to welcoming many of you to San Antonio this week, and I urge you to let me know if you have any questions or suggestions about Association operations.
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
January 5, 2011
Members are invited to serve as volunteers at the 143rd Annual Meeting of the Association in Philadelphia, PA this coming January. Assignments include assistance in the Registration Area, monitoring session rooms, and supporting the Placement Service. Interested members should contact Heather Gasda in the Association Office by July 11, 2011. The Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee will develop a schedule of volunteer activity in late Fall.
In exchange for eight hours of service (either in one continuous or in two 4-hour assignments), volunteers receive a waiver of their annual meeting registration fees. It is not necessary to be an APA member to volunteer.
The ACLS Humanities E-Book series is offering individual subscriptions to its digital collection of over 3,300 full-text, cross-searchable titles in the Humanities to members of any one of the 70 constituent societies of the American Council of Learned Societies, including the American Philological Association. While some members will have access to this important series at their home institutions, we believe that others will find it helpful to purchase annual individual subscriptions for $35. Titles in the series were produced as long ago as the 1880s and as recently as the present and have been selected for their continuing importance to students and scholars. A complete title list is available at http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html. ACLS Humanities E-Book continues to expand, adding approximately 500 titles per year.
To subscribe, simply visit www.humanitiesebook.org/sub-ind.html, choose the ACLS constituent society of which you are a member, and indicate your membership number in the online purchase form. For inquiries about HEB, please e-mail subscriptions@hebook.org.
Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, in cooperation with Venice International University, will offer this advanced seminar for 20 fellows who will be either in an advanced stage of doctoral research, or recently completed Ph.D.s. The program is conceived as a two-year commitment. The first session (November 2011) will consist of lectures by scholars with a seminar approach on the origins and development of literary genres and literacy in Ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East. Some of the lectures will run simultaneously and will be devoted respectively to the interpretation of specific classical and near eastern texts, with more focus on textual analysis.
The aim of the program is firstly to investigate the relationship between themes, motifs and structures of the texts, starting with the early examples of epic poetry and of wisdom and didactic literature; secondly, to examine the processes involved in their transmission and preservation in both oral and written forms. A variety of issues concerning the history of literate cultures will also be reviewed, such as, for example, the textual traditions, the creation and organization of libraries, the classification of genres, and the relationship between literature and politics.
During the first session the fellows will identify a research project according to their own scholarly interests and under the supervision of one of the faculty. The research project will be presented in the form of an essay of about 20 pages in the second session of the seminar, which will be held in October 2012. Knowledge of Greek and Latin, and/or of some of the ancient Near Eastern languages, is expected. Lectures will be in English. A good knowledge of spoken and written English is also a prerequisite. Further information is available at http://www.univiu.org/component/content/article/58-shssnews/460-advanced-seminar-in-the-humanities, and the application deadline: April 15, 2011.
The Institute is an independent private institution founded in 1930 to create a community of scholars focused on intellectual inquiry, free from teaching and other university obligations. Scholars from around the world come to the Institute to pursue their own research. Candidates of any nationality may apply for a single term or a full academic year. Scholars may apply for a stipend, but those with sabbatical funding, other grants, retirement funding or other means are also invited to apply for a non-stipendiary membership. Some short-term visitorships (for less than a full term, and without stipend) are also available on an ad-hoc basis. Open to all fields of historical research, the School of Historical Studies’ principal interests are the history of western, near eastern and Asian civilizations, with particular emphasis upon Greek and Roman civilization, the history of Europe (medieval, early modern, and modern), the Islamic world, East Asian studies, the history of art, the history of science, philosophy, modern international relations, and music studies. Residence in Princeton during term time is required. The only other obligation of Members is to pursue their own research. The Ph.D. (or equivalent) and substantial publications are required. Information and application forms may be found on the School's web site, www.hs.ias.edu, or contact the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Dr., Princeton, N.J. 08540 (E-mail address: mzelazny@ias.edu). Deadline: November 1 2011.
The Department of Philology of the University of Crete, Greece presents the first international conference on the late antique poet Nonnus of Panopolis. There will be nine sessions: 1. Nonnus and Late Antique Paideia (esp. rhetoric, philosophy), 2. Nonnus and Christianity, 3. Nonnus and the Literary Past (esp. Homer, Hellenistic poets, Quintus of Smyrna, Oracles, Orphic Literature), 4. Nonnus and Visual Arts, 5. The Style of Nonnus (metre, language), 6. Nonnus and Latin literature, 7. The 'School' of Nonnus (esp. John of Gaza, the Orphic Argonautica and Paulus Silentiarius), 8. Nonnus' Afterlife (esp. Simone Weil), 9. Nonnus and Contemporary Society. The Conference will pay equal attention to the Dionysiaca and the Paraphrasis of the Gospel of St. John. New readings of key-passages in both poems will be presented, novel approaches to Nonnus’ relationship with earlier and contemporary literature, new insights into the reception of Nonnus by later poets as well as an attempt to redefine the notion of the Nonnian ‘School’. The conference rather than seeing Nonnus as a ‘follower’ or ‘imitator’ explores what he has to say as an erudite late antique poet who absorbs and transforms a long and varied literary and philosophical past. Further information: spanoudakis@phl.uoc.gr
The eighth Seminar for Ancient Greek and Roman Music in the Music Department of the Ionian University at Corfu will take place this summer, 4 to 10 July 2011. This year’s proceedings will focus on Book VIII of Aristotle’s Politics, a fundamental text for our understanding of Greek views on music and education. In the course of the week, seminars on this text will be conducted by three well-known specialists in ancient musicology: Andrew Barker, Egert Pöhlmann, and Eleonora Rocconi. For those who need them there will also be preliminary classes on 3 July, designed to introduce students to relevant musical technicalities; and for Greek students there will be additional classes in the course of the week, focusing on the translation of the texts. In the evenings there will be lectures on a variety of topics connected with the music of the ancient world.
The seminar sessions will take place at the magnificent historical locations of the Mon Repos
Villa and the Ionian Academy. Participation fees amount to € 200. Student accommodation at a very low cost will be provided in the university dormitories; the number of places is limited, so booking in advance to secure participation is crucial (the deadline is the 1st of May 2011). The full program will be announced in due course. For more information contact Secretary George Fragiskos [George@ionio.gr] or the organizers: Dr Petros Andriotis [pandriot@ionio.gr] and Prof Panos Vlagopoulos [pvlag@ionio.gr].
The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names and Monumenta Asia Minoris Antiqua Projects are holding a joint conference/ The theme on July 11 will be “Naming in Anatolia” and on July 12, “Roman Phrygia”. See the conference webpage on which titles of papers will be posted as they are confirmed at http://mama.csad.ox.ac.uk. Anyone interested is most welcome to attend; nearer the time we will ask to know who will be coming as a control on numbers. There will be no registration fee. Some graduate bursaries for travel and accommodation will be offered: details of how to apply will be posted and circulated in May.
The Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies is sponsoring this conference seeks to investigate the textual traditions of various texts and genres, including texts in classical Latin, mediaeval Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and the vernaculars. Preference will be given to those abstracts which deal with newly discovered texts and their manuscript settings, or which present new perspectives on established textual traditions. We encourage graduate students and newly established scholars to submit their work. The Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture will be given by Susan L’Engle, Vatican Film Library, Saint Louis University Email abstracts to epig@osu.edu or send them to Professor Frank T. Coulson, Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies, 190 Pressey Hall, 1070 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210. Deadline for submission: August 1, 2011.
This is a workshop organized by Krzysztof Nawotka (University of Wroclaw, Poland), Volker Grieb (Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, Germany) with Agnieszka Wojciechowska (University of Wroclaw, Poland) as the organizing committee secretary. The aim of this workshop is to examine both the Macedonian conquest of Egypt, its consequences and its reflection in literature and art. An area of particular importance is attitudes of the local population to Alexander. The organizing committee looks forward in particular to contributions making use of both classical and Egyptian sources and to those uniting multidisciplinary approach to the sources material and research questions.
We invite papers suitable for delivery in 20-30 minutes. Please send abstracts of 300 words or less as an attachment to Agnieszka Wojciechowska (agnieszka.w4@gmail.com) by 30 May 2011. The publication of a volume containing a selection of revised conference papers is being planned.
This conference will analyze the importance of ancient Rome in constructing Western homosexual identities. Much scholarship exists on the contribution of ancient Greek culture and literature to discourses of homosexuality, but the originary contribution of Rome has been overlooked. It matters, however, not least because of its impact and presence during the 'Latin Middle Ages' and beyond. Latin literature provides the best known versions of homosexual myths such as Orpheus, Narcissus, Iphis and Ianthe (collected in that mythological compendium, Ovid's Metamorphoses) and explores distinctively Roman homosexual relationships (for instance, Virgil's Nisus and Euryalus), to which a multitude of later artists have responded. Conversely, authors such as Juvenal and Martial censure homosexual behavior. There have also been many influential instances of homosexuality from Roman history, from allegations that the youthful Julius Caesar was the 'queen of Bithynia' to the celebrated relationship between the emperor Hadrian and Antinous.
This one-off international conference aims to bring together scholars working in a range of fields (Classics, Reception Studies, Queer Studies, Modern Languages, Comparative Literature, Art History) to assess the broad impact of Roman culture on the construction of Western homosexual identities. Exploring this previously neglected area will afford scholarship a better understanding of the ways in which the reception of Roman and Greek culture are different and the importance of Rome as a model for later artists with homosexual leanings and, conversely, the attempted erasure of Roman homosexuality in societies where Rome is idealized. It is hoped that a wide variety of media, approaches, and research interests will be represented, particularly from those working outside the discipline of Classics, and that contributions will result in a substantial publication.
Proposals for papers of 30 minutes should include a title and an abstract of no more than 500 words, and should be received by 20 May 2011; submissions from postgraduate students are particularly welcome. Proposals for papers and further enquiries should be sent to Dr. Jennifer Ingleheart (jennifer.ingleheart@durham.ac.uk), Department of Classics and Ancient History, 38 North Bailey, Durham University, Durham, UNITED KINGDOM, DH1 3EU.
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Public Fellows Program. ACLS is a private, nonprofit federation of 70 national scholarly organizations. It is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. In 2010, ACLS awarded over $15 million to more than 380 U.S.-based and international scholars. www.acls.org
ACLS announces the inaugural competition of its Public Fellows program. In 2011 the program will place eight recent Ph.D.s in two-year staff positions at partnering agencies in government and the non-profit sector, beginning as early as September 2011. Fellows will participate in the substantive work of these agencies and receive professional mentoring. Compensation will be at the same level as new professional employees of the agency with similar experience.
This program, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to demonstrate the value of employing skilled and accomplished young scholars in a variety of capacities, thereby broadening the academy’s conventional ideas of the Ph.D. career path. The “crisis” in academic employment has been well discussed and is to many as much a besetting condition as an urgent crisis. Validating extra-academic employment could be a significant element of constructive change. Thus ACLS has partnered with the following agencies to offer these positions (detailed descriptions are available at www.acls.org/programs/publicfellows):
ACLS seeks applications from recent Ph.D.s who wish to begin careers in administration, management, and public service by choice rather than circumstance. Competitive applicants will have been successful in both academic and extra-academic experiences. Applicants may apply to only one position and must fulfill the following eligibility requirements: possess U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status; have received a Ph.D. in the humanities or related social sciences between January 2008 and March 2011; and not have applied to any other ACLS fellowship programs in the 2010-11 competition cycle. All applications must be submitted through the ACLS Online Fellowship Application system by Monday, May 16, 3pm EDT. (http://www.acls.org/programs/publicfellows/). Submitted applications will undergo ACLS’ standard rigorous peer review process, which may include interviews by ACLS reviewers and by the hosting agency.
Bruce Frier (2010-2016)
S. Georgia Nugent (2007-2013)
(in addition to the above)
*Member of Campaign Steering Committee
†Deceased
ACL Representatives
The first six members of this Committee constitute the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics, which considers grievances and complaints pertinent to the APA Statement on Professional Ethics.
AIA Representatives
Adam D. Blistein
April 15, 2011
Petitions to Nominate Alternate Candidates for Association Offices (see page XX)
May 13, 2011
Nominations for Goodwin Award (see page XX)
May 18, 2011
Nominations for Collegiate Teaching Awards (see page XX)
May 18, 2011
Individual Abstracts for 2012 Annual Meeting
June 1, 2011
Nominations for APA President's Award (see page XX)
June 3, 2011
Submission of Books for Goodwin Award (see page XX)
July 11, 2011
Nominations for Outreach Prize (see page XX)
July 30, 2011
Responses to Officer/Committee Survey (see page XX)
September 16, 2011
Nominations for Precollegiate Teaching Awards (see page XX)
January 5-8, 2012
143rd Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA
January 3-6, 2013
144th Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA
January 2-5, 2014
145th Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL
January 8-11, 2015
146th Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA
To date over 750 donors have pledged $1,950,000 to the APA’s Campaign for Classics for the 21st Century. When this amount is combined with the $41,000 net proceeds from a fund-raising event at New York University last October, we are very close to a total of $2 million raised in the Gateway campaign and to the amount necessary for the next deadline for claiming NEH matching funds: $2,090,000 by July 31, 2011. Pledges of support are sufficient to meet this deadline, but all existing and new pledges must be paid, and the APA must raise an additional $500,000 (for the total of $2,600,000) by July 31, 2012, if it is to retain the matching funds it has claimed.
We are particularly grateful to Stephen Kidd for volunteering to write the Association’s most recent communication to members about the Campaign: http://www.apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/Winter2011Appeal.pdf. He and his fellow graduate students in a number of different institutions have also made contributions in the last two months with the result that we can now report that more than 20% of all APA members have made a gift to the Campaign. Because the Campaign seeks to build an endowment for the future of Classics, it is very gratifying to see this participation by the future leaders of our field, and we hope all members will join them by sending in a contribution (http://www.apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/pledge_form_revised_10-10.pdf) or making a gift online (https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/AmericanPhilologicalAssociat/OnlineDonation.html).
Newsletter Publication Schedule
Appointment of Information Architect
Dues Notice and Distribution of Publications in 2011
Report of the 2008-2009 TLL Fellow
Report of the 2009-2010 Pearson Fellow
Call for Nominations for 2011 Coffin Traveling Fellowship
Minutes of Board of Directors Meetings
Vice President Reports (Fall 2010)
Acknowledgment of Annual Giving and Capital Campaign Gifts
Funding Opportunities/Fellowships
I apologize for the late publication of this issue which combines what should have been separate issues for Summer and Fall 2010. I appreciate members' patience with the disruption caused by our office move last August and their willingness to rely on announcements sent via e-mail and posted on our web site and - more recently - the news blog established by outgoing Web Editor Robin Mitchell-Boyask and the Association Facebook page organized by Outreach Vice President Judith Hallett. Still, I am mindful that some members still prefer and others are only able to read about Association activities in this printed form. I anticipate a return to regular publication of four issues during 2011.
On behalf of the Board of Directors of the American Phililogical Association (APA), I am pleased to announce the appointment of Samuel J. Huskey of the University of Oklahoma to be its first Information Architect. Prof. Huskey will begin his four-year term at the end of the APA's Annual Meeting this January in San Antonio. He will succeed Prof. Robin Mitchell-Boyask of Temple University who has provided extraordinary service to the Association since 1998 as the first and only Editor of its web site.
Prof. Huskey's appointment and the expansion of the duties of his office are among the products of a recent review of the Association's publications program. One result of this process, funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was a decision to use the APA web site and other vehicles for electronic communication more aggressively to increase awareness of and access to the new scholarship generated in its various programs. The Search Committee I led felt that Prof. Huskey had the scholarly, pedagogical, and technological expertise that would enable him to carry out this expansion of the Association's electronic presence. Further, as the Association's Gatekeeper to Gateway Capital Campaign enters its final stages, the Search Committee felt that Prof. Huskey would be the appropriate person to coordinate efforts to fulfill the Campaign's commitment to provide the highest quality scholarship about classical antiquity to the widest possible audience in the format appropriate to each segment of that audience.
Another development that also makes possible the expansion of Prof. Huskey's position is the acquisition a few months ago of a new content management system for the Association's web site. As a result of this new system, APA Office staff is now able to post information about regular society activities themselves. This was an advantage that Prof. Mitchell-Boyask was able to enjoy only in the last few months of his tenure, and we are especially grateful to him for performing all the work of keeping the site up to date for so many years. We also appreciate his taking the first steps to expand our electronic presence by creating an APA news blog (http://apaclassics.blogspot.com/) earlier this year. Our next such expansion will be the creation of a Facebook page for the Association to be overseen by Prof. Judith P. Hallett, Vice President for Outreach.
I look forward to working with Prof. Huskey on increasing our ability to communicate electronically with both our members and all others interested in classical antiquity.
Dues Rates. Dues invoices for 2011 have been mailed to members. Please inform the Association Office if you have not received your invoice. The rates for 2011 are as follows:
In June 2010 the Board of Directors approved an increase in dues that was recommended by the Finance Committee. This is the first dues increase for individual members in three years, and it will allow us to conduct normal operations during our current extraordinary effort to raise an endowment that will both preserve the American Office of l'Année philologique after NEH funding ends and deliver valuable scholarly and teaching resources far beyond our current limited audience. We are drawing as much from existing endowment as is prudent. In the long run the capital campaign will enable us to do more for our members without having to have excessive dues. The dues structure adopted by the Board for 2001, which calculates dues for all except student members on the basis of a single percentage rate, has been retained. APA members who joined the society before 1980 and who have paid dues for 30 consecutive years are eligible for a lower dues rate. That rate for 2011 is $60.
Payment of dues is requested by December 31, 2010, to ensure an uninterrupted listing in the online Directory of Members and to permit continued access to the members only section of the APA web site. Before submitting your dues payment, please turn over the dues invoice and respond to the survey of members' fields of interest that has been prepared by the Committee on Research. The Committee's goal is to make it possible for members to use the APA's online Directory of Members to find other classicists working in areas of common interest.
Publications. By action of the Board of Directors, APA members will receive printed versions of three Association publications (TAPA, the Newsletter, and Amphora) only on request. The Board has taken this action in order to achieve both financial and environmental savings. In the upper left-hand corner of the invoice you will find check boxes you may use to request copies of these publications in the mail. The Newsletter and Amphora will continue to appear on the APA web site; TAPA will continue to be available to APA members via Project MUSE (click on the "Members Only" link on the main page of our web site).
Communication with Members. If you do not regularly receive e-mails from my office, the APA probably does not have your current e-mail address in the membership records that the Johns Hopkins University Press maintains for us. If you have not provided that address, I urge you to do so either by noting it when you pay your dues or by sending an e-mail to the Press at jrnlcirc@mail.press.jhu.edu. The Board of Directors has instructed me, first of all, not to share members' e-mail addresses with any other organization or individual, and, second, to make communications with the entire membership as brief and as infrequent as possible. By providing your e-mail address to us, you will be sure of receiving important Association announcements.
This report was originally published in The Times Literary Supplement, February 4, 2010, and is reprinted by permission.
You say 'putator'. In the middle of Munich, just a few metres away from the site of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, unnoticed, though not hidden, is a "treasure" that the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities has quietly overseen for more than half a century.
"The Treasure of the Latin Language", or, in its own tongue, Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL for short), is "probably the most scholarly dictionary in the world" (or so claims the article "Dictionary" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica). It is most probably also the longest-running, and most certainly the longest-conceived. Ever since the fourteenth century, Latin philologists dreamed of a comprehensive Latin lexicon, to contain all Latin words used during the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire with all their meanings.
It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that such a dream could be realized - and then only as a collaborative project. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the great Swiss philologist Eduard Wölfflin recruited colleagues for this dictionary. And in 1884 he published the first volume of the "Archive for Latin Lexicography and Grammar". Intended as a bait, it presented several specimens of articles which were to be included in the future lexicon. But authorities were slow to bite. It would take another decade until five German-speaking academies of sciences agreed to produce jointly a Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. The schedule anticipated five years for the collection of the materials - that is, all the documentation of all the different words - and fifteen for the writing of the lexicon.
A hundred-and-fourteen years after this plan was conceived, I showed up on my first day to begin work at the TLL as the American Fellow. The first words I would work on started with "p". The visitor, or new Fellow, in the Academy enters the sandstone wing of the Residence through large, wooden double doors. Across the shining marble floor, the porter may, on a good day, mention the elevator.
Otherwise, the circular, open staircase, decorated with portraits of presidents of the Academy, will take you eventually to what seems to be the fourth floor (but was misleadingly said to be the second). And there, at the end of an inconspicuous corridor, behind another wooden door, lies the "treasure": the archive of millions of paper slips, the "material", stored in the second room of the impeccably sorted library of Latin texts and documents. The rooms are light but decidedly stuffy with the smell of old books, which, arranged by the authors' dates as opposed to their names, reach up to the ceiling. Portraits of famous lexicographers, a bust of Eduard Wölfflin, and the first contract for the publication of the Thesaurus remind all who enter of the long history of the project.
The history of the Thesaurus is intertwined with the history of Europe. From 1900, the year of publication of the first fascicle, until the outbreak of the First World War, work progressed comparatively swiftly: the lexicographers published more than 500 "columns", almost three fascicles, annually. But the war and the subsequent recession brought the project to the brink of abandonment. In 1915, in the middle of Volume Five, publication stopped, not to be resumed until 1924. In 1922 an American scholar with close ties to the lexicographers in Munich made an impassioned plea in Boston in front of members of the American Classical League. The salary of the director of the Thesaurus, he complained, was below the average salary of an American high school teacher, and the secretary paid his bills with the help of his retirement allowances; worse still, many of the staff scraped together less than a living. "Is it possible that America, wealthy, unselfish, beneficent America, should willingly allow the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae to perish?" Yet the situation had to worsen before it could improve. At the last minute support from abroad, and in particular Swiss Latin lovers and the Rockefeller Foundation, restored the project to life. In the 1930s, a steady stream of national and international Fellows raised the output almost to the pre-war level. These were the golden years of the Thesaurus: the output was high, higher still its quality. But, like everything else, the Thesaurus fell victim to the Nazi regime and the Second World War. Several of the Fellows were Jews. The executive board of the Thesaurus, confronted in 1933 with the requirement that government employees provide documentation of their "Aryan bloodline", refused to account for the Fellows' religion, and many were able to keep a low profile and stay. But sooner or later they all had to leave, like Karl Oskar Brink, a Fellow supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1938. Oral history relates that he was accompanied to Munich's central station by Hans Rubenbauer, editor and friend. Rubenbauer later became a member of the Wehrmacht: the future German soldier saw off his Jewish friend, who would flee to London. When after the war Charles Brink, as he then called himself, recommenced his contributions to the Thesaurus, he would speak only English. He was later to become Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge.
The scholarly correspondence that continued during the years of war often carries an eerie tone. Early in 1943 a letter from the TLL informs a Dr Staedler that the form "vinlage" (the Latin "vincus") as an alternative to "village" ("vicus") was not found "in our material". It begs the recipient's pardon for the delay, laconically alluding to the now difficult access to the Thesaurus material. And difficult it certainly was: the millions of slips had left the centre of Munich. Before the Second World War, the Thesaurus was housed in the Maximilianeum, the terracotta palace on the bank of the Isar, now the seat of the Bavarian state parliament. When in September 1942 a flak-station was set up on the high-rise building, Rubenbauer, the acting General Editor, knew that they had to pack up. At the time, there was no copy of the archive; a fire would have annihilated the Thesaurus, its millions of slips, and the valuable books. But the archive went north into safe exile behind the walls of the Benedictine monastery in Scheyern. The library, irreplaceable - as many of the books contain the notes of generations of scholars working on the Thesaurus - soon followed; a German entrepreneur provided his company's vehicles for the transfer.
Several years passed before, in 1949, the International Thesaurus Commission was founded. Today, thirty-one academies from twenty-three countries support the work of the Thesaurus, contributing money or dispatching Fellows, like me, who usually work in Munich for up to three years. To work on the Thesaurus requires knowledge not only of Latin, but of ancient Greek (since Roman high culture was mostly bilingual), German, English, French, Italian and (ideally) Spanish, as translations and commentaries on Latin literature are published in all these modern languages. The staff of over twenty has recently included people from Austria, Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the US. Like its language, the Thesaurus is international.
On my first day as a Fellow I learned that "pruner" was to be my first word: putator - a seven-lettered probe of my limited familiarity with the Romans' horticultural texts and practices. Assistance came in the form of thirty or so paper slips. These, vintage 1890s, patiently waited for me in a grey cardboard box. Tinged with age, grey with a hint of yellow, they carried the passages, sometimes as a handwritten copy, sometimes as a beguiling reference, in which my word figured. Comprehensiveness is a relative term. The original Commission at the end of the nineteenth century decided that the Thesaurus should contain all Latin texts, literary and non-literary, from the beginnings to the second century ce. From then, the Antonine Age, to the sixth century, a representative selection seemed a sensible compromise.
Later Latin - medieval, humanistic and neo - was to be excluded. Of the first period, every text, however fragmentary, by every author, however obscure, was to be fully excerpted and indexed: classical literature like Cicero, Ovid and Tacitus, inscriptions, ostraca (potsherds used as writing surfaces), Pompeian graffiti - everything that carried a letter. This was a Herculean task in the non-computerized age. Distinguished scholars revised all these texts to ensure accuracy and noted alternative readings. Then all these texts were copied by hand on cards, passage after passage. These, in turn, were copied lithographically as many times as individual words occurred. On each slip a different word was underlined in red, and that word was entered as the lemma in the top right corner. Finally, all cards with the same lemma were shuffled into chronological order and filed. When in the autumn of 1899 the initial collection was completed, the Thesaurus counted five million slips. Since then it has doubled its number: new texts have been discovered (mostly inscriptions and papyri), and texts later than the second century ad have been excerpted more fully. To those ten million slips new ones are occasionally added even today.
When I flipped through my slips to get a first impression, I was not surprised to find my word discussed in an ancient linguistic treatise, repeatedly used in agricultural texts, mentioned in an encyclopedia, and defined in commentaries and scholia (ancient marginal notes). But what was it doing in legal texts so frequently? "Should a putator fail to alert passersby when he throws down a branch from the tree, and should one of them be hit by the branch and die, the putator is sentenced to the mines." Apparently, one fine day somewhere in the far reaches of the Roman Empire, an unsuspecting man or woman was killed by a careless cutter of trees.
A lexicon like the Thesaurus is different from a concordance, which simply lists all occurrences of a word. It should not be confused with the common notion of a dictionary either, the task of which is usually confined to providing translations. Eduard Wölfflin wanted his lexicographers to write the history of a word, "its struggle with competitors, the changes of its meanings, the phases of its decline or continuance". Such biographies will have to be written for all the 50,000 Latin lemmata, which have been written in the top corners of the paper slips and will eventually make up the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. This number is comparatively small: ancient Greek calls more than twice that number its own, and the vocabulary of modern languages, especially English, exceeds ancient Greek by far. But much writing was lost, and with it words. When the "Edict on maximum prices" was discovered - issued by the Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of the fourth century ad - it revealed fifty lexemes previously unknown.
For Wölfflin, the cardinal virtue of the biographer of Latin words was impartial, patient observation. In this spirit, Claudia Wick, currently one of six full-time editors at the TLL, pointedly writes that "lexicographers do not translate". Rather, they try to establish the significance of a word, and set out to understand its various meanings and their connections. She uses a relatively simple example: pullinus literally means "that which belongs to the hen" - "hennish". It is used in expressions ranging from a hen's egg (ovum pullinum) and chicken soup (ius pullinum) to chicken dung (fimus pullinus). Contrary to what one might like to think, the egg is closer to the dung than to the soup: the two former are produced by the hen, whereas the latter is made from the hen as an ingredient. And if there were the Latin equivalent to chicken fodder, it would belong to a third category. For chicken fodder is not made of, but provided for, chickens. The three English prepositions - "by", "from", "for" - neatly represent the differences in meaning of the three usages of the Latin "pullinus". At the TLL, the word-biographer always starts with the name. And so, in writing down my results, I started with my word, the lemma, set in bold in its most common spelling, with its long vowel marked: putàtor.
Then follows a section lexicographers refer to as the "head". There the reader will learn about the word's origin, ancient comments on its etymology and meanings, sometimes in the form of a Greek gloss (an explicatory, often marginal, annotation), alternative forms and spellings, and alia similia or "other things of a similar kind"). Since two ancient authors define "putator", and it is glossed in Greek, this is what I put up front. Then comes the history of the word: its meanings, literal and metaphorical, general and particular, normally presented in chronological order. Here before the reader's eyes a life unfolds: when is the word attested for the first time? When, if at all, is it used metaphorically? Which meanings occur, which dominate? Does it simply vanish from the records at some point (which would be indicative of its disuse, maybe even death)? "Putator" led a relatively simple life: it enters the scene during the first century BC in its literal and general use as "one who cuts branches." But soon it is further specified: the putator cuts either trees or vines. Both the general and the particular usage can be traced into late antiquity. But there was more: for in inscriptions we find two men, father and son, the former most likely a slave, who upon his manumission had taken as his name his former profession: and so the putator became Putator.
The lexicon is as good as its lexicographers. Neither speed nor sensation is their business. Though less studied texts, such as inscriptions and medical or botanical treatises, still yield the occasional surprising discovery of a word or an unknown meaning, it is rather the painstaking, slow-footed, elementary, foundational research that is their daily bread. The articles go through various editorial stages to ensure quality. Fellows work under the supervision of the editors. Together they discuss particularly difficult passages, possible structures of the article, which passages to include, which to leave out. Once a Fellow has written the article, the editor edits it, sometimes rather heavily. The revised version is read by another editor, whose suggestions are also taken into account. In the next stage, external readers, mostly senior Latinists, comment on it. But the fascicle in which it appears does not go into print before all its articles have met the approval of the General Editor. All of this takes time, and the actual writing of the articles will probably take ten times longer than anticipated. This gross underestimation has raised the eyebrows of observers and funders more than once. When questioned in the past, the staff of the Thesaurus have explained that when Wölfflin and his collaborators drew up the plan, they simply did not know what they were getting into. And most often, whenever articles were rushed, they fell short in quality. As every reader of biographies knows - and those on words are no different - good ones require not only careful research, but also circumspect arrangement and diligent writing.
Before I started, my editor, John Blundell, asked at the end of our first meeting whether I had any presumptions about the putator. Now, putator was not a word that I actually had thought much about before. Nevertheless, I ventured that I expected to find the division of the verb "putare", which can mean "to prune" and "to believe", in the noun as well as the verb. Two days later I had learnt that I had been (almost) entirely wrong. I further suggested that, given the widespread metaphorical use of agricultural terms in Roman culture, such was certainly to be expected in this case, too; again, if it had not been for a late Christian writer, I would have been completely mistaken. But in one Christian text, God is the "most knowledgeable putator", a metaphorical use, and in one passage in Augustine the putator is a believer. Why it took the putator some 600 years to discover this other aspect of his personality is beyond the reach of inquiry; at least for now, because maybe one day a newly discovered fragment somewhere in the sands of Egypt will reveal an earlier instance of it.
The TLL remains a work in progress. On the one hand, about one third of the alphabet is still waiting in cardboard boxes to be studied and transformed into articles. Deadlines have been missed so often that predictions for the conclusion are expressed tentatively. But 2050 seems reasonable. On the other hand, the slips are safely stored even after the fascicle with their word, "putator" say, has been published (once the word biography has appeared in a fascicle, no changes are possible). References to the latest scholarly articles that deal with the word in question are added to the slips, and new conjectures noted. Thus the archive continues to be updated, so that a future scholar, maybe interested in trees, will be able to take advantage of its riches, or perhaps one day, after the last volume has been completed, a supplement will be produced. In any case, it will remain a treasure.
Christophe B. Krebs
My career as a graduate student at Oxford University did not begin at orientation or with my first step beyond the iron gate of Lincoln College or the moment I put on my graduate robe. It began the moment my father-in-law missed the exit to the Raleigh airport as my husband and I, running a tad late, raced to catch our one-way flight to London. This brief moment of panic returned to me throughout my first year as I ran through Turl Street in sub fusc to make Matriculation, when I found myself locked in the graveyard surrounding Lincoln’s library, and as I looked up from my notes right before my first presentation. Oxford is an intimidating place that feels, many times, like somewhere down the rabbit hole. The only way to thrive among this wonderland of porters, staircases, bulldogs, formal halls, and each library’s particular set of rules is to do the only thing I could do as I watched that missed exit fade into the distance: keep calm and carry on. Oxford has required from me a new degree of confidence and tenaciousness that I now realize are necessary assets for the student of Classical languages in the 21st century.
I mention these qualities because this time last year I was crestfallen when another student referred to my work as ‘part of the frivolous humanities’ and I was embarrassed to describe my studies when others spoke of their work on mapping brain patterns in patients with language disorders, treating Glaucoma in Africa, and researching drug trafficking in South America. In the same way I was mortified when a porter sharply interrogated me as to whether I knew how staircases worked and I was terrified to raise my hand in a class of Oxford students. Nevertheless I indeed learned how staircases work in Oxford and the more I spoke in class the less my heart felt like it would explode. I had hoped to breeze into Oxford with no trouble save for remembering my umbrella in the morning. That didn’t happen. I struggled throughout the year and at times I questioned my desire, my ability to continue in the field of Classics. Nevertheless I completed my first year of graduate work and I am now just a few days from first week of my second year with a passion I have not experienced before in my studies. Although this journey has led me completely outside of my comfort zone, I could not have progressed this far without it and for that I am sincerely grateful to the APA and its support which made this experience possible.
My time in Oxford has afforded me the opportunity the travel throughout the United Kingdom. During the unusual snowstorm that we experienced last winter, I visited Cardiff University and attended a lecture on the revival of the Welsh language. The university graciously provided me with resources regarding manuscripts of Latin texts translated into Welsh which proved incredibly useful as I researched the transmission of ancient and Medieval Latin throughout the British Isles. Once the sun returned at the beginning of a magnificent English summer, I travelled to Scotland where I visited the universities of Edinburgh and Stirling along with Stirling Castle and climbed the 246 steps of the William Wallace Monument.
I am currently in my second year of the Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature. In my first year I was required to submit two essays and sit two exams in Latin palaeography and textual criticism. I prepared for these by attending seminars and tutorials with Tobias Reinhardt and Stephen Heyworth. Now in my second year I am reading Comedy with Peter Brown and attending a seminar on literary papyrology with Dirk Obbink. I am also writing my thesis this year on Greek and Roman characteristics in the twelfth century comedy Geta by Vitalis de Blois (Vitalis Blesensis) from the Loire Valley under the supervision of Matthew Leigh. I hope to continue my time at Oxford and I am applying for the Doctorate of Philosophy (DPhil) program this January. I look forward to furthering my work in manuscripts and I hope to produce a critical edition as part of that degree. I then anticipate returning to the United States to begin a career as a university professor in Classics.
Megan Elizabeth Miller
In 2011 the American Philological Association (APA) will again award the David D. and Rosemary H. Coffin Fellowship for study and travel in classical lands. The Fellowship was established in 2004 by the friends and students of David and Rosemary Coffin to honor the skill, devotion, learning, and kindness with which they educated students at Phillips Exeter Academy for more than thirty years.
The Fellowship is intended to recognize secondary-school teachers of Greek or Latin who are as dedicated to their students as the Coffins themselves by giving them the opportunity to enrich their teaching and their lives through direct acquaintance with the classical world. It will support study in classical lands (not limited to Greece and Italy); the recipient may use it to attend an educational program in (e.g. American Academy, American School) or to undertake an individual plan of study or research. It may be used either for summer study or during a sabbatical leave, and it may be used to supplement other awards or prizes.
Candidates for the Fellowship must have been teaching Latin or Ancient Greek at the secondary level (grades 9-12) in North America as a significant part of their academic responsibilities for three years out of the five prior to the award. Membership in the APA is not a requirement for application, although it is expected that applicants will have demonstrated an active interest in the profession and in their own professional development. Selection will be made on the basis of written applications by the Coffin Fellowship Committee. The amount of the award for 2011 will be $2,500. Recipients of the award will be expected to file a written report on their use of the Fellowship, which the Association may include in one of its publications.
Applications should consist of a) a curriculum vitae; b) a statement of how the Fellowship will be used and how it will further the applicant’s teaching; c) three letters of recommendation, at least one of them from the applicant’s chair or principal, and at least one from a former student. Applicants should send four copies of the c.v., the statement, and the letters of recommendation to the APA Office so that they arrive in the Office no later than Monday, January 31, 2011. American Philological Association ·University of Pennsylvania ·220 S. 40th Street · Suite 201E · Philadelphia, PA 19104-3512. Telephone: 215-898-4975 ·FAX: 215-573-7874 ·E-mail: apaclassics@sas.upenn.edu ·Web Site: http://www.apaclassics.org
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met via conference call on June 10, 2010. Those participating were Profs. Dee L. Clayman, President, and Peter Bing, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Kathleen Mary Coleman, Bruce W. Frier, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, James M. May, Carole E. Newlands, S. Georgia Nugent, and Ann Vasaly. Profs. Ronnie Ancona, Roger S. Bagnall, Barbara Weiden Boyd, John Marincola, Josiah Ober, and James J. O’Donnell were absent.
Prof. Clayman called the meeting to order at 10:05 a.m. The Directors had previously received an agenda for the meeting as well as minutes of their meetings on January 6 and 9, 2010.
Action: The agenda for the meeting was approved.
Action: After the correction of typographical errors, the minutes of the meetings of January 6, and 9, 2010, were approved.
In advance of the call, Directors had received minutes of the Finance Committee's meeting of May 24, 2010, the auditors’ report for the fiscal year that had ended on June 30, 2009, a table showing investment results for the fiscal year that would end on June 30, 2010, a projected financial statement for that fiscal year, and a budget for the next fiscal year. At its meeting the Committee had met with representatives of both the APA’s auditing firm and its financial management firm, and Prof. Nugent, Chair of the Committee, described those meetings for the Directors.
She stated that the auditors had issued an unqualified statement, had had no disagreements with Association staff about the content of the statement, and had not needed to issue any letters describing management deficiencies. Like many small organizations, the Association was unable to achieve an optimal distribution of responsibility for financial processing among several staff members. However, it mitigated these problems by having the Financial Trustees receive monthly statements directly from the APA’s bank and its investment advisor. Also, Profs. Nugent and Frier had discussed procedures they would follow in response to problems in financial management that they observed or that were reported to them. Because the Association’s investments were in fairly traditional instruments, it did not need to report any uncertain valuations of its assets in either its financial statements or its filings with the Internal Revenue Service. At the suggestion of the auditors, the Association would consult its attorney to get a better understanding of its responsibilities when endowments fell below the level of their permanently restricted net assets value as a result of investment losses.
The Committee had also had a satisfactory meeting with its investment advisor, and had discussed with her a gradual change in the investment guidelines for the Research and Teaching Fund. Income from the Fund would be needed to support the American Office of L’Année philologique beginning in July 2011, and the Committee had agreed that the advisor should gradually move the portfolio to the 60% equity/40% fixed income investment ratio used for the Pearson and Coffin Funds.
Prof. Nugent noted that the projected financial statement for the 2010 fiscal year anticipated a deficit of about $37,000 not including investment gains or losses. This figure would have been even higher except for the implementation of a number of cost saving measures. Dr. Blistein described two new grants received during the year from the Mellon and Kress Foundations. The former had provided $215,000 to support work that would link records in L’Année philologique to online versions of ancient texts cited in those records. The former had made a planning grant of $6,500 to explore the possibility of linking images mentioned in l’Année records to online photographs of those images. He also explained how staff had been able to reduce the level of expenditures for food and audiovisual services at the annual meeting.
The Board then reviewed the budget for the 2011 fiscal year proposed by the Finance Committee. Prof. Nugent noted that it contained only a few new expenditures: a set-aside of $15,000 to fund a thorough redesign of the web site in about three years, an increase in rent to $25,000 with one-time expenditures of $5,000 to move the APA Office, and an allowance of $8,000 for course release for the Editor of TAPA. The Association had raised neither dues nor registration rates since 2008, and the budget proposed increases in both of these rates for 2011 (with the understanding that any increase in registration fees required approval from AIA as well). The budget projected a year-ending deficit of just under $18,000.
Action: After reducing the proposed late registration rate for member students by $5, the Board approved the budget recommended by the Finance Committee.
Dr. Blistein reported that to date 519 donors had pledged $1.675 million to the capital campaign, but that the Association needed to raise about $400,000 more to claim the full amount of the final installment of matching funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and then an additional $500,000 to meet all outstanding matching requirements. While the Association continued to receive a good number of small and medium-sized gifts from individual donors, the decline in financial markets had made it much more difficult to secure large donations, especially from foundations.
The Development Committee had decided to make its Spring mailing a combined appeal for annual giving and the capital campaign. To date, the appeal had generated $27,000 in pledges to the campaign and just under $2,000 in annual giving donations. Overall, 316 donors had contributed $36,617 to annual giving during the 2010 fiscal year as compared to $46,073 received from 337 donors in the previous year.
Prof. Coleman had distributed to the Directors a proposal that she was making in collaboration with TLL Fellowship Committee Chair, Anthony Corbeill, to make a fund in memory of Prof. George Goold a part of the capital campaign. As long as the amount contributed to the fund surpassed $50,000, income from it would be used, first to supplement the stipend provided to each year’s TLL Fellow and, if the fund grew, to support other research in Latin lexicography, particularly at the TLL itself in Munich.
Action: The Board approved the institution of the George Goold Fund to support research in Latin lexicography provided that it received at least $50,000 in donations designated for this Fund.
Prof. Clayman described plans for a fund-raising event for the campaign to take place at New York University in the Fall. The event would feature a performance by the Aquila Theatre Company. She cited former Director, Matthew Santirocco for his assistance in organizing this event and in providing venues and personnel to assist the APA. A local committee would develop an invitation list of people outside the Classics community, and, if the event were successful, it might be repeated in other cities.
Dr. Blistein reported that the Penn Classical Studies Department would definitely need to reclaim the APA’s office space in Claudia Cohen Hall for the coming semester, but the School of Arts and Sciences had not yet offered any substitute space. Staff would soon have access to the web site’s new, more flexible content management system. The change to this system required new URLs for specific web pages, but, with the assistance of information technology staff in the School, he had found a programmer to write “redirect rules” for the site that would allow users to continue to use older URLs. Dr. Blistein also described changes in the leadership of the AIA and progress staff had made to find annual meeting sites for 2013 and beyond after the Joint Management Committee for the meeting had decided to have staff negotiate contracts themselves without the assistance of an outside meeting planning firm.
Dr. Blistein reminded Directors that their next meeting would take place in Philadelphia on October 1-2. The Penn Classical Studies Department would invite one of the Directors to give a talk immediately before the meeting.
There being no further business, the call was concluded at 11:55 a.m.
The Education Division has been busy on a number of fronts. Publication of and publicity for the new Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation, publication of a Preliminary Bibliography on Caesar for AP Latin teachers (and others), an updated guide to Latin teacher certification in the United States (currently in final revision stage), and the forthcoming publication of the APA Guide to Graduate Education have been taking much of the Division’s time. Those matters will be discussed below, along with several additional items from the Division, including the ongoing work of its committees.
(1) After approval by the APA Board, Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation was published in both hard copy format and in electronic form.
The following information is what appears currently on the Education page of the APA website:
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Dear APA Colleagues:
For "Perspectives" on the new Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation, see the relevant sections under that title in the Spring 2010 issue of Teaching Classical Languages.
http://tcl.camws.org/spring2010.html
Please note that at the end of each perspective you may add comments.
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It should be noted that Standards was featured in the Spring 2010 issue of Teaching Classical Languages, for which we thank John Gruber-Miller, editor of the journal and member of the Task Force that wrote the Standards. Seven classics professionals offer their perspectives on Standards after an introduction by the editor. These include two members of the Task Force (Ronnie Ancona and Lee Pearcy), a past President of the ACL (Ken Kitchell), a former World Languages District Supervisor (Cathy Daugherty), new Latin teachers (Cory Holec and Erik Collins), and a veteran Latin teacher (Bob Patrick). An interesting feature of TCL’s coverage is its mechanism for journal readers to post online their reactions to the published responses.
Copies of the Standards are currently being sent by the APA office to foreign language supervisors and Departments of Education in institutions where Latin certification is offered. In addition, there will be a workshop on the Standards sponsored by the APA Committee on Education and organized by Lee Pearcy, former APA Education Vice President and Co-Chair of the Task Force, at the 2011 Annual Meeting of APA in San Antonio on Sunday, January 9, from 8:30-11:00 a.m. Speakers, in addition to Dr. Pearcy, will be Sherwin Little (Task Force Co-Chair), Ronnie Ancona, John Gruber-Miller, and Susan Shelmerdine, all Task Force members. A plenary session on the Standards was held at the Annual Institute of the American Classical League at Wake Forest University in June 2010. Speakers were Ronnie Ancona, Sherwin Little, and Susan Shelmerdine. The session included questions and lively discussion.
(2) In response to the upcoming addition of Caesar to the Advanced Placement Latin curriculum, the APA Board in January endorsed the development of a preliminary bibliography to help AP Latin teachers prepare for their future teaching. As APA Vice President for Education, I appointed Board members John Marincola and Ann Vasaly to take on this task and am very appreciative of their efforts. The bibliography is now posted on the APA website and has been publicized to ACL as well. Thanks are due to APA President-Elect Kathleen Coleman for her successful effort to secure copyrighted material for inclusion from Oxford University Press (and to OUP itself). Thanks also to Wiley for its copyrighted contribution, obtained with the help of John Marincola. The bibliography was mentioned at a plenary session of the ACL Institute and was met with enthusiasm.
(3) The updated information on Latin teacher certification in the United States, state-by-state, should be available on the Education page of the APA website this winter. Some final revision is taking place based on feedback after circulation to the Joint Committee on Classics in American Education, the APA Board, and select other individuals. This will replace the material presently there, which dates back to 2004. Most of the work was completed by Hunter College students, Christopher Amanna and Manuel Andino, with the help of a Student-Faculty Research Initiative Grant from Hunter College. I will write some additional information on the nature of teaching at the college level vs. the secondary level and the typical training required/expected for each. Information specific to teaching Classics at the community college will be included, if it becomes available. Initial inquiries have not produced much information in that area so far.
(4) The next APA Guide to Graduate Education is currently being produced. This version will continue to have a small print run, but will also be available online for the first time. This is a very important change, which reflects how those of us already in the profession and students investigating graduate schools typically seek information. The Guide will now include information about Post-Baccalaureate programs as well as Ph. D and M.A. programs.
In the future, we hope to encourage departments to include even more information. This might include number of degrees awarded, job placement records/information, teaching experience available, time to degree etc. Self-reporting via departmental websites would have the advantage of providing a context for this information, e.g., a lot of teaching experience can lead to longer time to degree etc.
There has been discussion with James May, APA VP for Professional Matters, about what to include. Joseph Farrell, chair of the unofficial committee of Classics Ph.D. program department heads, has been involved in discussion as well. It may be useful for the Education and Professional Matters Divisions, Joseph Farrell, and the head of the unofficial committee on terminal M.A. programs to devise a statement for APA Board consideration and possible adoption about what they would recommend departments include in the future.
Additional Items:
The Joint Committee on Classics in American Education met in June at the ACL Institute. The primary focus of discussion was how to follow up on the Standards in order to help those seeking Latin teacher certification. Efforts will be made to identify institutions that offer the required training and to expand the number of and access to Latin teaching methods courses.
Ann Vasaly has been serving as the APA’s representative on the College Board’s AP Latin curriculum committee, which has recently released preliminary information about the forthcoming single AP Latin (Vergil-Caesar) course.
The Education Committee received an inquiry from an APA member about ways in which adjuncts or other temporary college Classics faculty might gain training to teach courses for which they may have had little preparation. The Committee acknowledged that this could be a problem, particularly in geographical areas where such faculty may not have the Ph.D., but thought that, in general, the APA was not necessarily the appropriate source of such training in terms of time and resources. One suggestion was made that the APA might provide a list of possible mentors, especially perhaps from the ranks of retired faculty, who could provide some quick free advice on teaching.
The Ancient History Committee and the Women’s Classical Caucus will be co-sponsoring a session for the Annual Meeting in San Antonio, “What Became of Lily Ross Taylor? Women and Ancient History in North America,” organized by Celia Schultz and Michele Salzman. Speakers will be Nathan Rosenstein, Elizabeth Carney, Ellen Bauerle, and Sara Forsdyke. The session will take place on Saturday, January 8, from 8:30-11:00 a.m.
The Joint Committee (with AIA) on Minority Student Scholarships will again hold its scholarship raffle at the Annual Meeting. The raffle of books and book gift certificates will take place this year immediately prior to the opening of the Exhibition Hall on Sunday, January 9. Tickets for the raffle are $10 each or three for $25 and can be purchased at the time of advance registration or at the meeting in the Registration Area. You do not need to be present at the event to win the raffle. The scholarship winners for 2010 were Timothy Castillo of Trinity University and Mario Morales of University of Rochester. Mr. Castillo took an intensive Greek program at the University of Texas, Austin, while Mr. Morales attended Father Reginald Foster’s Aestiva Latinitas summer program in East Milwaukee.
The 2010 winner of the David D. and Rosemary H. Coffin Fellowship for Travel in Classical Lands was Jeffrey Brickler, teacher at Turpin High School in Cincinnati. He used the award to attend the American Academy in Rome's Classical Summer School.
The winners of the 2009 Awards for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level were Gregory Aldrete, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Ronnie Ancona, HunterCollege and CUNYGraduate Center, and Denise McCoskey, Miami University. The winner of the 2009 Award for Excellence in Teaching at the Pre-Collegiate Level was Stergios Lazos, St.Edward High School, Cleveland, Ohio. Starting this year (2010), winners will be announced in the December preceding the Annual Meeting, and will appear in the January Vice President’s report.
Thanks to a host of individuals who generously contribute time, talents and energies, the Division of Outreach has enjoyed a busy and productive year. Among its major activities are projects organized by the three committees under the purview of Outreach: the Outreach Committee itself, the Committee on the Classical Tradition (COCT), and the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (CAMP), to be described in fuller detail below. The Outreach portfolio also includes the APA publication Amphora, of which T. Davina McClain, of Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University, has been reappointed as its editor, and Diane Johnson, of Western Washington University, as its assistant editor. There are a number of other initiatives in the area of outreach taking shape that warrant attention first since, they bring both classical antiquity and the APA to a wider audience.
I am delighted to report that Peter Meineck, Artistic Director of the Aquila Theatre Company and clinical professor at New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies, has received a highly prestigious Chairman’s Special Award of $800,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. One of the two largest grants made by the NEH this year—and indeed the sole grant in this category made to a theater company—it is also the largest award that the NEH has ever given to any theater company. The award will fund “Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives”, a major national humanities program slated to travel to one hundred public libraries and arts centers across the USA. Its mission is to bring the writings and insights of Greco-Roman antiquity to communities of veterans and their families in inner cities and rural areas. Meineck will oversee this program in conjunction with the American Philological Association, the Urban Library Council, Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. and New York University’s Center for Ancient Studies.
“Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives” is modeled on Aquila’s 2009 NEH-funded “Page and Stage” program, which drew on the expertise of sixteen program scholars selected by the APA. It will focus on the staging of scenes from the Homeric epics and Athenian tragedy that treat themes of special relevance to modern Americans, and in particular address issues faced by military veterans and their families. CAMP, chaired by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz of Hamilton College, has been helping to recruit 40-50 scholars to present lectures, coordinate reading groups, and chair discussions at the varied program venues. These program scholars, solicited by a widely circulated call for self-nomination, will be selected on the basis of such criteria as area of academic specialization, teaching experience, record of involvement in public outreach, and geographic proximity.
Those selected as program scholars will undergo training at the 2011 APA annual meeting, and receive a $2000 stipend, which includes a subvention to assist with travel to San Antonio. In addition to planning the training session at the APA, program consultants will also produce and distribute a scholars’ guide. In their own communities, program scholars will work closely with both the sponsoring libraries and the program directors on developing and implementing this ground breaking new public program in classics.
Another burgeoning Outreach initiative involves the Classical Reception Studies Network, based at the Open University (UK), which the Outreach Division, representing the APA as a whole, joined in 2009 as an Overseas Affiliate Partner. A number of US classics and comparative literature programs—among them those at the University of Michigan, the University of California at Irvine, and Northwestern University—joined in this same capacity at approximately the same time, as did classics departments at universities in Ireland and South Africa, and the Classical Reception Studies Network in Australia. I have been working with the director of the CRSN, Lorna Hardwick on the CRSN Steering Group along with representatives from other partnering organizations, among them Sara Monoson of Northwestern University. We are extending the scope of CRSN to include exchange of information and ideas, in part through a website, on the teaching of classical reception to undergraduate students and “taught Masters’ students” (and thereby complement the work CRSN currently undertakes to organize national and international workshops for research student). We are also formulating proposals for expanding research collaborations between groups of scholars in different countries.
A conference on Classics in the modern world: a ‘Democratic Turn’?, held at the OU in June 2010, provided a further forum for researchers from the US and Canada to meet and debate with CRSN colleagues literally from all over the world: Australia, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Poland and South Africa as well as the UK. In the fall of 2009 an email seminar was held to identify and discuss some of the underlying research questions relating to this topic. Several North American scholars were on the circulation list; several others presented papers at the conference itself. Three participated in a panel, sponsored by the APA CAMP committee, on “Democracy as Popular and Political”: Kathryn Bosher, Northwestern University; Dorota Dutsch, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Nancy Rabinowitz. A panel on African-Americans and the Classics, which evolved from a project developed by COCT, included papers by Kenneth Goings and Eugene O’Connor, Ohio State University; Margaret Malamud, New Mexico State University; and Michele Ronnick, Wayne State University. Among the other presenters were Bracht Branham, Emory University; Robert Davis, City University of New York; Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California, Santa Cruz; Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park; George Kovacs, Trent University; and Barbara Lawatsch-Melton, Emory University.
CRSN held a workshop for graduate students before the opening of the main conference and offered opportunities for more advanced doctoral students to present their work-in-progress during the conference. Here, however, few if any North American students participated. Through my involvement on the CRSN steering committee, I hope that the APA can work with the Outreach, CAMP and COCT committees in identifying graduate students in classics and related fields with research interests in classical reception, and in encouraging them to share their work at interdisciplinary academic conferences of this kind.
One of the chief responsibilities of the Outreach Vice-President has been to develop and pursue different strategies for reaching out beyond the professional classics community, first and foremost by collaborating with colleagues around the US and Canada to gather information on classically related events in their geographical regions, and to publicize these events globally as well as locally. When I assumed this position in 2008, I continued the practice of my predecessors in this position—Jennifer Roberts, CUNY, and Barbara Gold, Hamilton College— by sharing on-line articles from various North American media outlets about the classical world and its cultural presence today on a section of the APA website. Entitled “Events: What’s Current in Classics?,” this section has been maintained for several years by Robin Mitchell-Boyask of Temple University, the APA website editor. I made similar contributions to The Dionysiac, a listserv announcing classical plays, theatrical events and conferences, run by Hallie Rebecca Marshall of the University of British Columbia.
Over the past year, however, I have been encountering numerous relevant news items of this kind posted by others—many but not all of them classicists— on the “social utility” website Facebook. I have, moreover, been finding it increasingly easy and expeditious to share these items, and to post items brought to my attention by others (who have emailed me texts and links), on my own Facebook page. For this reason, I would like to consider starting an APA Facebook page over the next few months, perhaps with the assistance of one or more Outreach Committee members. Facebook already has a Wikipedia article about the APA in its “files”, written by Ruth Scodel, University of Michigan, with the approval of the APA Board, during her APA presidency. I would ideally like to use the text of this article on this proposed page. I would also like to obtain reactions from members of the Outreach, CAMP and COCT committees and from the Amphora editors, and some promises of assistance as well, before I launch this page. But I am eager to have it “up and running” by the time of the APA meeting in San Antonio.
After updating the description of the Outreach committee and its activities on the APA website in January 2010, it was time to tackle the task of reorganizing and refocusing the Outreach Speakers’ Bureau. The most recent list did not include any classicists currently teaching in Canada; happily, several Canadian colleagues have now agreed to be listed. The practice of having state coordinators has been discontinued, since the individuals who have contacted me about identifying possible speakers did not appear interested in limiting their options to local presenters. Indeed, the major speaking invitation that came my own way as a result of my own listing was from a lecture series in Des Moines, Iowa. Those already on the Speakers’ Bureau roster were all asked if they wished to remain. They were also informed about plans to connect presentations by classicists (and particularly presentations to audiences and geographical regions with few opportunities to engage with scholars and teachers in our field) with the publication by these speakers, in books and journals, of new scholarship, and made cognizant of the need to privilege scholarly efforts that can easily be made accessible to a non-specialist audience.
In addition, with the assistance of CAMP, and at the request of over twenty colleagues who attended an organizational meeting of those interested in the musical reception of classical antiquity at the APA in Anaheim, Outreach has launched two additional rosters in 2010: one of classicists with backgrounds in musical performance and the history of music; the other of classicists with backgrounds in theatrical performance and in classical performance receptions. In compiling the roster of “musical classicists”, which now numbers over thirty individuals from North America and beyond, we are especially eager to identify colleagues who would be willing to share their knowledge of both music and classical antiquity with individuals writing or performing works that are set in the ancient Greco-Roman world, draw on ancient Greek and Latin literary texts, or feature classical figures and themes.
For the roster of “performance classicists”, we are hoping to identify colleagues willing to share their knowledge of classical antiquity and performance with individuals who are considering staging works that are set in the Greco-Roman world, draw on Greek or Latin literary texts, and/or feature classical figures and themes, in the areas of drama, music and dance. We also anticipate that the senior scholars listed in this roster may be asked to review “classical performances” staged by faculty members under review for tenure and promotion. Thanks to Mary-Kay Gamel, Keely Lake of Wayland Academy, Nancy Rabinowitz, and especially Ted Gellar-Goad, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, for helping conceptualize, publicize and coordinate these two new rosters.
The wide interest in the musical reception of classical antiquity, voiced initially in response to the Call for Papers for the 2011 Outreach session on the musical reception of classical texts, described in detail below, has fructified in other ways as well. In June 2010 I was invited to speak at a conference at the University of Graz, Austria, celebrating the 350th birthday of the composer Johann-Josef Fux: it featured a performance of his 1714 opera Dafne in Lauro, inspired by Ovid’s narrative of Apollo and Daphne in Metamorphoses Book 1.
Finally, the organizers of the 2011 Outreach panel—Robert Ketterer, University of Iowa, and Andrew Simpson, Catholic University of America—are also organizing a conference to be held at the University of Iowa in the fall of 2011 entitled “Re-creation: Music and the Reception of Classical Antiquity.” The conference has the enthusiastic support of both the Department of Classics and the School of Music at the University of Iowa. It will explore the reception of Greco-Roman and other ancient literature, theory and culture in musical works composed for various venues, among them silent film scores, the musical stage (as operas, operettas, oratorios, and “musical comedies”), instrumental pieces, pop music in a general, inclusive sense.
The organizers will also welcome presentations focused on history, theory and other academic topics connected with the written and spoken word as well as its musical settings. One or more concerts will be incorporated into the conference as well as the screening of a silent film with Andrew Simpson (the acclaimed piano accompanist for the 2010 CAMP –sponsored session on classically themed silent films) on the piano. The organizers also hope to enlist the expertise of several members of the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at Iowa who specialize in silent film. It is hoped that the APA Outreach Committee, CAMP and COCT will play an important organizational role in this project, particularly in efforts to obtain outside funding.
Amphora will finish its ninth year in December. The editor, Davina McClain, has prepared the following statement for this report:
Amphora, which originally was scheduled to appear in March, appeared in late June. The delay was due to a series of difficulties encountered by both the editor and the assistant editor. Additional time was needed to ensure the quality of the submissions, and of the issue itself. Once it was ready, the designer worked miracles to pull everything together into a beautiful issue. The next issue is slated to appear in December. At the moment there are not enough submissions of the quality necessary for publication, but the editor is making inquiries.
The various committees in the Outreach division have planned a number of exciting events for the 2011 APA meeting in San Antonio. Each is described in the report submitted by the respective chair.
The Committee on Outreach will sponsor a panel, organized by Robert Ketterer and Andrew Simpson, on “The Children of Orpheus: How Composers Receive Ancient Texts”, and featuring the following papers:
Benjamin Stevens, Bard College, a member of the Outreach Committee, and Brett Rodgers, Gettysburg College, have independently co-organized a panel on “The Classical Tradition in Science Fiction” for the APA meeting in San Antonio. The topic of the Outreach panel for the 2012 APA meeting in Philadelphia will be “Black Classicism”, organized by Kenneth Goings, Ohio State University; Denise McCoskey, Miami University; Eugene O’Connor, Ohio State University Press; and Michele Ronnick, Wayne State University. The call for papers has been published.
Another Outreach committee member, Keely Lake, has organized a session entitled “Building Bridges: Latin’s Connections to Modern Languages and Cultures,” for the meeting of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in Boston on November 21. The two presenters—Lake and APA President-Elect Kathleen Coleman, Harvard University—will demonstrate links between Latin and modern languages as well as between classical and modern colleges. The similarities between the methods of classical and modern language instruction will be emphasized. The goal is to see Latin as complementary to rather than competing with the study of modern languages. Lake has updated and redesigned the National Committee for Latin and Greek website (promotelatin.org), and is eager for more contributions; she is pleased to report that the APA will be supporting some National Latin Teachers Recruitment Week grants in 2011.
The committee’s other activities in 2010 have included plans for a proposed series of lectures by ten distinguished classicists to be held at the Embassy of Greece in Washington, DC, and the nomination of a distinguished classicist for the National Humanities medal. I would like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues who have helped in these efforts, among them: Adam Blistein; John Bodel, Brown University; Deborah Boedeker, Brown University; Dee Clayman, The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Kathleen Coleman, Harvard University; W. Robert Connor, The Teagle Foundation; Judith Fletcher, Wilfred Laurier University; Mary-Kay Gamel; Keely Lake; Dimitrios Iatromanolakis, the Johns Hopkins University; Peter Meineck; Kurt Raaflaub, Brown University; and Nancy Rabinowitz.
Chair Nancy Rabinowitz has written the following report:
CAMP has had a very busy year in 2010. At the January meeting in Anaheim we arranged for the screening of a series of silent films with classical settings and themes in lieu of our traditional “live” performance. This film project—Greece and Rome in Silent Cinema—is part of a British initiative headed by Maria Wyke, University College, London, and Pantelis Michelakis, Bristol University. The addition of live piano music at the screening, offered by Andrew Simpson, made the event particularly pleasurable. At the same meeting CAMP co-sponsored (with Boston University) a special film showing of Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son: What Have Ye Done?
We also sponsored a successful panel, which investigated the socio-political contexts of re-performances of ancient drama, and asked how different cultural and political circumstances informed or influenced the productions. Its topic is of great relevance to research in the burgeoning field of classical reception. As Lorna Hardwick has emphasized in Reception Studies (2003), the theater has been at the foreground of discussions about how the classics continue to resonate into the modern world. The panel brought together three intersecting threads of inquiry that have for twenty years dominated the field of Athenian tragedy in particular. The presentations, moreover, underscored the importance of taking socio-political developments into account: not only those at the time of the original performance (so as to tackle such thorny problems as that of dating) but also those occurring when plays are re-performed (since the socio-political context can influence production choices: plays may be performed for the express purpose of commenting on current political events).
CAMP continues to view its annual panels as venues for raising significant questions about the intersections between performance and reception. The 2011 panel, organized by Dorota Dutsch and Nancy S. Rabinowitz, is entitled “Democratic Inflections”. It aims to engage in the international debate on the notion of a “Democratic Turn” in classical reception. In our conception, the word “democratic” draws attention to the ways in which performances of classical texts have been appropriated by diverse cultural groups and segments of society, both those in dominant positions but more particularly those that define themselves as disenfranchished. It features an international panel of speakers.
This year’s CAMP production, to be held Friday evening, January 7, 2011, will feature a dramatic reading of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, as translated, adapted and directed by Bella Vivante, University of Arizona. In Vivante’s words, the reading is a “racy adaptation that aims to reflect the spirit and intent of Aristophanes’ play while rendered in a modern idiom for a contemporary audience. Like all CAMP productions, this one will feature classics faculty and students from across North America as the performers, a troupe “chomping at the bit to entertain APA-AIA conference-goers with a lively, comedic romp. The director promises pratfalls, slapstick, stock jokes about chicks, dudes, sex, and drinking, singing, dancing, celebrity impressions, cinematic parodies, good shticks, bad puns and more. In keeping with the Old Comedy features of this play within the constraints of modern society, this performance is for Mature Audiences only.”
We have also launched a list of scholars interested in consulting on or reviewing performances of ancient drama, a companion to the list of “Musical Classicists.” Finally, we continue to work with Peter Meineck to identify and train program scholars for his NEH grant.
Chair Dirk Held has written the following report:
COCT will sponsor a session at the 2011 APA meeting in San Antonio entitled “New World Classics: Receptions of Antiquity for Modern Children.” Organized by Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pensylvania, and Deborah Roberts , Haverford College, the panel will address American versions of antiquity from Hawthorne to the present day. The papers are:
The Division of Professional Matters includes under its jurisdiction the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics, the Committee on Placement, the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, and the Classics Advisory Service. Here follow brief reports from each committee, reporting on activities since the last APA meeting in Anaheim.
Various questions were presented for consideration by the committee; as always, our deliberations are strictly confidential. Two complaints that have occupied the attention of the Subcommittee for some time have been resolved. The communication of outcomes is still pending in one of these cases.
A number of items came under consideration by the Placement Committee this year. We discussed at some length the value of extending the placement service to applicants for secondary schools, to encourage the schools to register with the service, and to alert our PhDs to career opportunities at that level. We have organized a panel on the subject, including PhDs who have taught or are teaching in private or public schools, to take place at the San Antonio meeting. We were able to settle amicably complaints leveled at individuals for violations of placement procedures or discourteous treatment of candidates. Happily, there were very few such instances. We will discuss through e-mail and more fully in San Antonio the proposition of introducing more flexibility in procedures when institutions conduct senior searches and possible candidates (especially those whose candidacy is solicited) prefer to avoid the embarrassment, awkwardness, and breach of confidentiality involved in formal registration.
After a delay of several years, CSWMG is now in possession of the raw data behind the various reports it is charged to produce: Journals, Placement, and the Departmental Census. The committee has created three teams to process the data, reconsider the nature and purpose of the surveys, and produce the reports. The teams for the Journals and Placement reports have been joined by representatives of the Publications Committee and the APA/AIA Joint Committee on Placement, respectively. These teams are now at work and expect to produce draft reports by the time of the Annual Meeting in San Antonio, where the full committee will meet to consider recommendations to be passed along to the Professional Matters Committee.
1. Since I took over in January of this year the CAS has been in contact with eleven colleges and universities, nine in the US and two in the UK.
2. The bulk of the work has been in support of departments and programs in crisis, whether threatened with extinction or otherwise under stress. A letter from the APA President to the authorities in question is almost always part of our response but in some cases other strategies are used. We always take our lead from the wishes of the local department. In some cases this year a general letter-writing campaign was felt to be counter-productive because it was likely to alienate administrators, but some colleagues found this a productive strategy. Enlisting the aid of parents can be effective in some cases. Different traditions of faculty governance may recommend one or another approach to a dean or provost by the APA. In calendar 2010 we have so far worked on six cases, with one still ongoing as of this date. At issue was (or is) the elimination of positions—in two cases amounting to half the instructors in Classics—the closing of departments, the downgrading of a department to a program, and the cancellation of a flourishing Latin program along with terminating an Associate Professor of 30 years service.
3. The CAS also responded to requests from three colleges and one university for suggestions of suitable evaluators of their programs; two other colleges asked for assistance in developing or creating a Classics program.
4. I intend to revise the web page of the Classics Advisory Service during the present academic year. Suggestions from APA officers and members for useful additions or other editing would be welcome.
5. Responses to several threatened programs were coordinated with CAMWS and I think that the pooling of information has helped both organizations to respond more effectively. I would like to thank Anne Groton, Secretary-Treasurer of CAMWS, for collaborating with APA in this area. We plan to discuss how we can work together even more closely in the future.
The elected members of the Program Committee in 2010 were Elizabeth Asmis, Maud Gleason, Steven Oberhelman, Jeffrey Rusten, and myself. We met twice in Philadelphia to consider submissions for the 2011 meetings, to be held in San Antonio. Heather Hartz Gasda and Adam Blistein provided indispensable support in making our meetings possible and our deliberations efficient.
1. At our first spring meeting (April 24) the Committee evaluated proposals for 16 panels, 2 seminars, 2 workshops, and 7 roundtable discussions; we also approved the charter renewal of 1 existing Affiliated Group (Category I). 4 applications for At-Large Panels were submitted (none an APA/AIA Joint Submission), of which we accepted 1, rejected 2, and invited 1 to revise and resubmit (this resubmitted panel proposal was subsequently accepted at the Committee’s June meeting). The Committee approved all the proposed seminars, workshops, and roundtable discussions and 9 of the 12 proposals for Organizer-Refereed Panels; the Committee suggested that one of the rejected Organizer-Refereed panels be recast as an At-Large Panel proposal, to be considered in April 2011. All 4 of the proposals submitted by APA Committees were accepted; three of these will be paper sessions, and one will be a workshop (“Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation,” from the Committee on Education). The now-traditional panel sponsored by the APA / AIA Joint Committee on Placement was scheduled to follow the reception on the opening night of the meetings: the theme this year will be “Classics Ph.D.s and Secondary Teaching: Challenges and Opportunities.” We also reviewed 16 panels submitted by affiliated groups: the Committee regretfully could not let 2 of these go forward, one because it had not attracted the minimum number of abstracts for review, another because it became plain, after an inquiry, that the proper procedures to insure double-blind refereeing had not been followed.
2. At the April meeting the Committee took up two other pieces of business. First, it received a report from Elizabeth Asmis, concerningthe APA / CA Joint Panel that she undertook to organize for the CA Annual Conference in late March or April 2011, and congratulated her on securing the participation of Peter Wiseman and Ingo Gildenhard (for the CA) and Erich Gruen and Joy Connolly (for the APA), who will offer papers on “Cicero and Civic Unity.” Second, it took up the request made by the Board of Directors in January to suggest steps that might be taken to the annual Plenary Session more attractive: I presented the Committee’s recommendations (which appear at the end of this report) to the Board at its meeting in Philadelphia in early October, and they were enthusiastically adopted.
3. The Committee met again for two days on June 18-19. As noted above, we accepted the one At-Large Panel proposal that had been revised and resubmitted. The adjudication of 407 individual abstracts was the main item of business. This number was up 30.4% from the 312 abstracts submitted for the Anaheim meetings of 2010, and was second only to the record 446 abstracts submitted for the meetings in San Diego in 2007.[1]
As always, explaining fluctuations in submissions from year to year is an uncertain business; yet I find it impossible to believe that this spike is not attributable in good part to the introduction of online-submissions for this most recent round. Though the system made available for this purpose through the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) was imperfect in some ways, it represented a giant step in the right direction; furthermore, the SSRN staff were responsive when problems arose, and there is little evidence that those problems were visible to our members, who reported remarkably few difficulties to the Association’s central office. We have arrived at the future, or at least its threshold, and for that thanks must go to Immediate Past-President Josh Ober, who pointed the Association toward SSRN, and above all to Adam Blistein, who labored tirelessly to make the collaboration work.
As most members are probably aware, every year before the June meeting, each of the five members of the Committee independently reads, writes comments upon, and rates every individual abstract on a scale of 1 to 4. After the committee members have submitted their ratings, Heather Gasda collates them in tabular form in advance of the meeting: the collated ratings provide the basis for our discussions. In cases where the committee members agree, there is little or no discussion. Otherwise we discuss each abstract until a consensus is reached. The discussion of the abstracts, which is often extensive and always collegial, constitutes the most enjoyable part of our work. There are no quotas. We consider all abstracts on their own merits and in accordance with the guidelines published on the Association’s website.
Of the 407 abstracts submitted, the Committee accepted 121 or 29.7%, up from the acceptance rate (24.4%) of last year. Women submitted 154 abstracts (37.8%), men 253 (62.2%), proportions that represented a slight tilt in the direction of men relative to last year. The acceptance rate for men (32.0%) was roughly equivalent to last year’s acceptance rate for men, while the acceptance rate for women (26.0%) was up markedly. We received (roughly speaking) 200 proposals on Greek subjects (49.1%), 164 on Roman topics (40.3%), with the remaining 43 (10.6%) devoted to topics such as linguistics, reception, and pedagogy. The top three categories for submissions were Latin Epic (35), Greek tragedy (33), and Greek epic (29); the accompanying tables provide further statistics, including comparisons with submissions in each category last year.
On the afternoon of June 19 the Committee organized the accepted papers into sessions, identified potential presiders, and drafted a preliminary program for the meetings in San Antonio.
4. There will be two seminars in San Antonio: “Allusion and Intertextuality in Classical Historiography,” organized by John Marincola; and “The Audience of Roman Comedy,” organized by Timothy J. Moore. As in the past, the papers for these seminars will be circulated to interested members in advance of the meetings, and the session itself will concentrate on extensive discussion of the papers; participation will be limited according to the space available. We warmly urge members to consider submitting proposals for seminars at future meetings.
5. Dee Clayman’s presidential panel will present “New Chapters in Recovering Greek and Latin Literature.” Her presidential address is titled “Berenice II, Lady of the Lock.”
6. As always, the Committee is eager to learn of any initiatives that the membership would like the Committee to undertake to enrich the annual program, and I invite the members to send their suggestions and comments to my successor or any of the continuing members of the committee.
7. On the Committee’s behalf I warmly thank all those who have submitted abstracts, organized panels, and agreed to chair sessions for the meetings in San Antonio; and Adam Blistein and Heather Gasda for their help in all aspects of preparing the program. Speaking for myself, and I am sure the membership at large, I also warmly thank my colleagues on the Committee, whose service demands weeks of their time each year, and in particular the colleagues whose terms are now ending, Steve Oberhelman and Jeff Rusten: if you look in the dictionary under “commitment” or “collegiality” or “acumen,” you will see their pictures. Finally, as I prepare to hand on the Committee’s chairmanship, I want to express my warmest gratitude to Adam and Heather once again, for their flawless collaboration and support over the last four years; and, especially, to the membership, for having given me this opportunity to work with them and learn from them.
In January 2010 the Board asked the Program Committee to consider ways in which the Plenary Session could be made more attractive to members and be better attended. The Committee took up the question at its April meeting in Philadelphia and now offers the following recommendations, several of them anticipated in Board’s earlier discussion:
This report will confine itself to questions of leadership in the division. The report to follow the January board meeting will discuss in more detail the specific activities of our different areas of publication.
We undertook this year two searches, for "web editor" and for editor for monographs.
For "web editor", I am pleased to report that the search committee has identified and endorses as candidate to the full Board for approval Professor Sam Huskey of the University of Oklahoma (c.v. postpended); the Board has approved the appointment at its October meeting. Sam has done good work with CAMWS in this space, is a fresh thinker, and is eager to work with us as we see what more we can do within existing resources to enhance our web presence. We have agreed that we would style him "Information Architect" for the Association, to reflect that the position is not only one of shoveling content onto a static page and arranging it, but is as much a job of thinking and designing conceptually how the web "publishes" the Association and its business. This choice carries forward discussions the Vice Presidents had with the Presidents and Adam last winter after our publications retreat. It does not preclude recognizing as we work with Sam that other approaches and resources might be necessary, but I am convinced that he will be the right thinking partner for just such conversations, and that in the meantime, he will do the doable within our present arrangement (which includes some greater capacity since the redesign of the website and the addition of a "content management system" last winter). (Search committee: Clayman, Hallett, Bagnall, Levene, Lenski, O'Donnell, Blistein)
For monographs editor, we are in a more difficult position. Solicitation of the association did not generate applications we could move seriously forward. Members of the search committee have deliberated further, beaten the bushes, gathered some names, and approached a number of respected senior members of the Association, to no avail. The underlying challenge, surfaced at our retreat, is that we are at a point where it is not clear just how APA-published monographs differ, first of all, from the array of things published commercially and elsewhere and, second, how the Association might most responsibly take up the challenge of reimagining its publications in view of digital opportunities. The search committee continues to deliberate. (Search committee: Coleman, White, Mastronarde, Goldberg, O'Donnell, Blistein)
The editor for textbooks, meanwhile, Sander Goldberg has spent some valuable time in exploring publishing possibilities this year, first with Rice University Press, which had an engaging model for e-publication of monographic scholarship but which discorporated late this summer. Investigation continues.
Clearly, our corporate and distributed mind is at some variance on the question of the future of our publications. Where we are of a mind in knowing the character and quality of scholarship that we think the Association should publish -- with TAPA -- we continue to flourish. There are and with Professor Huskey's appointment will be more opportunities to think about how to "leverage" that publication, but it is in good hands. On the other hand, our aporia in other matters has everything to do with the interesting times in which we work. My view is that we should proceed deliberately and directly on the question of the Association's self-presentation (with a view to the Gateway that we have discussed for years now) and more deliberately still on the question of other forms of publication. It is not at all clear that if we take a pause of some short time to reconsider our options anything of value would be lost.
J. O'Donnell
This report consists of the interim reports from some of the task forces appointed last winter. As they got into action at different points, they have varying amounts to report. The Task Force on Digital Peer Review has got itself organized but has no substantive report so far.
(John Bodel, Chair; Erwin Cook; John Duffy; Judith Hallett; Sharon Herbert; William Metcalf; Michele Salzman; Matthew Santirocco). This group was charged with exploring possible ways to fulfill the aim of the APA Directors to create an ongoing summer program aimed at giving graduate students from a mix of institutions a common foundation in methods and materials of research. Two areas targeted for primary consideration were the documentary research disciplines (papyrology, epigraphy, palaeography, and numismatics) and fields outside the range of traditional graduate programs in Classical philology, such as archaeology and the study of Egypt and the Ancient Near East. The committee conducted its deliberations by email over the spring and summer months. Various ideas were mooted in a series of exchanges concerning three issues especially: organization and location, timing (both frequency and duration), and staffing and costs.
We find ourselves in agreement on several basic principles, but also conceding that in many cases an ideal might have to be abandoned in favor of what is possible: the perfect combination of duration, venue, rotation, and staffing is likely to be difficult to achieve, and to some extent, we believe, the initiative is sufficiently worthwhile that it should be implemented in some fashion, even if imperfectly, if only to learn better what works and what doesn’t.
The following list of recommendations and issues for further consideration is therefore focused on the most basic questions, with details of many particulars left to be worked out ad hoc in individual instances by a suitable program leader, once identified. Practically, the first step of any APA-sponsored initiative would seem to be securing the cooperation of a scholar with suitable skills (and possibly access to suitable research materials) willing to undertake the leadership of a summer seminar. Subsequent arrangements would to some extent need then to depend upon what the leader could manage. Nonetheless, several ideal parameters might be identified and, if possible, observed.
Seminars should be hosted at institutions with suitable resources (research libraries and housing accommodations). Those focused on documentary disciplines ideally should be held at places that provide access to suitable collections of study materials. A distribution of seminars among different regions of the country on a broadly geographical rotation is desirable, but having a single or a few fixed host institutions during the early years may help the programs to become established. Research universities are perhaps the most likely locations to host seminars, but research centers such as the Center for Hellenic Studies or the Getty Center might also be considered.
Ideally, at least one summer seminar should be sponsored annually, with the targeted fields offered in rotation. The minimum desirable duration for any seminar is three weeks. The ideal range of duration is three to six weeks. Seminars of four or six weeks might be broken into two units, with an intervening assignment, and possibly two (or more) instructors at different venues (see below on staffing and teleconferencing). If funding permits, two seminars of four to six weeks might be sponsored in a single summer, thus improving both geographical distribution and disciplinary accessibility.
Suitable program leaders might be more readily recruited to undertake a seminar if the possibility existed of sharing the work with a colleague. Two-person teams have been found to work well in such undertakings. Recent emeriti, who have expertise and time, might be among those recruited. Wherever feasible, distance education via teleconferencing should be combined with on-site instruction, for both economic and programmatic reasons. Learning the documentary disciplines benefits from specialist instruction by experts not always available on a single campus. In some cases, one co-director might join another on a single campus; in others, teleconferencing might allow two (or more) instructors in different locations to co-teach a seminar. Costs can be minimized and resources maximized by enabling willing experts on location with collections of primary materials to use them for instructing students at another site. Substantial funding will be needed, mainly for subsidies for students not supported by their home institutions (expected to be a majority). Likely sources of funding include (in addition to APA), NEH, ACLS, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation. Students from well subsidized Ph.D. programs might be expected to seek funding for some or all of their expenses from their home institutions.
Collaboration: For several of the ‘documentary’ disciplines, as well as archaeology itself, cooperation and, ideally, collaboration should be sought from the AIA. If reciprocal opportunities in philology were desired by archaeologists, APA could reciprocate.
Membership: Some committee members are in favor of extending the opportunity to groups other than active graduate students, such as post-docs.
Topics: Two committee members favor extending the range of possible topics to include interdisciplinary thematic seminars similar to those sponsored by NEH.
C. W. Marshall (chair), University of British Columbia
In the past the APA through its Committee on Research has supported many worthwhile large projects, but none that clearly represent Reception Studies. Reception (the study of how the ancient world has been understood and disseminated within and since antiquity) has grown, especially since 1995, as a sub-discipline of the field, and offers great opportunities for interdisciplinary contact with other academic fields. Indeed, Reception provides a rubric within which many of the traditional fields of Classics can profitably be examined.
A particular focus of Reception has been in performance studies, particularly in theatre. Since theatre is by definition ephemeral, any opportunity to document or preserve information about such performances should be pursued, in order to preserve transient information for future generations of scholars and theatre practitioners.
The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD,
An Archive of Classical Performance for North America would be able to complement the UK and European initiatives, while providing a platform from which other reception projects could be launched.
Given limited resources, choices must always be made for coverage, and these choices shape the discussion. These choices may fall along three axes: time, geography, and medium. (Other axes could be devised, but these convey the point.) Is the time period to be constrained (e.g. “since 1950”)? What geographical limitations will be placed (all of North America? global? the state of Delaware)? Theatre only, or also cinema, comics, sculpture, architecture…?
The specific parameters of what the archive would cover will depend on the interests of the director. We suggest that in order best to complement parallel efforts, a performance archive might focus on theatre and cinema performances in North America – performances both of ancient texts and (more generally) that represent the ancient world. Conceivably, direct adaptations in other media of ancient performance texts could also be included.
While any location could serve as an archive, for long-term viability and ease of consultation, an archive site would need
The greatest financial cost is likely to be staff, for maintaining archives and digital archives and for research. One model that would be worth pursuing would be doctoral fellowships and postdoctoral fellowships, a model that has proved successful for reception and database projects at Oxford, Northwestern, and Hamilton College, among others.
It must be asked what a North American Archive can accomplish that the APGRD cannot. Five things seem immediately relevant:
An archive would not only look to the past. Given the rapidly growing number of productions of ancient drama on both amateur and professional stages in North America, one major function of the archive would be to preserve records of new productions. This might in itself encourage collaboration between directors, actors, and producers, and also serve to inspire directors/producers to look to antiquity for new productions.
There are also opportunities to build links with (and support) other projects. These might be based in Reception (such as Classicizing Chicago, based at Northwestern), or in Performance (such as the work of Aquila Theatre Company, based in New York). The APGRD has undertaken a successful programme of publications on reception that also should be emulated.
The conclusion that we came to in London when we talked at length there last November stands, I think: namely, that APA should not seek to take any independent initiative in this area for the time being. Rather, it should aim to stay informed about the progress made by Charlotte and associates with the prospect in mind of offering or fostering assistance somehow to a major project of great potential value such as ePIR whenever this is launched, building on a satisfactory outcome #1 to RMMA.
Charlotte Roueché has been involved in Prosopography in two ways:
Through the individuals who appear in our online epigraphic corpora: Aphrodisias in Late Antiquity (2004): http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/ala2004/ includes an index of persons with references to PIR
Inscriptions of Aphrodisias (2007), http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/index.html includes an index of names, but does not identify individuals, except for the imperial house.
Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania(2009), http://irt.kcl.ac.uk/irt2009 is based on a book published in 1952. It therefore includes persons who will have been included in PIR, although this is not indicated in the web publication.
A first edition ofInscriptions of Cyrenaicawill be published in 2010: it will include an index of names, but will not identify individuals, except for the imperial house. We intend to integrate information from PIR and from LGPN.
As chair of the UK, British Academy sponsored Committee for Byzantine Prosopography: this inherited the remit of PLRE, and has published:
PBW I, 641-867, published in 2001 on a CD
PBW, 1025-1180, published in 2006, online:http://pbw.kcl.ac.uk/
This material may fall outside our remit: but our experiences there are of considerable methodological and technological value. It is important to note that the Austrians published a prosopography of the Byzantine Empire, 1261-1453 http://verlag.oeaw.ac.at/products/Sachgebiete/Byzantinistik/Prosopographisches-Lexikon-der-Palaiologenzeit-I-1-12-Add-1-2-CD-ROM-Version.html?language=de&language originally on paper, but since 2001 on CD. They are now working with colleagues in Thessaloniki to put this online.
Our current projects are driven principally by serendipity and research bids, as follows:
In hand.
In May 2011 I will be preparing a report to Mellon on how all that has worked out.
The expected outcomes should be:
ePIR. We are searching, with colleagues in Germany and elsewhere, for funding to pull together a range of projects in Roman prosopography: the aim is to start by taking the PIR database, upgrading its technology, and publishing it online.
The task force was charged with finding a means to create an online database of vital and professional information about classical scholars. At the outset there were three principal sources of information: The Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists (BDNAC), ed. Ward Briggs (Greenwood, 1994); The Dictionary of British Classicists (DBC) ed. Robert B. Todd (3 vols. Thoemmes, 2004) and the website “Catalogus Philologorum” supervised by Franco Montanari of Genoa.
The first two of the above-named reference works are not available in machine-readable form; the third is essentially a posting of .pdfs and .doc files that are not downloadable or searchable. Anticipating future contributions that would either be optically scanned or individually typed into a common format, I optically scanned letters “A,” “B,” and “C” of the BDNAC (122 pages) into .docx format and typed the “A” entry from the DBC (36 pages) in the same format. (N.B. The BDNAC copyright is owned by the APA; we do not have permission to use material from the DBC; I did this only for initial testing of our program.)
Conversion to TEI: With the source material in .docx format, the next step was to convert it into something approximating a TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) XML format, the standard markup language for this kind of project. This involved turning a document of words into consistent semantically-tagged fields, such as “name”, “born”, “died”, “education”, “experience”, “publications”, and so on.
A certain percentage of this work can be done automatically and will produce what is called a “medium-grade TEI” format (abbott_middle.xml) which has heading labels (“Born,” “Education,” etc.) [N.B.: This file can be opened with Wordpad vel sim.). The creation of a “high-grade TEI” format (abbott_high.xml) which breaks out each of the subfields as specific items, cannot realistically be done automatically, but will require clerical help to hand edit the source files, probably with the oXygen XML editor or some similar editor. The high-grade format would be most advantageous for the publications list, which, because of the varying use of colons and commas, font shifts, and the idiosyncrasies of citation style, need to be prepared by the human hand and eye.
Sample of formats:
Middle grade:
to Judge Thaddeus Marvin & Mary Jane A.
High grade:
key="#ABBOTT1-father">Judge Thaddeus Marvin and
Merging of Sources:With both the BDNAC and DBC material in TEI format, we tweaked the program to read the files, combine them into one file, and present the material in a browser. Parsing the Word document requires a long list of special rules to accommodate the vagaries of whatever Word has used to format the text for that version of the document. This has been a tedious process and it will be vital that future entries be in a standardized Word format. In the future, we should have a template to capture user input, and the template would produce output data that had all the tags.
Output: The attached file, DCS.xml, opened in a browser such as Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer, gives an example of the current web display. While it is possible to include images (photos of the subject; book covers), we have not yet got to that stage. The file produces one long web page, which should ultimately be a series of individual web pages with discrete addresses, and there are some small tweaks (comma after surname in left panel) that need to be worked on, but all such improvements and even the basic format of the output can be readily modified with our program.
It would probably be reasonable to produce this as digital material for the web using the eXtensible Text Framework (xtf) for displaying and searching. xtf is a California Digital Library project that seems to be one of the emerging platforms of choice for this kind of project. File A_SearchScreen.pngis a screen shot of the xtf search page. We (the staff programmer from the USC Center for Digital Humanties and I) took abbott_high.xml, indexed it with xtf, and then searched for “abbott” as on this screen shot.
The result of that search is the file B_SearchResults.png, a file similar to the output of a Google search, with each of the search hits highlighted as a link. (The second search hit comes from our already having some sample data in the collection when we added the abbott_high.xmlfile to the collection.)
Finally, the screen shot that is file C_Display.pngshows the display of the abbott_high.xml entry in xtf. All this is in the browser, and the display format can be changed as desired.
There are other parts of xtf that would allow for indexing and for writing software for analytics (all the entries referencing Harvard in the “education” section, for example).
Conclusions: At this stage, we are very close to completing the necessary programming to create a workable database website. The next big step will be to find financing for the creation and editing of more source material.
The five members of the task force agreed each to take on a particular area and of these four members submitted reports to me, as requested, during the summer. This constitutes sterling work which will be invaluable for the APA Committee on Research as it decides how to proceed on this matter. I shall summarise briefly the results of their work.
Jeffrey Henderson took responsibility for investigating the availability of translations of non-Christian Greek and Latin texts in a number of series, including Loeb Classical Library, Penguin Classics, Aris & Phillips, Focus, Tusculum, and Budé, as well as translations available online. He submitted two lengthy documents (12 pages for the Greek and 10 pages for the Latin) consisting of lists with checks where translations already exist. These are attached as Appendices 2 and 3. A glance at this list reveals many gaps – and a moment’s thought suggests that even where translations exist, they may be outdated and in need of revision. I circulated Jeff’s lists to all members of the group, who were immensely grateful.
Jan Ziolkowski brought to the group his expertise as a member of the editorial board for the Fathers of the Christian Church, published by the Catholic University of America Press. He submitted a brief list of projects recently published, under way, commissioned, projected and desired. I do not attach this as it contains confidential material.
Carin Green offered to investigate collections of fragments of Latin literature, primarily Republican literature, and submitted a list of collections of fragments which have not been translated and which she believes should be, an opinion with which it is easy to concur. She also praised the ongoing (if slow) work on translating Festus in the UK and suggested that the Loeb Classical library volumes Remains of Old Latin are in need of updating.
Pramit Chaudhuri provided three different documents, one on Ancient Medical Texts, one on Greek Law and one on Roman Law, which I attach as Appendices 5-7. Of these, he finds that Roman Law is currently the best served in terms of translations. There is a huge gap in terms of English translations of ancient medical texts; the French Budé series is leaps ahead here. In all of these fields he identifies as a major concern the lack of translations of papyri and he convincingly argues that this area is a priority, followed closely by inscriptions.
Summary These investigations reveal a general pressing need for more online translations of classical texts, especially those of a more technical nature (medical texts, legal texts) and those collected as fragments or according to their mode of preservation (inscriptions, papyri). Had we received a report on epistolary texts, I consider that that area too would reveal enormous gaps in coverage. There is clearly awareness of the need for translations of the huge amount of patristic material.
Alongside the need to fill gaps there is also a constant need for the revision of outdated translations, ideally in online versions. In this regard, it will be important for the APA Committee on Research to talk to the editors of the Loeb Classical Library, to find out more about the ongoing process to digitise the series for searchable online availability. I believe it would also make sense to talk to the editors of the Perseus Project and any other similar online resources, to find out how it is decided which translations to post; maybe it is simply a matter of copyright.
I believe that the APA is the appropriate body to coordinate efforts in this area, to the extent that that is possible when dealing with commercial publishers. In promoting online availability of classical texts in translation, there may be less interference of commercial motives and it is in this arena that the APA could play a central role in coordinating activities, to avoid duplication of effort, for example. Maybe the APA could set up a body to oversee the online posting of particular types of text.
I realise that the work on this Task Force has in no way been comprehensive; that would be hard, if not impossible. However, I believe that the Task Force has done all it can to carry out the brief assigned. I therefore propose that its work be considered done and that it be considered dissolved. I wish to express my deepest thanks to the participating members.
As a critic who significantly altered thinking on the classical subjects that engaged his attention, as a model of the classicist as man of letters and man of action, as a soldier who fought heroically and was wounded defending his principles and an oppressed people, as an intellectual who saw the eternal parallels between his war and the Peloponnesian conflict immortalized by Thucydides, as the first director of a research institution that has become a haven for classical scholars young and old, as the most significant public intellectual in the field of classics since Gilbert Highet, who continually attracted a wider audience for the legacy of the ancient world, as the trainer over decades of many eminent classicists from subsequent generations, as a scholar who produced accessible and rightly popular classroom texts that survived for generations, and, not least in his extraordinary longevity, B.M.W. Knox had a life and career that can fairly be compared in the twentieth century to Gildersleeve’s in the nineteenth.
Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, England on 24 November 1914, to Bernard, a professional pianist, and Rowena Walker Knox. His father had fought at Passchendaele and when he died in 1926, Knox was sent to Battersea Grammar School in London, where he, like many British boys of his generation, was given compulsory military training both in the school year and in summer camps. In the Cadet Corps he learned to use Morse Code, the standard Lee-Enfield .303 rifle, and the Lewis light machine gun. In the classroom he started French at 12, chose Latin over German, and soon took up Italian and Russian. When caught by a teacher reading Doctor Smith’s First Greek Book during a study session and sent to the master, Knox found his enthusiasm not punished but rewarded with private tutorials in Greek.
In 1933 he entered St. John’s College as a scholarship student in the fiercely contentious political atmosphere of Depression Cambridge. He was never a firebrand like his friend John Cornford (son of Francis Cornford), but was radicalized when he and his colleagues, marching in Cambridge with the Anti-War Movement to lay a wreath on the War Memorial on 11 November 1933, were pelted with fruit and eggs and abused by toughs. The failure of the British government to answer the economic distress of the period led him to join the campus socialists. He also met an American student at Girton named Betty Baur, who planned a career as a writer. Knox’s mentor was Martin Charlesworth (1895-1950), then Laurence Reader in Classics (for Ancient History). Despite Charlesworth’s attentions, Knox was distracted by politics and anticipated no better than a third, though he nonetheless took an Upper Second (2.1) in the Tripos and received his BA in 1936. His career between leaving Cambridge and joining Yale presents a real-life For Whom the Bell Tolls.
With Franco poised to take Madrid in the fall of 1936, Knox was persuaded by Cornford to use his extensive military training in support of the Loyalist side. He arrived in Madrid’s University City neighborhood (above the Manzanares and the great park Casa de Campo to the west) in November of 1936, was assigned to a British machine-gun unit (16 men) attached to the Franco-Belgian battalion “Commune de Paris” of the XI International Brigade and given antiquated French machine guns that took three men each to operate. When the brigade commander offered to replace them with WWI-era Lewis guns, Knox and his friends leaped at the opportunity. A month later, in Boadilla del Monte near Madrid, a bullet struck him flush in the neck and shoulder, nicking his carotid artery and damaging his right arm. The blood spurted up like a fountain and Knox was left for dead by his friends Cornford and Griffin McLaurin , cursing his fate in what he later learned was Homeric fashion before he lost consciousness. He somehow revived and managed to rejoin his friends, but in the absence of ambulances he had to walk several miles to a field hospital dressing station and then go by car to a hospital in Madrid.
When he awakened in the hospital he was surrounded by a doctor and young interns. Remarking on the position of the entrance and exit wounds, the doctor asked his students to name all the organs that the bullet had missed. In other words, “Why is this man still alive?” The bullet had been at the end of its trajectory and did not have sufficient force to damage him further. Half of his troop of 16 were killed and three badly wounded. (McLaurin had been killed on 9 November; Cornford would be killed on 28 December)
Back in Britain with scanty job prospects, Knox renewed his acquaintance with Betty Baur, love ensued, and the two were married in her home state of New Jersey in April 1939. Knox took a job at the Edgewood School in Greenwich, Connecticut for $50.00 a month while Betty worked on her first novel. Her first two novels appeared under her maiden name, but she subsequently took the nom de plume Bianca Van Orden (Knox regularly dedicated his books to “Bianca.”).
Knox enlisted as a private in the United States Army as soon as the school year following Pearl Harbor ended. He graduated from Officer Candidate School in November 1942 and became a naturalized American citizen in September 1943. Meanwhile, he was sent to East Anglia as a B-17 base ground defense officer. Bored by this assignment, he signed up in March 1944 for a posting undescribed but listed only as hazardous and requiring knowledge of French. His early training in languages and his fierce courage fit him well for Operation Jedburgh, a joint British-American-French operation that began after D-Day. Teams comprised of a French, Belgian, or Dutch officer, an American or British officer, and a radioman parachuted into Nazi-occupied France, Belgium, and Holland. Working with the local Resistance, the teams arranged airdrops of weapons and supplies, trained Resistance members, and ran guerilla operations while evading capture by the Germans. Among his 300 Jedburgh colleagues were future CIA director William Colby; Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop; Lucien Conein, who went on to coordinate the coup against South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963; and John Kirk Singlaub, who commanded Special Forces in Vietnam. Knox parachuted into Brittany on 7 July 1944 with his team (“GILES”) and worked with over 2000 members of the French resistance behind the lines until the Nazis were overrun by U.S. Army units advancing into Brittany, after which the team participated in the siege of Brest.
Operation Jedburgh was now to focus on China, but Knox pleaded for another European assignment. He was assigned to an OSS unit operating with Italian Partisans in the mountainous areas of North Italy. While pinned down in the cellar of a house in Fasano, Knox spied amid the crumbled brick and broken glass the corner of a book sticking out of the rubble. It turned out to be the 1938 text of Virgil, edited by J. Albini & H. Funaioli, published by the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana with a title page that read, “iussu Benedicti Mussolini.” Wondering if he still retained his Cambridge Latin, Knox performed a sors Vergiliana and stuck his finger in at the following passage:
(Geo. 1.505-511)
The book was too large to carry with him but he swore then, “If I ever get out of this, I’m going back to the classics and study them seriously.” For his war service he received two Bronze Stars, the Croix de Guerre avec Palme a l’Ordre de l’Armée, and the notable British honor of being “Mentioned in Dispatches.”
Spared by providence and good fortune, Knox was de-mobbed in September 1945 and set about making good on his promise. Following the birth of his son, Bernard MacGregor Baur Knox (presently Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics) in 1945, he applied to the graduate program at Yale on the G.I. Bill. His Yale interviewer, whom Knox claimed to be the chair, Harry Mortimer Hubbell, but was probably Bradford Welles, called him to his face “a premature anti-fascist” (an FBI euphemism for communist), yet he was accepted. He was 32. Already hired by Yale as an instructor, he received his doctorate in 1948 with a dissertation on “Traditional Structure and Formula in the Tragic Narrative Speech.” He was named instructor (1947-8), then assistant professor and fellow of Branford College (1948-54), associate professor (1954-9) and professor (1959-61), with a specialty in the large lecture classes on the classics in translation, a burgeoning area following the war. At about this time he was induced by his Yale colleague Maynard Mack to contribute the classics portion of an anthology entitled World Masterpieces (1956), which became the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces (1979) and now the Norton Anthology of World Literature. Knox also edited the Norton Book of Classical Literature (1993).
His ability to draw parallels between ancient wars and recent ones, to find modern counterparts to the sufferings of Prometheus or the self-discovery of Oedipus transfixed his students, one of whom, Dick Cavett, later had him on his television show for a full hour. Another was Robert Fagles, who as a graduate student in the late 1950s took Knox’s class on Sophocles’ Ajax. A friendship developed into a partnership when Knox wrote the introductions for Fagles’ translations of Sophocles’ Theban plays, Homer and Virgil.
In the Yale of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, Knox was attracted to their fresh ways of encountering a text and he was mindful of the debt he owed to Virgil. His first scholarly publication, “The Serpent and the Flame: The Imagery of the Second Book of the Aeneid,” AJP 71 (1950) 379-400, appeared in the same year as Pöschl’s Die Dichtkunst Vergils and both had wide influence. With it, Knox introduced New Criticism to the classical world and (with Pöschl) paved the way for numerous dissertations and studies that investigated patterns of imagery and thematic development in the works of ancient authors.
Knox applied New Critical techniques to tragedy in Oedipus at Thebes: Sophocles’ Tragic Hero and His Time (1957). Characteristically, he was able to set Sophocles in his social context and to trace recurrent imagery in a way that was meaningful even to readers who knew no Greek. His translation of Oedipus Tyrannos (1959) was performed by the Canadian Stratford Shakespeare Festival for television and filmed by the Encyclopedia Britannica.
In 1961 he was named the first director of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington. His Sather Lectures of 1962-3 were published as The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (1964). In this book Knox shows by linguistic analysis of the interchanges between the hero and his/her antagonists that structurally, Sophocles uses a similar pattern in all of his plays. Analysis of character and historical context in the Antigone, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus show that each of his heroes is unique within this recurring structure.
During his quarter-century at the CHS, Knox built a world-class home for scholars of the ancient Greek world while enlarging his own reputation. He published widely-read essays on the vitality of classics in the modern world in The New York Review of Books,The NewRepublic, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other journals.Most of these essays were collected in his later books, Word and Action: Essays on Ancient Theater (1979; repr. 1986), Essays Ancient and Modern (1989), The Oldest Dead White European Males and Other Reflections on the Classics (1993; repr. 1994), and Backing into the Future: The Classical Tradition and Its Renewal (1994).
In addition to his Sather Lectureship, he was Nellie Wallace Lecturer at Oxford (1975), Martin Lecturer at Oberlin (1981), West Lecturer at Stanford (1984) and Jefferson Lecturer for the NEH (1992). He won the George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism (1978), the Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award from PEN (1990) for Essays Ancient and Modern, and the Frankel Prize from the NEH (1990). He received honorary degrees from Harvard (1962), Princeton (1964), George Washington University (1977), Yale (1983), Michigan (1985), and Georgetown (1988).
He was President of the APA (1980) and received its Distinguished Service Award (1996). He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding member of the British Academy, the Special Forces Club (London), and the Cosmos Club (Washington).
Despite his retirement from the CHS in 1985 at age 71, he maintained an active schedule of lecturing and writing. He edited with P.E. Easterling the Greek section of The Cambridge History of Classical Literature (1986), produced the Norton Anthology of Classical Literature, and the great introductions to Fagles’ Homer (1991, 1997) and Virgil (2006), as well as introductions to translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Catullus.
Betty Baur Knox died in 2006. Bernard Knox died of heart failure on 22 July 2010 in Bethesda, MD. He is survived by his son. His ashes and those of Betty Baur Knox will rest at Arlington National Cemetery.
Ward W. Briggs
The Yale University Department of Classics has reported the death of Gordon W. Williams. See the Department’s web site: http://www.yale.edu/classics/news_williams.html.
During 2010 the Association learned of the deaths of the following members, some of whom, in fact, passed away before this year. We offer condolences to their families, friends, and colleagues. The names of life members are followed by an asterisk [*].
The APA salutes the following members who have supported its work for a half century or more. The year in which each joined the Association is given in parentheses. Please advise us if you observe any errors or omissions.
New England Classical Journal, now in its 38th year of publication, invites articles and notes on all aspects of the ancient world, including history, literature, art, and pedagogy. We will consider proposals for special issues on selected topics. Submissions, encouraged via email, should be sent to Professor Nina C. Coppolino, NECJ Editor, 66 Elmhurst Avenue, Providence, RI 02908; email address ncoppolino@earthlink.net. Paper submissions should bear no indication of the author’s identity in the body of the manuscript. Scholarly essays are peer-reviewed, and publications are listed in classical bibliographies. For more information about New England Classical Journal please visit the web site of the Classical Association of New England: http://www.caneweb.org/index.asp. For tables of contents of recent issues, indices, sample articles, and style guidelines, see the NECJ archives at: http://www.caneweb.org/necj/necjarch.htm.
The Department of Classics at the University of Notre Dame is pleased to announce the establishment of a two-year Master’s Program in Classics. The sixteen regular and concurrent faculty of the department represent a wide array of specialties, including Greek and Roman literature and culture, history, linguistics, and archaeology, from Archaic Greece through Late Antiquity. Full tuition scholarships and stipends are available. For more information, go to classics.nd.edu or contact Brian Krostenko, Director of Graduate Studies, at Classics@nd.edu.
The John J. Winkler Memorial Trust invites all undergraduate and graduate students in North America (plus those currently unenrolled who have not as yet received a doctorate and who have never held a regular academic appointment) to enter the seventeenth competition for the John J. Winkler memorial prize. This year the Prize will be a cash award of $2,000, which may be split if more than one winner is chosen.
The Prize is intended to honor the memory of John J. ("Jack") Winkler, a classical scholar, teacher, and political activist for radical causes both within and outside the academy, who died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 46. Jack believed that the profession as a whole discourages young scholars from exploring neglected or disreputable topics, and from applying unconventional or innovative methods to their scholarship. He wished to be remembered by means of an annual Prize that would encourage such efforts. In accordance with his wishes, the John J. Winkler Memorial trust awards a cash prize each year to the author of the best undergraduate or graduate essay in any risky or marginal field of classical studies. Topics include (but are not limited to) those that Jack himself explored: the ancient novel, the sex/gender systems of antiquity, the social meanings of Greek drama, and ancient Mediterranean culture and society. Approaches include (but are not limited to) those that Jack's own work exemplified: feminism, anthropology, narratology, semiotics, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and lesbian/gay studies.
The deadline for submissions is March 1, 2011. Essays should not exceed the length of 30 pages, including notes but excluding bibliography and illustrations or figures. Text should be double-spaced; notes may be single-spaced. Electronic submission is required. Essays may be submitted in any version of MS Word, PDF, or plain text format. Please include an email with your essay in which you provide the following information: your college/university, your department or program of study, whether you are a graduate or undergraduate, your email and regular mail addresses, a phone number where you can be reached in May of 2011, and the title of your work. Please note: Essays containing quotations in original Greek must be sent in PDF format, due to difficulties reading different Greek fonts and keyboarding programs.
The Prize is intended to encourage new work rather than to recognize scholarship that has already proven itself in more traditional venues. Essays submitted for the prize should not, therefore, be previously published or accepted for publication. Exceptions to this rule may be made in the case of the publication of conference proceedings, at the discretion of the prize administrator. The Trust reserves the right not to confer the Prize in any year in which the essays submitted to the competition are judged insufficiently prizeworthy.
Contestants may send their essays and address any inquiries to: Kirk Ormand, Dept. of Classics, Oberlin College; kirk.ormand@oberlin.edu.
The following members received Rome Prizes for 2010-2011 from the American Academy in Rome:
· Seth G. Bernard, University of Pennsylvania, Men at Work: Public Construction, Labor, and Society in Middle Republican Rome
· M. Shane Bjornlie, Claremont McKenna College, Politics and Tradition in Sixth Century Italy: A Study of Cassiodorus and the Variae
· Andrew M. Riggsby, University of Texas at Austin, Think Like a Roman: Essays in Cognitive History
· Tyler T. Travilian, Boston University, The Corpus Priapeorum: A Textual Edition with Introduction and Commentary.
Irony and Humour as Imperial Greek Literary Strategies: The Playful Plutarch, Ioannou Centre For Classical And Byzantine Studies, University Of Oxford, 12-13 July 2011. Plutarch of Chaeronea is always taken very seriously. The old image of a sober moralist, whose words should be taken at face value and whose ethical judgements are clear and simple, still dominates research. Even readers who are willing to grant him a sense of humour are seldom prepared to see this as anything more than a flash in the pan. Yet Plutarch often employs irony; almost no other ancient author is more receptive to the different intellectual and cultural uses of humour. From the Table Talk’s concern with identifying appropriate uses of jesting at the symposium, to the Political Precepts’ admonition to make measured use of witticism in political discourse; or from the lively interest exhibited by the Lives in joking as evidence of good or bad character, to the various effects that irony achieves in the Moralia, Plutarch’s corpus consistently testifies to the importance of humour as a means of intellectual engagement and communication in the period of the high Roman Empire.
This conference aims to examine the centrality of humour in Plutarch’s works, both as a literary device and as a topic in its own right. By ‘humour’, we wish to encompass a broad spectrum of discursive and intellectual practices, literary devices and manifestations of psychological processes: laughter, wit, anecdote, ridicule, joking and jesting, mockery, derision, satire and the satirical, parody and irony.
We welcome papers exploring specific passages in Plutarch’s writings where humour features, as well as papers tracing his views and works to broader cultural practices of playful engagement in public festivals or elite symposia. In particular, we suggest the following key topics for investigation:
-- Types and styles of humour in Plutarchan discourse, and their various uses: literary-aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, pedagogical, political and otherwise.
-- The role that laughter, jesting and humour play in various communicative contexts in Plutarch’s writings: their underlying psychology and their cultural significance.
-- Wit and humour as an appropriate technique in social encounters, and in the mode of self-presentation appropriate to those encounters, as seen in Plutarch’s works and other imperial Greek authors.
-- Irony within the Lives and the Moralia as manifested by narrative, style and phrasing, and displayed by the characters or the narrator.
-- Plutarch’s theoretical views on wit, humour, jesting, irony and their various media.
-- Plutarch and the various traditions of comic dialogue and satirical writing in the Roman Empire.
We welcome paper proposals by both professional scholars and postgraduate students. Abstracts of up to 300 words should be sent to the two conference organisers by the 20th of February 2011: Dr Eran Almagor (eranalmagor@gmail.com). Dr Katerina Oikonomopoulou (aikaterini.oikonomopoulou@linacre.ox.ac.uk)
Classics Triennial Conference, A Celebration of Classics, 25-28 July, 2011, University of Cambridge. The Celebration of Classics will see a remarkable line up of international scholars brought together in a novel format for such an event. There will, of course, be some very distinguished plenary lecturers, and there will also be two outreach evenings with well-known figures from the media and literary world. But the centre of the event is a set of seminars where leading classicists will be presenting their cutting edge work in a seminar format with extensive opportunities for discussion (each paper will have at least 45 minutes for comment and questions). Each day has only two such seminar slots, leaving plenty of time for debate as well as meeting old and new friends. We are hoping that you will want to come to Cambridge and participate in this event. For full details about the conference, registration, and graduate bursaries please see http://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/faculty/seminars_conferences/triennial_conference/
The Latin/Greek Institute of The City University of New York will offer basic programs in Latin and Greek from June 6 through August 16. These courses are intended for people with no (or very little) knowledge of the language. Two and a half to three years of college Latin or Greek will be taught in ten weeks of intensive, concentrated study. Twelve undergraduate credits will be awarded through Brooklyn College. The programs are team-taught by six faculty members, who are on 24-hour call. Students are trained in morphology and syntax and read representative ancient texts (through the Renaissance in Latin and Attic, Ionic, and koine texts in Greek). Graduate students are welcome to apply. Scholarship aid, funded entirely by donations from alumnae/i, is available to partially defray tuition. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation is offering competitive fellowships to beginning graduate students in art history who are focusing on European art history.
For information and application forms, write to: Latin/Greek Institute, City University Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016, Telephone: (212) 817-2081. E-mail: rfleischer@gc.cuny.edu Web site: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/lginst
The American Classical League is sponsoring a technology workshop and study tour in Rome during the Summer of 2011: RomeIn Situ and In the Lab. Classics teachers of all levels (Elementary through College) are encouraged to take advantage of this opportunity. Please check the ACL website for details (http://www.aclclassics.org/rome2011.html.
The Department of Classics of University College Cork, Ireland, offers an intensive 8-week summer school from June 27-August 18, 2011 for beginners with parallel courses in Latin and Greek. The courses are primarily aimed at postgraduate students in diverse disciplines who need to acquire a knowledge of either of the languages for further study and research, and at teachers whose schools would like to reintroduce Latin and Greek into their curriculum. In each language 6 weeks will be spent completing the basic grammar and a further 2 weeks will be spent reading simple, unadapted texts.
For further information and an application form see our website: http://www.ucc.ie/acad/classics/summ_sch.html or contact Vicky Janssens, Department of Classics, University College Cork, Ireland, tel.: +353 21 4903618/2359, fax: +353 21 4903277, email: v.janssens@ucc.ie
The Department of Classics, University of Reading, will host a Postgraduate Latin Summer School 18 July-19 August 2011. This summer school is open to students who have graduated or are in their final year of a BA. This is an ideal course for those planning to do postgraduate work or to pursue a career in Classics teaching.
Students will be expected to have read to the end of section 3 of Reading Latin, or equivalent, before the summer school begins, and will complete a course of study designed to enable them to read unmodified Latin texts. The Summer School is supported by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Subject Centre for History, Classics and Archaeology, and is able to offer part-bursaries.
For further information, please contact Dr David Carter: d.m.carter@reading.ac.uk Please also see the web site: http://www.reading.ac.uk/classics/latinsummerschool.aspx.
Vergilian Society Study Tours for 2011. For further information, tour and scholarship applications and detailed itineraries, see the Vergilian Society website: http://vergil.clarku.edu/
BolognaUniversityGreek and Latin Summer School, 27 June-15 July 2011. The Department of Classics (http://www.classics.unibo.it) of Bologna University welcomes applications to its intensive Greek and Latin Summer School. The courses will be held in Bologna from 27th June to 15th July 2011 for a total of three weeks. The school offers Greek courses (for beginners only) and Latin courses (at different levels; beginners and intermediate) and the possibility of combining two courses (Latin & Greek) at a special rate. The teaching will be focused both on language and on literature; further classes will touch on moments of classical history and history of art, supplemented by visits to museums and archaeological sites (in Bologna and Rome). Participants must be aged 18 or over. All tuition will be in English. For further information and to register, please visit: http://www.unibo.it/summerschool/latin. E-mail: diri_school.latin@unibo.it
Intensive Workshops in Speaking and Reading Latin at Dickinson College, July 2011. July 5-11, 2011: Professors Milena Minkova and Terence Tunberg will return to Dickinson for the second annual Conventiculum Dickinsoniense, a week-long total immersion seminar in active Latin, designed specifically for all cultivators of Latin who wish to gain some ability to express themselves in correct Latin. Fee: $300, including lodging and two meals (breakfast and lunch) per day, as well as the opening dinner, and a special cookout at the Dickinson farm for one night. For more information to apply, see here: http://www.dickinson.edu/academics/programs/classical-studies/content/Teacher-Workshops/
July 13-17, 2011: Dickinson professors Francese and Reedy will lead a reading-based five day Dickinson Latin Workshop, during which participants will read Tacitus’ Germania in its entirety. Fee: $300, which includes lodging and three meals per day. To apply, please contact Mrs. Barbara McDonald, mcdonalb@dickinson.edu. For more information, please contact me at francese@dickinson.edu. Full flyer will be posted on the Dickinson website soon, so watch this space: http://www.dickinson.edu/academics/programs/classical-studies/
You will note there there is a day left between, July 12, designed as a day of rest and recovery for anyone who might want to participate in both experiences. Lodging and meals will be covered for those people for the interim day. Both workshops are supported and subsidized by the Roberts Fund for Classical Studies at Dickinson College.
Conventiculum Latinum Lexintoniense, University of Kentucky from 21–29 July 2011. The Conventiculum Latinum Lexintoniense has become internationally known for providing a stimulating occasion in which participants can live for an extended period of time in an all-Latin environment, speaking and hearing no language but Latin. People who have never experienced Latin as a spoken language are cordially invited and welcome, but we ask that all participants be able to read Latin, and feel reasonably secure in their knowledge of basic morphology and syntax. The purpose of our seminars is to add an active dimension to the experience of those who already possess a certain passive knowledge of Latin. We also invite participants who are already experienced in the active use of Latin. It is our intention that the conventiculum will provide such participants with a pleasant opportunity to practice their skills in spoken and written Latin, and meet like-minded others. For further details, please see the Conventiculum website at:
http://www.as.uky.edu/ACADEMICS/DEPARTMENTS_PROGRAMS/MCLLC/MCLLC/CLASSICS/CONVERSATIONAL/Pages/ConversationalEnglish.aspx. And write to Professor Terence Tunberg at: terence.tunberg@gmail.com
The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, one of America’s most distinguished centers devoted to advanced teaching and research, was founded in 1881 to provide graduate students and scholars a base for their studies in the history and civilization of the Greek world. Today, 130 years later, it is still a teaching institution, providing graduate students a unique opportunity to study firsthand the sites and monuments of Greece. The School is also a superb resource for senior scholars pursuing research in fields ranging from antiquity to modern Greece, thanks to its excellent facilities, including internationally renowned libraries, the Blegen, dedicated to classical antiquity, and the Gennadius, which concentrates on the Greek world after the end of antiquity. Visit the school’s web site (http://www.ascsa.edu.gr/index.php/programs/) for information on its programs and fellowships for 2011-2012.
Memoria Romanaand the Max Planck Institute Research Award are pleased to invite proposals for eight doctoral fellowshipsand international research stipends primarily for younger scholars on subjects relating to memory and memorialization in the areas of Roman history, literature, archaeology, art, and religion, with a tenure of one year (with a possibility of renewal for a second year). Recipients can pursue their research at any location of their choice but will collaborate with Prof. Karl Galinsky and come to Austin or Bochum, Germany, periodically for colloquia and discussion with other recipients. Costs of such travel will be defrayed by the Project.
Research stipends will support projects in the subject areas listed in the call for dissertation fellowship awards. These are subventions of maximally $5,000, especially for projects leading to publication. They may include, for example, travel to museums, libraries, and archaeological sites. Applicants from all countries are eligible for the awards. More information about the requirements and application procedures can be found at http://www.utexas.edu/research/memoria/. Applications will be considered every three months. Deadlines for receiving applications are 1 November 2010, 1 February 2011, 1 May 2011, and 1 August 2011. Applications should be sent to Ms. Sarah Davies electronically (s_davies@mail.utexas.edu) with the words "Memoria Proposal" in the subject line or to Max-Planck Award Project, Department of Classics, C3400, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-0308. The grant project will be continued until 2012.
The American Research Center in Sofia (ARCS), Bulgaria, offers three programs with accompanying fellowships for the academic year 2011-2012: a Fall term program (September-November 2011) focusing on the history and archaeology of Bulgaria and neighboring countries, from prehistory to the present day; a Spring term program (February-April 2012) focusing on the history of religion in Bulgaria and neighboring countries; and a nine-month program (September 2011-May 2012) which incorporates both Fall and Spring term programs. The programs combine a formal academic curriculum with independent research. ARCS hosts the programs' lectures and seminars; organizes related study trips; facilitates opportunities for taking Bulgarian and other Balkan language classes; and provides logistical support and access to local libraries, museums, and other educational institutions. The Center engages the participants with eminent local scholars relevant to the field of their study and makes arrangements for specialized research at local institutions. Further details about these programs are available on the ARCS webpage (www.einaudi.cornell.edu/arcs) and the ARCS facebook group page (www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=106253216070705).
Please direct any questions about ARCS academic programs, fellowships, or application procedures to Professor Denver Graninger (graninger.arcs@gmail.com), Director of ARCS. American Research Center in Sofia, 75 Vasil Petleshkov St., Sofia 1510, Bulgaria. Tel. (+359 2) 947 9498; FAX: (+359 2) 840 1962. http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/arcs/
NEH Summer Seminars and Institutes for College and University Teachers. Application Deadline: March 1, 2011. Each summer, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports national residential seminars and institutes for faculty who teach American undergraduates. These study opportunities allow faculty and a select number of graduate students to increase their knowledge of current scholarship and advance their own teaching and research. Participants in these two- to six-week projects receive stipends to help cover travel and living expenses. Many seminars and institutes take place on American campuses; others are held at sites in Belize, Guatemala, Mexico, India, and Italy. For a list of the seminars and institutes to be offered in the summer of 2011, along with eligibility requirements and contact information for the directors, please visit www.neh.gov/projects/si-university.html.
The Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies at The Ohio State University offers short-term fellowships (of one to four months duration) to support visitors pursuing post-doctoral research in Greek and Latin epigraphy. The fellowships pay a stipend of $1,500 per month and recipients are expected to be in residence during the tenure of the award and are encouraged to participate in the activities of the University. Current students, faculty, and staff of the Ohio State University are not ordinarily considered for the award.
The Center's holdings include, in addition to a comprehensive library to support the study of Greek and Latin inscriptions, has a number of special collections. The focus of the Greek collection is Attica, but there are numerous squeezes from other sites. There is no application form. Applicants are requested to submit a curriculum vitae and a brief research proposal (not to exceed three pages) to the Director, Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies, The Ohio State University, 190 Pressey Hall, 1070 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210-1002. The applicant should also arrange to have two letters of recommendation sent to the Director. All application materials must be received by January 31, 2011. For more information, please visit our website: http://epigraphy.osu.edu/fellowships/
The University of Southern California invites applications for the Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities. Appointments are for two years, with a start date of August 15, 2011. Provost’s scholars will teach three courses over four semesters, with one semester free for full-time research. They are expected to reside in the Los Angeles area during the academic year and to participate in the scholarly life of the host department and the university through seminars and other scholarly activities. The salary is $50,000 per year plus fringe benefits, with a research and travel account of $6,000 per year. Candidates may choose one of the following programs as their proposed host department: American Studies, Art History, Classics, Comparative Literature, Critical Studies (Cinema), East Asian Languages and Cultures, English, French, History, Linguistics, Musicology, Philosophy, Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Spanish and Portuguese.
Applicants will be evaluated based on their prior academic accomplishments, the significance and intellectual merit of the proposed project, and their potential to contribute to the intellectual life of their host department and the community of scholars at USC. Candidates must have received the Ph.D. no earlier than July 1, 2007 and must have the degree in hand by July 1, 2011. The program expects to make five to eight postdoctoral awards per year. The application deadline is February 1, 2011. Application guidelines are available at the program website: http://grad.usc.edu/postdocapp .
Inquiries about the USC Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholars Program in the Humanities should be directed to Vice Provost Sarah Pratt at vpgp@usc.edu.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has granted an extension of time to the APA to claim funds available under its current Challenge Grant. To date over 650 donors have pledged over $1,900,000 to the APA’s Campaign for Classics for the 21st Century, and the Association has received and is investing more than $1,700,000 of the amount pledged.
The NEH Challenge Grant calls for the APA to raise a total of $2,600,000 in order to receive $650,000 in matching funds. By meeting earlier grant deadlines, the APA was able to claim $460,000 of this amount. Thanks to this recent NEH action, the APA has until July 31, 2011, to raise an additional $150,000 and claim the final installment ($190,000) of matching funds. Pledges of support are sufficient to meet the July 2011 deadline but all existing and new pledges must be paid, and the APA must raise an additional $500,000 (for the total of $2,600,000) by July 31, 2012, if it is to retain the matching funds it has claimed.
At the end of October the Association made an excellent start at reaching its next goal by holding a fund-raising event at New York University's Center for Ancient Studies. Thanks to the magnificent cooperation and assistance of Dean Matthew S. Santirocco, his staff, and the Aquila Theatre Company in residence at the Center, the APA was able to host a performance of several scenes from Greek epic and tragedy. Dean Santirocco and APA President Dee L. Clayman chaired an event committee that attracted an audience that was largely new to the Association and its activities. The event generated over $40,000 in net proceeds that can also be used to claim NEH matching funds. The event Program is posted on the APA web site and photographs will follow soon.
Starting next Summer the endowment being generated by this Campaign will begin to support important Association activities. First of all, it will ensure the uninterrupted operation of the American Office of L’Année philologique when its current grant funding expires in June. In addition, endowment funds will permit us to offer two fully-funded minority scholarships this coming Summer and to offer more substantial teaching awards in January 2012. The recent appointment of the APA's first Information Architect, Prof. Samuel Huskey of the University of Oklahoma signals that the APA is ready to start fulfilling the Campaign's promise of making its web site and other electronic media a gateway to information of high scholarly quality about classical antiquity. There is a great deal that can be done in this area with existing resources and volunteer labor, particularly with Prof. Huskey as coordinator. Even more will be possible once the full $2,600,000 is raised.
About 20% of all APA members have made a contribution to the Campaign for Classics; as this figure indicates, however, about 80% have not. If you have not yet made a contribution to the Campaign, now is an important time to do so. Please use either our secure online donation mechanism or this pledge form to make your pledge and set up a comfortable schedule of payments.
Spring 2010
Volume 33, Number 2
Table of Contents
· Financial Statement for 2009 and 2008
· Report of the Delegate to the ACLS
· Roundtable Discussion Session at the Annual Meeting
· Call for Nominations for 2010 Precollegiate Teaching Awards
· Pearson Fellowship Announcement
· Minority Scholarship Announcement
· University and College Appointments
· Reminder for Organizers of Panels at 2012 Annual Meeting
· Meetings/Calls for Abstracts
· Cambridge University Press Advertisement
· Bolchazy-Carducci Advertisement
Message from the President: The APA Online
There are still many of us active in the profession who can remember when all messages from the APA came through the US Postal Service, and more urgent business was carried on by telephone. Those days are long gone, and now the APA, like the rest of the world, communicates with its members by email and through our webpage. Dues payments and campaign contributions are often made online, and last year online voting attracted the largest number of participants ever. This year saw the first ever submission of abstracts for the annual meeting online through the Social Science Research Network, as well as the introduction of the APA’s blog and RSS feed. If you have not yet registered for this free service go to the Association’s website, http://www.apaclassics.org/, and look for the RSS link on the bottom left. In two mouse clicks you will be ready to automatically receive timely information that used to appear in the Association’s Newsletter.
While we have made great strides in carrying out the APA’s business online, much remains to be done. One desideratum is an electronic publishing program. Retrospective volumes of TAPA are now available throughJStor, and Project Muse provides new volumes online, but the textbook and monograph series are produced only in print. The APA/AIA Taskforce on Electronic Publication, chaired by Donald Mastonarde, and lately The Publication Committee, under the leadership of Vice-President James O’Donnell, have been wrestling with the difficult technological, legal, cultural and financial issues that must be faced in creating an optimal electronic publishing program. In the near future we can expect some thoughtful recommendations for first steps in this direction.
Another area that could benefit from more timely electronic communication is placement. Posting “Positions for Classicists” on the website each month was certainly an improvement over the printed lists sent only to registrants, and the more recent option of receiving listings by email twice a month, further increased the information flow. We could do better, however, with a blog for registered job seekers that brings notices of positions as soon as they are received by the Association.
The APA also needs to face the reality that Wikipedia is the first place students go to find out about the classical world. We should seriously consider using our collective expertise to make it better. The APA could enlist members, including graduate students, in a project to systematically review, revise and augment existing entries with reliable information, bibliography, and links to scholarly resources. We could also add new ones where the coverage is lacking.
Finally, the APA should update its website and the system it uses to manage the information on it. Here the only missing ingredient is funding. More financial resources, in fact, will make possible all of the suggestions sketched above and many we cannot yet imagine. Funds raised in the Campaign for Classics are intended, in part, to be an “innovation” fund for the future, as well as a means of improving communication within and beyond the profession. Give generously!
Dee L. Clayman
Financial Statements for 2008 and 2009 Fiscal Years
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the Anaheim Marriott Hotel, Anaheim, CA, on January 6, 2010. Those present were Profs. Josiah Ober, President, and Roger S. Bagnall, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ward W. Briggs, Cynthia Damon, Dee L. Clayman, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, John Marincola, Donald Mastronarde, James M. May, and James J. O’Donnell, Dr. Lee T. Pearcy, and Prof. Kurt A. Raaflaub. Also present by invitation were the following Directors who would take office on January 9, 2010: Profs. Ronnie Ancona, Peter Bing, Kathleen Mary Coleman, and Ann Vasaly. Profs. Carole E. Newlands and S. Georgia Nugent were absent. Prof. Ober called the meeting to order at 3:35 p.m.
Action: The Directors approved the agenda for the meeting that they had received in advance.
Action: The Directors approved minutes of their meeting of September 25-26, 2009.
Report of the President
Prof. Ober thanked Profs. Bagnall and Briggs for their help in forming an ad hoc committee on archives, the vice presidents and committee chairs for their efforts during the year, and Dr. Blistein for agreeing to continue as Executive Director. He also noted the new design of the web site that had been implemented recently. The decline in financial markets had affected Association operations, but APA had still been able to implement new electronic means of communication and to conduct retreats of both the Publications and Research Divisions to determine what further initiatives would be most useful for members.
Report of the Outgoing Vice President for Education
Dr. Pearcy thanked the members of the committees in the Education Division for their hard work during his term, and he was especially grateful for the help he had received from Sherwin Little, whose term as ACL President overlapped with his own as Vice President. He also thanked the members of the APA/ACL task force who had developed the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation and the designer of the printed version, Suzanne Lashner. The Directors had received a new version of this document in advance of the meeting.
Action: The Board voted to approve the publication of Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation and to express the Association’s thanks to the task force that developed it.
Dr. Pearcy reported that Prof. Vasaly had agreed to represent the APA on a College Board committee to develop the new Latin AP curriculum. He said that during his term the Education Division had focused in large part on secondary education, but the Division should not limit the scope of its activities to that area.
Association Awards
Prof. Ober had circulated to the Directors a proposal for an award for an outstanding journal article along with a summary that Dr. Blistein had prepared for the previous Board meeting of awards offered by other learned societies in the humanities. He noted that in many respects, APA’s portfolio of awards was similar to that of its peers, except that it had none for journal articles. If the Board was interested in having such a prize, it would need to decide whether to restrict the award to members and what universe of articles would be eligible, establish nominating procedures, and find funding.
Action: After discussion, the Board approved the development of an ad hoc committee to develop guidelines for a journal prize.
APA Participation in Research Groups
In recent months the APA had been approached by several groups in Europe that were conducting research into specific areas of Classics scholarship. Typically, the groups were asking APA to become an institutional member. In at least one case, the focus of the group had matched that of a standing APA committee (on the Classical Tradition), and that Committee had participated in the group’s activities. Directors felt that in other cases the research group might want to consider the possibility of seeking affiliated group status.
Annual Meetings
2010 Annual Meeting. Dr. Blistein reported that 1,700 individuals had registered for the meeting in advance, and he estimated that 200 more would do so at the meeting itself. If that estimate was correct, the meeting would be only slightly smaller than the 2006 meeting in Montreal despite a considerably worse job market. In addition, the anticipated attendance was very close to the amount budgeted. When the meeting site had been selected in 2007, the Associations had booked additional rooms at the Hilton across the street from the Marriott in large part because while the latter hotel had sufficient meeting space, it did not have enough suites for rent by institutions conducting placement interviews. The subsequent economic decline had made a large number of those rooms unnecessary and had exposed the Associations to penalties for insufficient bookings at the Hilton. However, with assistance from the Marriott and Experient, the firm which had negotiated the contracts, it now appeared possible that the societies would avoid these penalties. Experient had already helped APA and AIA to obtain a reduction in the contracted sleeping room rates and the number of rooms reserved. Dr. Blistein also cited Heather Gasda for controlling audio visual and food expenses to obtain the cost savings approved by the Board in January 2009.
Future Annual Meetings. Dr. Blistein and Ms. Gasda were moving forward with staff of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) on a system to offer online submission of panel proposals and abstracts for the 2011 meeting. On the following day Prof. Kaster and Dr. Blistein would meet with a director of SSRN with whom Prof. Ober had first explored this collaboration. In the interim, calls for abstracts for Organizer Refereed and Affiliated Group panels had been posted on the APA web site. Having abstracts for the former sessions go to Ms. Gasda via e-mail attachment was a temporary measure that should not be necessary again for the 2012 meeting.
In August, Dr. Blistein had reluctantly agreed that AIA staff could negotiate contracts for the 2013-2015 meetings without Experient, but no results were so far apparent. During the Winter it might be necessary for the Joint Management Committee to review the process of negotiating these contracts.
Financial Matters
Preliminary Statement for Fiscal Year Ending June 2009: The Directors had received a preliminary report from Dr. Blistein that was produced after auditors had begun but had not completed their work on the year. The report anticipated a deficit for the year of about $9,000. The report compared budget figures to projected final numbers, and Dr. Blistein noted that while income was below budget, half of the $90,000 discrepancy was the result of an intentionally reduced draw on General Fund in a year when the Association wanted to avoid liquidating its financial assets. The fact that expenses were about $40,000 below budget had made these savings possible.
Updated Budget for 2010 Fiscal Year: Dr. Blistein had distributed a revised budget that accounted for changed circumstances in the first six months of the fiscal year but (with one exception) no new expenses. The document anticipated a surplus of about $10,000 for the year assuming that the APA would meet its current challenge grant deadline and be able to claim the last installment of matching funds. A new reduced estimate for exhibit show revenue would reduce that surplus by $2,500, but the budget still contained an allowance for the same amount in hotel attrition penalties that might not be incurred.
In the category of Professional Services Dr. Blistein noted some unexpected savings achieved by the Placement Service. Because of decreased activity, Placement Director Renie Plonski used fewer assistants to schedule interviews in advance and brought one fewer person to the meeting. In addition, the fund-raising event at the Center for Hellenic Studies in September had cost less than expected. Dr. Blistein also noted that, pending a discussion at the meeting of the Committee on the Web Site and the Newsletter, he might ask the Board to approve an upgrade to the content management system for the new web site design that could cost close to $10,000.
Association Investments. Dr. Blistein had distributed a summary of investment values in the Association’s four funds. He noted that the General, Pearson, and Coffin Funds were about half-way back to the values they had at their approximate high points at the end of December 2007. Therefore, the trailing 3-year average that the Finance Committee would use in May 2010 to calculate disbursements for the 2011 fiscal year would be approximately 5% of the figures on the report. The Coffin Fund was now more than $3,500 above its permanently restricted value after being $7,000 below that figure in December 2008. Investment gains so far for the fiscal year were in the range of 11%-13% net of withdrawals.
The Research and Teaching Fund was now also above the value of initial contributions and had grown in recent months at a faster rate because of its more aggressive investment strategy. However, withdrawals from that fund would begin in July 2011; so, the Finance Committee would soon need to make the strategy more conservative. The APA’s advisors at BNYMellon Wealth Management continued to change the specific mutual funds in which they place APA investments although the types of investments (mid-cap, large-cap, bonds) and the overall strategy had not changed since June 2009. The small individual equity holding in the Research and Teaching Fund was temporary. BNYMellon holds Campaign gifts made with shares of stock for a few days or a few months depending on conditions and then sells them, investing the proceeds in the mutual funds that make up the bulk of the portfolio.
Executive Director Report
As was now customary, Dr. Blistein had posted a detailed report on the 2009 calendar year on the APA web site in advance of the meeting. He reviewed several important issues from that report with the Board.
Development. He reported that the Gateway Campaign had about 400 donors, most of them members, who had pledged just over $1.5 million. The challenge grant called for the APA to report $2.1 million in pledges by the end of January, and $2.6 million collected by Jan. 31, 2011. An extension would be needed, and Dr. Blistein would discuss this matter with the NEH’s Challenge Grants office after review of the situation at the combined Development/Campaign Committees Meeting the next day. The Campaign Committee had developed a new approach to Greek foundations and wealthy individuals that it was currently pursuing. It might be possible for the APA to set up a lecture series at the Greek Embassy in Washington, but given the financial difficulties of that country, this project was not likely to result in a significant campaign gift. A number of donors had made very generous one-time gifts to the Campaign as long as 4 years ago. The APA needed to solicit them again.
So far during the fiscal year the Association had received about $20,000 in annual giving contributions from all sources (online, dues, mail, registration). Members seemed to like the approach taken in the latest letter written by Profs. Christopher Brunelle and Allen Ward.
Placement Service. The number of institutions conducting interviews at the meeting was down from about 55 the previous year to just over 40. This was the lowest number in Dr. Blistein’s experience as Executive Director. He believed that the job situation in Classics was neither better nor worse than others in the humanities. The mailing of scheduling materials to candidates and institutions in November had been held up by poor mail service, which had given a further impetus to automating the collection of scheduling information in the future. It would be difficult to automate actual registration for the Service beyond making the current PDF form easier to fill in because of the necessity of checking two membership databases, and Dr. Blistein felt that human attention to the actual scheduling process was essential.
Penn Office. Dr. Blistein expressed his appreciation to the Penn School of Arts and Sciences for its flexibility in allowing the Office to remain in situ for another year and stated that he would start to seek new space at Penn after the annual meeting. His usual presentation to new graduate students in the Classical Studies Department had stimulated more discussion than usual, possibly because Prof. Joseph Farrell had scheduled it at the end of the semester instead of the beginning so that the students had a better context in which to place APA activities.
Communication with Members. Dr. Blistein was concerned that as the APA moved to more digital communication, it would reach fewer people less often. Although members seemed to respond positively to his communications via mass e-mail, the Association did not have a valid e-mail address for almost a quarter of the members. He reminded the Board of Prof. O’Donnell’s suggestion last September that he rely more on regular blogging rather than the Newsletter for communications from the Office and asked the Directors to begin a discussion of this issue that could continue in the meeting of the Committee on the Web Site and Newsletter two days hence.
Among the mechanisms suggested by Directors were APA sessions at regional meetings, development of a Facebook page, and development of a sophisticated blog with links and indices. If these new approaches were adopted, it would be acceptable to reduce the number of newsletters each year, particularly now that many of the functions that used to be performed by newsletter inserts (ballot, abstracts submission, annual meeting registration) were conducted largely or completely online.
Action: The Board approved Dr. Blistein’s suggestion that he be permitted to send a request for a valid e-mail address via first-class mail to all members who had so far not provided that information.
Other Business
Prof. Ober thanked the members of the Board who were concluding their service at this meeting: Prof. Raaflaub (President 2008), Prof. Briggs (Financial Trustee 2004-2010), Dr. Pearcy (Education Vice President 2006-2010), and Profs. Damon and Mastronarde (Directors 2007-2010).
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 6:15 p.m.
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the Anaheim Marriott Hotel, Anaheim, CA, on January 9, 2010. Those present were Profs. Dee L. Clayman, President, Ronnie Ancona, Roger S. Bagnall, and Peter Bing, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Barbara Weiden Boyd, Kathleen Mary Coleman, Bruce W. Frier, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, John Marincola, James M. May, S. Georgia Nugent, Josiah Ober, James J. O’Donnell, and Ann Vasaly. Prof. Carole E. Newlands was absent. Prof. Clayman called the meeting to order at 12:00 noon.
Action: The Directors approved the agenda which they had received in advance of the meeting.
Action: In accordance with By-Law #14, Profs. Kaster and Boyd were chosen by lot to be members of the Executive Committee for 2010.
Report of the President
Prof. Clayman thanked Prof. Ober for his accomplishments as President and the APA Office staff for organizing the annual meeting. During her year as President she hoped to continue the discussion of scholarly communication that Prof. Ober had initiated.
Reports of the Vice Presidents
Professional Matters. Prof. May reported that the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics was working on two cases, one of which might require Board review of a Subcommittee proposal for public action. The Placement Service had registered 445 candidates, but only 40 institutions were conducting interviews at the meeting. The Joint Committee on Placement had decided that it was no longer necessary to print the annual collection of CV's and was exploring ways to automate the placement process where appropriate and to publicize the availability of teaching positions on the secondary level.
The Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups had asked that other relevant APA committees share responsibility for the surveys it produced. For example, it felt that the Publications Committee should contribute to the survey of journal editors. Prof. Joseph Farrell, the current convener of the regular meeting of Chairs of Ph.D. programs had met with the Professional Matters Committee to discuss the possibility of the APA collecting additional information on the outcomes of students entering graduate study in Classics.
In advance of the meeting, both the Committee and the Directors had received an issue brief prepared by the Coalition on the Academic Workforce that proposed guidelines for the treatment of adjunct and part-time faculty. The Committee had reviewed this document and had recommended that the APA endorse it. Directors agreed that the employment conditions of contingent faculty needed to be improved but felt that some of the remedies proposed in the issue brief were impractical or inappropriate.
Action: The Board declined to endorse the Coalition on the Academic Workforce's issue brief.
Publications. Prof. O'Donnell reported on the recent retreat of the Publications Division that had been made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. All of the Association's publications series were in good condition and were benefiting from the work of excellent editors. Still, this was a good time to consider appropriate changes to the program, particularly because both of the APA's major publications agreements, with Oxford University Press for book publication and with the Johns Hopkins University Press for the publication of TAPA and for management of the membership database, were up for renewal.
The expanded Publications Committee that had met during the retreat had established a set of principles for all Association publications. Its subsequent recommendations included the development of a greater capacity to produce digital publications, increasing the visibility of TAPA, and using the APA web site for more communication with interested laypersons. Prof. O'Donnell distributed to the Directors a document providing more details of these principles and recommendations. The Committee on the Web Site and Newsletter had discussed an earlier draft of this document in Anaheim and would continue the discussion in New York during the Spring.
Action: The Board urged the Publications Committee to develop the programs outlined in the principles and recommendations document and to produce detailed proposals and budgets.
Program. Prof. Kaster reported that the 2010 meeting had gone well. Although there were fewer sessions than in previous meetings, attendance at the sessions had been good. He thanked Prof. Boyd for filling in at the last minute as a presider at a session, and he also thanked staff member Heather Gasda for her contributions to many aspects of the meeting.
The Program Committee had held a workshop on abstract writing that had been well attended and that had resulted in a new set of guidelines that would be published before the next call for abstracts was issued. That call would include a new abstract category for gender and sexuality.
Action: At Prof. Kaster's suggestion, the Board adopted a policy already in place for AIA sessions that the Association would no longer provide computers for presenters making digital presentations, and it added to that policy a provision that presenters needing to rent computers would be required to deal directly with the audio-visual company.
Research. Prof. Bagnall reported that he had formed task forces to investigate the feasibility of projects identified as promising at the Research Division's retreat in early September. He described the grant proposal that Prof. Eric Rebillard, Editor of l'Année philologique on the Internet, had submitted to the Mellon Foundation. This proposal sought funding to create a Classical Works Knowledge Base (CWKB) that would make it possible to link l'Année records to classical works cited in those records. CWKB would be designed to provide links from other resources to ancient works. For example, a project editing the works of early American political writers was interested in using CWKB to link to the ancient texts mentioned in those writings.
He also described the work of Prof. Lora Holland, funded by a grant to the Association from the Packard Humanities Institute, to create l'Année records of articles in collected works that the various offices had not captured. The policy of l'Année's governing body, the Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique (SIBC), gave such works a low priority, and Profs. Bagnall and Clayman would write to SIBC requesting a change in that policy.
Education. Prof. Ancona reported that the Minority Scholarships Committee had renewed its commitment to making awards that could make a difference in an applicant's career. The Committee had noted a decline in the number of applications. The scholarship offered did not usually cover all costs of a summer program; so, the decrease might be caused by the economy. Prof. Ancona also described the annual meeting panels that the Committee on Ancient History had put on in Anaheim and was organizing for the future.
Prof. Ancona hoped that the National Committee for Latin and Greek (NCLG), which the APA supports with annual dues, would increase the level of its communication with members. NCLG had produced a video about the benefits of studying Latin, and a link to this should be posted on the APA web site.
The Education Committee intended to make contact with Classics teachers in community colleges and to post more information on the APA's web site. A grant from Hunter College would make it possible to update the existing set of links to teaching certification requirements in individual states. The departments that currently offer teacher training programs were considering the formation of an affiliated group similar to the ones for M.A. and Ph.D. program chairs.
The Directors discussed the upcoming addition of Caesar to the Advanced Placement curriculum and the requests of secondary school teachers who had never taught this author for web-based resources they could use. Profs. Marincola and Vasaly volunteered to produce an annotated bibliography for the APA web site.
Outreach. Prof. Hallett described the annual meeting panels that the Committee on the Classical Tradition had presented for 2010 and would organize for 2011. She also passed on a request from the Committee that its name be changed to include the term "receptions".
Action: The Board requested a specific proposal for a name change from the Committee.
As a cost-saving measure Amphora was currently being published only once a year. The next issue would appear in the Spring, and subsequent issues would appear each January as long as this publication schedule had to be maintained.
Action: The Board extended the terms of Editor, T. Davina McClain, and Assistant Editor, Diane L. Johnson, until January 2012.
After sponsoring a showing of silent films with classical themes in Anaheim, the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance would return to producing a reading of a play, in this case Thesmophoriazusae, for the 2011 annual meeting. It was also developing a roster of members knowledgeable about Classical themes in modern music and would continue to assist the Aquila Theatre Company with its NEH-funded programs that brought productions of scenes from ancient dramas to public libraries. In addition to organizing panels at the annual meetings, the Committee on Outreach would encourage nominations for the new President's Award and improve the Speaker's Bureau listing on the web site to include presenters' discussions of their current research.
Financial Matters
Report of the Development Committee. The combined Development and Campaign Committees had met on January 7. Staff had presented updates on gifts received to date for both annual giving and the capital campaign, and Committee members suggested a number of new prospects who should be approached for the Gateway campaign. The APA was supposed to claim its next installment of NEH matching funds for its challenge grant on January 31. It currently needed to raise about $600,000 to claim the full amount available and the Committees agreed it would need an extension of time to do so. The Committees also discussed the content, design, and follow-up plans for the Gateway appeal to be sent to members during the Winter and a proposed fund-raising event in New York City with a performance by the Aquila Theatre Company. Unlike the event held in September at the Center for Hellenic Studies, admission would be charged. The Committees also endorsed a request from a regional association that had contributed to the Gateway campaign that the APA publicize a fund-raising effort of its own.
Action: The Board approved the publication in the Newsletter of fund-raising notices from organizations that had supported the Gateway campaign.
Report of the Finance Committee. Prof. Nugent reported on the meeting of the Finance Committee that had taken place earlier in the day. The Committee had two major concerns: First, if the Association was committed to increasing the amount and quality of its communications, it needed to set aside funds to develop the necessary resources to make major improvements in its web site. The Committee had approved a proposal to spend about $9,000 to improve the current content management system but wanted the Board to understand that a much more substantial upgrade would be needed to realize the ambitions of the Gateway campaign.
The second concern was the Gateway Campaign itself. The delay in claiming matching funds could create a budget deficit for the current year, and the campaign needed to convey a clearer message with a greater sense of urgency. Directors suggested several ways in which the Gateway Campaign could be described more effectively as well as techniques to distinguish the campaign from the traditional and ongoing annual giving appeals.
Action: The Board approved the addition of $9,000 to the budget for the current fiscal year to purchase an upgrade to the web site's content management system.
Other Business
Pearson Fellowship. The Pearson Fellowship Committee had discussed the request made by the Board in September that it consider modifications to the Fellowship because the annual stipend available no longer covered the full costs of a year's study in the UK. The Committee was reluctant either to expand eligibility to first-year graduate students or to students taking a gap year or to offer the Fellowship in alternate years (in which case a larger stipend could be offered). Instead it proposed to keep offering the Fellowship on its current terms but to make the call for nominations more explicit about the extent to which it could fund a year's study. It also suggested possible donors to an expanded fund.
Action: The Board accepted the recommendation of the Pearson Fellowship Committee to retain the current guidelines for the Fellowship but to improve the call for nominations.
Plenary Session and Business Meeting. The Board discussed the modest attendance at the Plenary Session and the very low attendance at the Business Meeting. Directors agreed that announcing award winners in advance and reducing the time devoted to the reading of award citations might increase the audience at the Plenary Session, and Dr. Blistein stated that he would ask the Association's attorney to review the APA's legal obligations as regards the Business Meeting.
Action: The Board asked the Program Committee to propose a new format for the Plenary Session.
Next Meeting. Dr. Blistein stated that he would circulate an e-mail to the Directors to determine which of three dates in September or early October was the best for the Board's next meeting. The Board would also hold a conference call in June to approve a budget for the 2011 fiscal year and to handle any other urgent matters.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 3:05 p.m.
Report of the Delegate to the ACLS
The annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies took place May 6-8 at the Sheraton Society Hill in Philadelphia. Representing the American Philological Association were Adam D. Blistein, Executive Director, and Helen F. North, Swarthmore College Emerita, Acting Delegate.
The ACLS plays a unique role in American academic life, bringing together representatives of most of the humanistic disciplines and related social sciences and providing an annual opportunity for the exchange of ideas, the discussion of current issues, and the meeting of delegates in an environment conducive to the renewal of old friendships, the making of new acquaintances, and the recognition of our debt to colleagues who have left us in the last year. At the 2010 meeting the roll-call of the Council produced 71 voting members, and there were also many representatives of ACLS affiliates, such as the Presidents of constituent societies and distinguished visitors speaking for a variety of humanistic interests. Only a few items from the crowded agenda can be mentioned here.
Because the ACLS from its foundation in 1919 has devoted itself to providing scholarship assistance to its members, special attention is always paid to this aspect of the work of the Council. In a time of such economic depression the success of the ACLS in maintaining its traditional assistance to humanistic scholars at various stages of development was impressive, although a deduction in the number of its fellows from 65 to 57 was necessary this year. A newly organized fellowship program (ACLS New Faculty Fellows) beginning in the fall of 2010, deserves special mention. It addresses the dire situation of newly minted PhDs and provides for two years a salary of $50,000 plus a $5,000 research travel allowance annually, health insurance and a moving allowance. This year 46 awardees were hired each by one of 96 participating institutions. The program was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to which an application has been made for similar support for next year.
The absorbing report of President Pauline Yu dealt not only with the fellowship program. but with the need to appeal to forces outside academic boundaries, particularly the federal government, and appropriately the luncheon speaker was the recently appointed Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach, whose previous experience includes 30 years in Congress and teaching at Princeton. He has received many awards testifying to his support of the humanities and has been elected to two wrestling halls of fame, which suggests that he is a fighter. We hope so.
Among other items in the program of special interest to classicists was a discussion by recent fellows of Emerging Themes and Methods of Humanistic Research, which included John N. Hopkins, a doctoral candidate at Austin, Texas, just off the plane from Rome, where he is studying the development of Roman temple design. There was also a symposium on the consequences of Google's digitization for access to necessary material, featuring James J. O'Donnell, Provost at Georgetown University and Secretary of the ACLS Board of Directors.
And finally there was the crowning event of the day, the delivery of the Charles Homer Haskins Prize Lecture on The Life of Learning. The scholar honored on this occasion was Professor Nancy Siraisi, Hunter College Emerita, who delivered the 28th in this notable series, describing the studies that led to her eminence in the mastery of European medicine of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. She proved entirely worthy of the honor paid to her by the ACLS.
We were pleased to represent the APA at the 63rd Institute of the American Classical League (ACL) at Wake-Forest University this past June. Over 300 teachers of Classics at the primary, secondary, and college levels as well as a number of graduate students attended the Institute and participated in three days of sessions, workshops, and social events. The Institute also has a teaching materials exhibit at which APA sets up its regular table top display. The Institute Program on the ACL web site (http://www.aclclassics.org/Institute/2010/PrelimProgram.aspx) gives a detailed picture of the meeting's activities.
The Institute's theme was Peace & War and featured a number of paper sessions on Caesar, Cicero, Vergil, and Roman history. The Institute also marked the recent publication of our joint effort with ACL, Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation by offering a session devoted to presentations about that document (Ronnie was one of the speakers), as well as several other sessions devoted to teacher training, certification, and evaluation. Martha Abbott, Director of Education at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, gave a particularly useful presentation on federal legislation and regulations that may affect Latin teachers in the near future. At a session on upcoming inclusion of Caesar in the AP Latin exam, participants thanked us for the material we've recently posted on our web site about that author: http://apaclassics.org/index.php/education/caesar
This was the last Institute of Sherwin Little's ACL Presidency. Sherwin, a Latin teacher at Indian Hill High School in Cincinnati, is the first secondary school teacher to serve as ACL President, and he has been an enthusiastic and effective partner with the APA throughout his four-year term, whether the issue was recruitment of secondary school teachers, preparation of the Standards document (he co-chaired the task force that developed that document with Lee Pearcy), or the APA's capital campaign (he serves on the campaign committee). We welcome Peter Howard of Troy University as the new ACL President and are glad to report that we will continue to work with Sherwin as he takes over responsibility for ACL's Placement Service. APA members should be aware, if they are not already, that ACL manages the most comprehensive listing of positions for Classics teachers at the primary and secondary school levels: http://spectrum.troy.edu/~acl/.
Departmental Membership in the American Philological Association
The American Philological Association (APA) invites college and university departments offering programs in classical studies to become departmental members. The APA instituted this category of membership as a way of giving recognition to those departments that are willing to support the entire field while they do the essential work of passing on an understanding of classical antiquity to each new generation of students. Departmental members will be listed on the Association's web site, in an issue of the Association's Newsletter, and on a page in the Annual Meeting Program. The APA will issue outstanding achievement awards to students designated by the department. Departmental members will also be able to obtain certain APA publications and other benefits at no charge, and they will support two important international classics projects in which the APA participates: the American Office of l'Année philologique and its fellowship to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Departmental dues revenue that exceeds the value of benefits received will be used to support these two projects and will make the APA eligible to receive matching funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) which is currently the major supporter of these two projects.
A form for enrolling a department as a member is available on the APA web site: http://apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/Dept_Member_Form.pdf. Departments may select a membership category that corresponds to the highest academic degree that each one offers. However, departments selecting the higher Supporting or Sustaining categories will enable the Association to claim additional matching funds from the NEH so that the Association can focus its fund-raising efforts on the capital campaign and on unrestricted annual giving.. The web site and Program listings of member departments will give appropriate recognition to those selectingthe higher levels.
As of July 31, 2010, the following departments are participating in the program for this year.
2011 Annual Meeting: Deadline for Proposals for Roundtable Discussion Sessions Extended
This 90-minute joint session with the AIA consists of a number of tables devoted to discussions of a variety of topics, with at least one discussion leader for each topic. Members are invited to propose themselves as roundtable discussion leaders. Topics may be the leader’s area of scholarly interest or an issue important to the profession. Since certain topics lend themselves to presentation by more than one leader, proposals for multiple leaders are welcome. The Program Committee believes that these sessions can provide an excellent opportunity for younger registrants (both graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s) to interact with established scholars in a less formal environment than a session or a job interview. Leadership of a roundtable discussion does not count as an “appearance” on the annual meeting program; i.e., roundtable leaders may present a paper or serve as a respondent in an APA paper session.
The Program Committee invites members to submit brief (50-100 word) descriptions of a suitable topic for a roundtable. These submissions for the annual meeting in San Antonio, TX should be sent to the Executive Director's Office by September 7, 2010.
The slate of candidates for this Summer's election has been posted on the APA web site (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/about_the_APA/administration/slate_of_candidates_for_election_in_summer_2010). Once again, members will have the option to cast ballots online and will receive voting instructions in August.
Call for Nominations for 2010 Precollegiate Teaching Awards
Pearson Fellowship Call for Nominations
APA/AIA Minority Summer Scholarship
The 2010-2011 Placement Service Year has begun. Instructions for using the Service this year (http://apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/2010-2011_Placement_Service_Guidelines_Only.pdf) as well as forms for institutions and candidates (http://apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/2010-2011_Placement_Registration_Forms_Only.pdf) can be found on the APA web site.
University and College Appointments
The following are the names of the candidates who have obtained new positions through the 2009-10 Placement Service. Additional names will be printed in a future issue of the Newsletter, and we are still accepting submissions. Candidates whose names appear in bold and italics represent individuals who filled a new position at that institution. Also listed are institutions who contacted the Placement Service and stated that no one was hired as a result of their candidate search.
Reminder for Organizers of Panels at 2012 APA Annual Meeting
The Program Guide for the January 2012 Annual Meeting will appear in October. Organizers of affiliated group and organizer-refereed sessions that have been approved for presentation at the 2012 meeting are reminded that calls for abstracts for their sessions should be sent to the Association Office no later than September 20, 2010. See the APA web site (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/annual_meeting/meeting_info/calls_for_abstracts_for_organizer-refereed_panels_and_affiliated_group) for samples of previously published calls for abstracts.
Ineke Sluiter, Leiden University, is one of the four recipients of the Spinoza Prize awarded each year by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). The prize is the highest award in Dutch science.
Jan Ziolkowski, Harvard University, is among the 229 leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business and public affairs who were elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences this Spring.
William Hansen, Indiana University, has been elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. The Society gives his honor to members who have made outstanding achievements in folklore scholarship.
W. R. Johnson, University of Chicago, Stanley Lombardo, University of Kansas,and Sheila Murnaghan, University of Pennsylvania have received the 2010 Umhoefer Prize for Achievement in Humanities for their introductions and translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
Three APA members are among the recipients of Guggenheim Fellowships for 2010. Their names, affiliations, and project titles are as follows.
The following APA members have received ACLS Fellowships for the coming academic year. Their names, affiliations, and project titles are as follows.
Atlantic Classical Association, October 15-16, 2010, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, NS, Canada. Papers of 20 minutes duration are invited on any aspect of the Ancient World or its reception. Please send the title and an abstract of not more than 200 words to 2010 ACA Conference, by August 31, 2010 to Alison Barclay (Alison.Barclay@smu.ca) or Myles McCallum (Myles.McCallum@smu.ca). Please also include your AV requirements. Information about conference registration and places to stay will be available at the end of August.
Lutheranism & the Classics, 1 and 2 October, 2010, Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The Age of the Reformation was also the Age of the Renaissance, a period to which the birth of the modern discipline of classics may be traced. The classics provided a rich source for the thought, intellectual undergirding, and polemic of the era. Classics thus became part of the cultural DNA, as it were, of the Reformation and post-Reformation Church in the West. Of particular interest to this conference is the reception of the classics in the Wittenberg (Lutheran) Reformation. There, the darling of the Northern European Renaissance, Philipp Melanchthon, appropriated the classics in the service of the Gospel and drew them to the fore as an integral part of the reformational program in Saxony and much of Northern Europe. Papers at “Lutheranism & the Classics” explore this watershed period in the history of classics reception and its ongoing impact on the Evangelical Lutheran Church. For more information, visit www.ctsfw.edu/classics. Inquiries may be addressed to one of the three organizers: John Nordling (john.nordling@ctsfw.edu); Carl Springer (casprin@siue.edu); Jon Bruss (jonbruss@yahoo.com).
The Classical Association of the Canadian West (CACW) presents Peasants, Potters and Prostitutes. Lower Classes in Greek and Roman Antiquity March 11-12, 2011, The University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The CACW invites scholars and graduate students to submit abstracts on the topic of lower classes in the ancient Greek and Roman world. Topics may include but are not limited to:
Nostos: War, the Odyssey, and Narratives of Return, March 23-27, 2011, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC. A soldier comes home from war. What does he find? How does he adapt? He’s been away a long time. He’s had a long journey filled with wonderful and traumatic experiences. Now, there are strange people in his house doing strange things. What should he do? For almost three thousand years in the west, the archetype of this narrative has been Homer’s Odyssey. The poem has fostered many successors from the Nostoi to the Aeneid, to Ulysses, March, and O Brother, Where Art Thou. The narrative remains as present to our society as it was in archaic society. Soldiers today, both men and women, are still coming home, making that fraught passage. And in the largest sense, we too, both soldiers and civilians, are always coming home, always returning to where we’ve never really been before to confront the different in ourselves and others.
We invite a broad range of interdisciplinary papers to explore historically, philosophically, politically, and psychologically topics including but not limited to the following. What is the significance of the Odyssey today? What did it mean in archaic Greece? What does the tradition surrounding it say about the changing meaning of the concepts and practices of war, of the journey, of return, and of home? Do we ever really come home? How does homecoming have the potential to both harm and heal? What is the place of the unheimlich in the all too familiar?
Abstracts for twenty minute papers should be sent to frankj@mailbox.sc.edu by October 1, 2010. Abstracts should be no more than 250 words long. Panel proposals of 750 words are due by the same date. Panels should include three papers and a respondent. This conference is sponsored by the Thirteenth Annual University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference, the Classics in Contemporary Perspectives Initiative, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, the Department of Political Science, and associated Departments and Programs.
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation provides a variety of fellowships to scholars wishing to conduct research in Germany. Support is available for both postdoctoral fellows and more senior researchers. See the Foundation's web site for further information: http://www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/programmes-by-target-group.html.
The European Institutes for Advanced Study (EURIAS) Fellowship Programme is an international researcher mobility program offering 33 fellowships for the 2011/2012 academic year. It offers 10-month residencies in one of the 14 participating Institutes: Berlin, Bologna, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Cambridge, Helsinki, Jerusalem, Lyons, Nantes, Paris, Uppsala, Vienna, Wassenaar.
EURIAS Fellowships are mainly offered in the fields of the humanities and social sciences but may also be granted to scholars in natural and exact sciences, if their proposed research project does not require laboratory facilities. The Program welcomes applications worldwide from promising scholars at an early stage of their careers as well as from established senior researchers. All participating institutes have agreed on common standards for EURIAS fellows, including the provision of a living allowance (in the range of € 26,000 for a junior fellow and € 38,000 for a senior fellow), accommodation (or a mobility allowance), a research budget, plus coverage of travel expenses.
Applications are submitted online via www.eurias-fp.eu. The deadline for application is September 10th 2010. Late applications will not be considered. Further information on the program is available at www.eurias-fp.eu.
The National Endowment for the Humanities supports undergraduate course development through Enduring Questions Course Grants for new courses and Teaching Development Fellowships for existing courses.
Enduring Questions Course Grants (up to $25,000). What is the good life? What is beauty? What is friendship? What is the relationship between humans and the natural world? Enduring questions such as these have long held interest to college students and allow for a special, intense dialogue across generations. The National Endowment for the Humanities will award Enduring QuestionsCourse Grantswhich support up to four college faculty members from any discipline with up to $25,000 to develop a new humanities course at the undergraduate level on a question of enduring significance, to be taught at the sponsoring institution at least twice during the grant period. The application deadline is September 15, 2010. For more information and instructions, please see the grant guidelines at http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/EnduringQuestions.html
Teaching Development Fellowships (up to $21,000). The National Endowment for the Humanities will award Teaching Development Fellowshipsto support college and university teachers pursuing research aimed specifically at improving an existing undergraduate course that has been taught in at least three different terms prior to the application deadline. The research undertaken as a part of the project may involve engaging with fundamental texts or sources, exploring related subjects or academic disciplines, or cultivating neglected areas of learning. Research in any area of the humanities is welcome.
Teaching Development Fellowships cover periods lasting from three to five months and carry stipends of $4,200 per month. Thus the maximum stipend is $21,000 for a five-month award period. The application deadline is September 30, 2010. For more information and instructions, please see the grant guidelines at http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/TD_Fellowships.html
The Princeton Society of Fellows invites applications for three-year postdoctoral fellowships for 2011-2014 for recent PhDs (awarded in or after January 2009) in the humanities or allied social sciences. TheSociety will make five appointments to pursue research and teach half-time in the following areas: Open discipline; Humanistic Studies (two fellowships); LGBT Studies; Race and/or Ethnicity Studies. The stipend is approximately $72,000, and the application deadline is October 1, 2010. For eligibility, fellowship and application details, see www.princeton.edu/~sf.
The National Humanities Center offers 40 residential fellowships for advanced study in the humanities during the academic year, September 2011 through May 2012. Applicants must hold doctorate or equivalent scholarly credentials. Young scholars as well as senior scholars are encouraged to apply, but they must have a record of publication, and new Ph.D.s should be aware that the Center does not support the revision of a doctoral dissertation. In addition to scholars from all fields of the humanities, the Center accepts individuals from the natural and social sciences, the arts, the professions, and public life who are engaged in humanistic projects. The Center is also international and gladly accepts applications from scholars outside the United States.
Located in the Research Triangle Park of North Carolina, near Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, the Center provides an environment for individual research and the exchange of ideas. Its building includes private studies for Fellows, conference rooms, a central commons for dining, lounges, reading areas, a reference library, and a Fellows’ workroom. The Center’s noted library service delivers books and research materials to Fellows, and support for information technology and editorial assistance are also provided. The Center locates housing for Fellows in the neighboring communities.
Application materials are available from the Fellowship Program, National Humanities Center, Post Office Box 12256, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709-2256, or the Center’s website: . http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ e-mail: nhc@nationalhumanitiescenter.org. Applications and letters of recommendation must be postmarked by October 15, 2010.
The Loeb Classical Library Foundation will award grants to qualified scholars to support research, publication, and other projects in the area of classical studies during the academic year 2011-2012. Grants will normally range from $1,000 to $35,000 and may occasionally exceed that limit in the case of unusually interesting and promising projects. Applicants must have faculty or faculty emeritus status at the time of application.
Grants may be used for a wide variety of purposes. Examples include publication of research, enhancement (“topping up”) of sabbatical salary, funding for conferences, travel to libraries or collections, dramatic productions, excavation expenses, or cost of research materials. Individual grant requests may be only partially funded.
A special selection committee will choose the persons to whom grants are to be awarded and recommend the amount of the grants. James Loeb directed in his will that income from the Loeb Classical Library beyond that needed for the maintenance and enhancement of the Library eventually should be used “for the encouragement of special research at home and abroad in the province of Archaeology and of Greek and Latin Literature” and that awards should be granted “without distinction as to sex, race, nationality, color or creed.”
Application forms, with detailed instructions for applying, reference cover letters, and the like can be downloaded from our website
The American Academy in Rome invites applications for the 2011 Rome Prize competition. One of the leading overseas centers for independent study and advanced research in the arts and the humanities, the Academy offers up to thirty fellowships for periods ranging from six months to two years. Rome Prize winners reside at the Academy’s eleven-acre center in Rome and receive room and board, a study or studio, and a stipend. Stipends for six-month fellowships are $13,000 and stipends for eleven-month fellowships are $30,000.
Fellowships are awarded in a number of fields including Architecture, Historic Preservation and Conservation, Ancient Studies, Medieval Studies, and Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. To apply visit the Academy’s web site at www.aarome.org or write to the American Academy in Rome, 7 East 60 Street, New York, NY 10022, Attn: Programs. Telephone: 212-751-7200, Ext. 47. E-mail: info@aarome.org. Please state specific field of interest when requesting information.
The Rome Prize competition is underwritten in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The competition deadline is November 1, 2010.
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Winter 2010
Volume 33, Number 1
Table of Contents
By now you have all heard about the APA’s Capital Campaign, and many of you have already made generous contributions. The campaign has a number of worthy goals, but I want to use this opportunity to talk about the one that is closest to my heart – an endowment to support the American Office of the Année philologique. As you all know, The APh is the bibliography of record in our field, the place where all of our publications are documented, indexed and assigned to headings in a standard format so other scholars can learn about them, now and in the future, and we can find out about the books and articles we need for our own work.
While it is true that much research these days begins with Google, professional, scholarly research never ends there. The titles of books appear, sometimes with their entire contents, through the good offices of Google Books, and a search on JStor can lead the way to relevant articles in English language journals (for the most part), but none of these services, useful as they are, can produce a complete, reliable account of all the work a real scholar needs to see. The APh is the sole source of comprehensive information about European publications of all types, and simply put, we cannot do without it.
Beyond bibliography the APh is now poised become a much more widely-ranging and versatile research tool. With support from the NEH for the DCB project, the APh has been online since 2002, and links to JStor directly from citations in the APh can now be installed through OpenURL. Beyond this, the APA has funding from the Mellon Foundation for software and database development that will facilitate linking between citations of Greek and Latin texts in the APh with full texts online, and it has recently received funding from the Kress Foundation to test the possibility of links to images. A new, up-to-date user-interface is also on the way.
The APh has grown and changed over the years, yet it retains its original spirit. It was founded in Paris in 1926 by J. Marouzeau, as a challenge to the Bibliotheca philologica classica, and it has been published annually since 1927. Juliette Ernst, who worked with Marouzeau from the earliest years, and shared his view of classics as an interdisciplinary area study, succeeded him as director in 1965. Her heroic efforts kept the bibliography alive during the Second World War when she made clandestine border crossings from Switzerland into occupied France to bring her manuscripts to the printer and correct proof. She retired in 1992, at age ninety-two, twenty-two years after the mandatory retirement age, when her eyesight began to fail, and died in 2001.
In 1965, when the quantity of publications became too great for the Paris office to handle, Mlle Ernst convinced T. Robert Broughton to create an American Office at Chapel Hill which took over the collecting and editing of all of the English language publications. It is that office, which documents your work and mine, that needs our support. It has been funded, since its founding, by successive grants from the NEH, which is now redirecting its resources away from projects that have no definable end-point. A cumulative bibliography, like the APh, is updated every year, and falls outside the NEH’s current guidelines. The Endowment has not abandoned us entirely, however. Far from it! It has given the APA a Challenge Grant of up to $650,000 to help the Association raise the funding it needs to ensure that the American Office can continue its work.
The NEH will give us one dollar for every four we contribute, so we need a total of 2.6 million dollars to achieve our goals. We have already made great progress toward our goal, but we still need $600,000 by July 31, 2010, and then $500,000 more by July 31, 2011 to fully fund the American Office and support classics in other crucial ways. Please help by clicking here: https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/AmericanPhilologicalAssociat/OnlineDonation.html, and giving what you can.
Dee L. Clayman
As announced in the October-December 2009 Newsletter, the APA will publish only four newsletters each year but will issue more frequent updates in electronic form. These updates will appear on the APA web site and in e-mails to members as we have done for a number of years. In addition, we will take advantage of a news blog created by Web Editor Robin Mitchell-Boyask (http://apaclassics.blogspot.com/). APA Officers (as well as Robin and myself) will post information on this blog as it becomes available. The advantage of this vehicle is that it permits members to subscribe to various services that will alert them when something new has been posted to the blog (see under "Subscribe to APA News"). We hope to add this capability to the APA web site itself as soon as possible; in the interim, a subscription to the blog will alert you to new information
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
Slate of Candidates for Summer 2010 Elections
Report of the 2009-2010 Nominating Committee
The 2009-2010 Nominating Committee met for two full days, first on November 7, 2009 in Philadelphia, and then on January 6, 2010 in Anaheim. The committee’s deliberations and subsequent conversations of the co-chairs with nominees produced a slate of twenty-five candidates for twelve vacancies in nine offices to run in the 2010 elections. The slate, which has already been announced, precedes this report.
As in the past years, the Committee sought to identify qualified candidates who would reflect the diversity of the Association in terms of geography, type of institution, scholarly field, relative seniority, and gender. We were also attentive of course to the need for maintaining an appropriate balance with the members of committees who are already serving. We have made an effort to identify “fresh” nominees for some of the committees, i.e., individuals whose qualifications were very strong but who for one reason or another might not yet have performed much APA service.
We have also, as has been customary over the past several years, sent a list of recommended committee members to the President for use in filling appointed slots in the various APA committees. We hope in this way to give members with limited APA experience an opportunity to serve in and learn about the organization, especially younger members of the profession who may not yet be ready for an elective office, or whose names might not yet be well enough known to give a strong chance of winning.
In its deliberations, the Committee followed the established procedures of previous years. As we conferred to develop lists of possible candidates for each office, all self-nominated individuals and all individuals suggested by the committee members were considered. After thorough, sometimes lengthy, discussion, each committee member ranked the names on agreed lists of possible nominees, which ranged in number from 16 names to 24. The final rankings were determined by the cumulative scores assigned by the entire Committee. After the voting, we discussed possible conflicts and imbalances in the voting results, e.g., contests for any office between two members of the same department, or between members who have a recognized conflict of interest. We also kept in mind problems of balance in disciplinary interests, types of institutions, etc. where relevant to particular committees. To the extent that it was possible to do so, we sought to avoid slates with a significant imbalance in name recognition.
After each meeting the Co-Chairs contacted proposed candidates in the order of the Committee’s ranking. We had notable success this year, winning agreement from our first choices for every single office, and filling the slate in all but four instances with candidates who were among our top five choices. We feel, therefore, that the slate is a strong one and reflects reasonably well the Committee’s efforts to balance the roster of candidates for the individual offices. Inevitably, a certain number of the candidates declined nomination, almost all with regrets and because of other obligations rather than lack of interest in the position. The most common reasons for declining were the demands of administrative responsibilities at their own institutions and/or of current research projects, and several candidates indicated that they would be interested in running at a later time. (We have passed this information on to our successors.)
All self-nominated members received careful consideration, and we continue to urge members to nominate themselves or others for offices for which they feel qualified (http://apaclassics.org/Administration/2010OffCommSurvey.pdf). This expands our pool of interested and willing candidates and increases the members’ input into the nominating process. We also remind members that, in addition to the elected Committees, there are numerous committees of the APA that are appointed by the President and Board of Directors. Service on one of these can be a good means of achieving increased visibility in the Association and is good experience for preparing to stand for an elected office. We therefore encourage self-nomination for any of these appointed committees.
The Co-Chairs and the Committee members – Joy Connolly, Laura McClure, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Kurt Raaflaub, and Peter Rose -- owe a special debt of thanks, as always, to Adam Blistein and the staff at the APA office for their work on the logistics of transportation, housing and food, for the documentation provided on the offices and candidates (present and past) of the Association, and for prompt and helpful replies to queries about the responsibilities and functions of APA offices.
Finally, we take this occasion to offer two suggestions. The first involves the business of the Nominating Committee itself. The committee works with a thick binder full of information collected by APA staff, including a list of all current and past officeholders and a list of all unsuccessful candidates for office. If these two lists could be combined it would save the committee a good deal of time now spent in flipping back and forth to do cross-checking for availability and appropriateness of potential candidates. At some future point, if technology and staffing allows, it would also be good to offer Committee members a choice of hard-copy or digital copies of these files, and we imagine that eventually all of this information should be provided in digital formats.
Secondly, we have spent some time considering how to make participation in the APA more attractive to high school teachers of classics, whose students are ultimately the future of the field and of our organization. We suggest that, in addition to outreach efforts, the Directors consider adding a dedicated seat on the Board for a high school teacher. One possible way to do this might be to ask the American Classical League to provide names and resumes of teachers able and willing to serve. The Nominating Committee would then proceed to prepare a slate of two candidates in the usual way. We think the input of an experienced and well-connected secondary school teacher could benefit the Association, and hope that person would then act as a liaison with teachers, their schools, and their organizations.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Burian and James O’Hara, Co-Chairs
Joy Connolly, Laura McClure, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Peter Rose, Kurt Raaflaub (ex officio)
Awards
Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics
Awards for Excellence in Precollegiate Teaching
Education (Outgoing). Gratitude will be a theme of this final report of my term as Vice-President for Education. I begin by thanking the members of the APA who elected me, all past and present officers and members of the Board with whom I have had the pleasure to serve, and Executive Director Adam Blistein and his staff, who help the Education Division and our Association in more ways than I can count. I am also grateful to the dozens of APA members who served on the Education Committee, the Joint Committee (with ACL) on Classics in American Education, the Joint Committee (with AIA) on Minority Student Scholarships, and the divisional committees: the Committee on Ancient History, the Coffin Traveling Fellowship Committee, the Committee on Awards for Excellence in Teaching, and the Subcommittee on Pre-Collegiate Teaching Awards. Our Association, which is neither very rich nor very large, depends on the volunteer service of its members, and all who serve our profession in this way deserve its gratitude.
Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation: On October 16 and 17, the APA/ACL Joint Task Force on Teacher Training and Preparation met at Bryn Mawr College to review responses to the initial draft of Standards for Latin Teacher Training and Certification, to make final revisions of the document (among which was a change of title to Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation), and to develop plans for publication and dissemination of the finished document.
The final version of Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation accompanies this report. The Joint Task Force recommends primary publication as a web-based document housed on the ACL’s server, with a link from the APA web site. A small press run of about 500 printed copies, primarily for distribution to state education officials and other decision-makers, will supplement the web-based edition. ACL will hold copyright to both web-based and printed versions, as it does with the Standards for Classical Language Learning of 1997.
I ask the Board to approve this document and to authorize its publication. I hope also that the Board will join me in expressing its thanks to the members of the Joint Task Force who worked to create this effective, eloquent description of what a Latin teacher should know and be able to do. [Editor's Note: The Board voted to accept both of Prof. Ancona's recommendations. The Standards document can be found at http://www.aclclassics.org/pdf/LatTeachPrep2010Stand.pdf, and printed copies are available from the ACL, http://www.aclclassics.org/pdf/standards_order.pdf.]
Advanced Placement Latin: At this writing (December 24, 2009) the College Board has not settled on a syllabus for the new Advanced Placement Latin program that will replace the existing Vergil and the former Latin Literature programs and examinations. It seems likely that the final version of the new syllabus will not be in place for some time.
In November, 2009, the College Board invited the APA to nominate a representative to its AP Latin Curriculum Review Committee. According to Mr. James Monk, the CB’s Associate Director for World Languages and Cultures, this committee will develop a “curriculum framework” for AP Latin including “learning objectives, expectations of student performance, reading list/syllabus, grammatical terms and figures of speech, overarching themes and essential questions. The curriculum framework will also inform changes to the AP Latin exam by providing details of how the various components of the curriculum will be accounted for in the assessment.” I am grateful to Prof. Ann Vasaly for agreeing to serve as the APA representative to this Committee.
Mr. Monk and Prof. Christopher Francese have organized a workshop at our meeting in Anaheim on “New Developments in Advanced Placement (AP) Latin.” The workshop will be held on Friday, January 8, from 11:15 until 1:15 in Platinum Ballroom 3 of the Anaheim Marriott.
My term as Vice-President for Education has taught me a great deal about the state of our profession of Classics in the nation and world. It has also confirmed my belief in the importance of the work done by the APA through its officers, directors, committees, and staff. Gratias vobis omnibus maximas ago.
Respectfully submitted,
Lee T. Pearcy
January 6, 2010
Education (Incoming). I would like to begin this report by thanking my predecessor, Lee Pearcy, for his outstanding service as Vice President over the last four years. His ability to listen, respond, and lead were especially apparent in two major tasks undertaken during his term of office: the development of the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation and the APA’s response to the elimination of the Latin Literature Exam of the Advanced Placement Program. As a result of his own efforts and his collegial work with Sherwin Little, ACL President, Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation will be published shortly. In addition, despite the College Board’s unfortunate change in its Latin program, Lee’s determined efforts ultimately gave the APA a voice in College Board deliberations at the Fall 2008 Chicago AP Latin Faculty Colloquium and led to the invitation to have an APA representative on the College Board committee that is currently working on a “curriculum framework” for Advanced Placement Latin. I very much appreciate the contribution Lee has made to the profession and his help in making my transition into this office a smooth one.
Program Panel: The Division sponsored one panel at the 2010 Annual Meeting in Anaheim. The Committee on Ancient History presented a successful panel on “Material Culture in the History Classroom: Techniques and Methods,” organized by Serena Connolly. It was particularly useful to graduate students and to all with an interest in pedagogy and ancient history.
Education Committee and The Joint Committee on Classics in American Education. The JCCAE, which consists of the APA Education Committee plus representatives from ACL, met jointly this year with the Education Committee:
The Committee revisited some issues that had been discussed in previous years, including a possible meeting at APA of departments engaged in teacher training, gathering of statistics on Classics as part of liberal education, and encouragement of more nominations for the award for Excellence in Pre-Collegiate Teaching. It was thought that one factor discouraging candidates for this award might be the high cost of attending APA or ACL in order to receive the award in person and the relatively small amount of the award itself. It was hoped that added publicity by both APA and ACL, including timely e-blasts, might help to get the word out about this important award.
The Committee was updated on the changes to the Latin Advanced Placement program and members were encouraged to attend the APA 2010 workshop on New Developments in AP Latin. The Latin Literature AP Exam has now been eliminated and the current Vergil Exam will change to become a Vergil-Caesar Exam, with first administration planned for 2013 (with new course offered in 2012-13). The syllabus for the new Exam is expected to be announced in September 2010. There was discussion of possibly doing a panel on Caesar at a future APA Annual Meeting. It was suggested that reprinting some old, but good, Caesar texts might also be useful for teachers planning to teach the new AP Latin syllabus.
There was a report on the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation, which will be published this spring. The Committee decided to develop a panel for APA 2011 to address why the Standards should be of interest to APA members. The panel will be organized by Lee Pearcy, outgoing APA Vice President and Sherwin Little, ACL President, who jointly chaired the task force that developed the Standards. Additional plans for publicizing the Standards include a press release, a panel at the 2010 ACL Institute, and possible sessions at regional meetings.
Plans were announced to update and expand the material on the Education section of the APA website dealing with individual state requirements for Latin teacher certification and licensure. This work will be done with the help of a Student-Faculty Research Initiative Grant to the incoming Vice President from the Office of the President of Hunter College. A brief description of careers in Classics at different levels (secondary, four-year college/university, and community college [if sufficient information is available]) and the pathways to them will be posted as well. This new material will complement the APA’s Guide to Graduate Programs in the Classics.
The APA Board supported the idea of the incoming Vice President appointing a Task Force to develop some preliminary materials on Caesar that would benefit Latin teachers planning for the Caesar portion of the new AP Latin Exam. The incoming Vice President appointed APA Board members John Marincola and Ann Vasaly. These materials will appear on the Education page of the APA website.
Thank you to Rachel Sternberg for her service on the Education Committee and welcome to new member, Eric Dugdale.
Committee on Ancient History. The Committee’s primary activity this year was organizing the 2010 APA panel it sponsored. It plans to publish the papers from the panel on the APA website in order to reach an expanded audience. Its proposed panel for 2011, to be co-sponsored by the Women’s Classical Caucus, will address the underrepresentation of women in the teaching of ancient history.
Thank you to Sara Forsdyke and Nathan Rosenstein (Chair) for their service. Welcome to new members, Emily Mackil and Georgia Tsouvala. The new Chair will be Carlin Barton.
Joint Committee (with AIA) on Minority Student Scholarships. In keeping with the APA’s need to economize, the Committee did not hold its annual fundraising breakfast this year and instead focused all of its attention on selling raffle tickets. Those sales happily generated enough income to support two scholarships (although not fully funded ones). The Committee reconfirmed its commitment to choosing recipients for the scholarships for whom the funded summer experience would be transformative. Some concern was expressed that the number of applicants was down to six from the previous year’s fourteen. There was some speculation that the economy might be playing a role. Potential candidates may not think their actual expenses will be met by the amount of the scholarship and therefore may not apply. Informing applicants about possible supplemental sources of support might be useful. Tulane University is to be applauded for donating the Scholarship brochures for this year.
Thank you to Benjamin Acosta-Hughes (Co-Chair) for his service and welcome to new member, Mira Seo. The new APA Co-Chair will be Sanjaya Thakur.
Other Committees: The freestanding committees of the Education Division also have new and retiring members. Thank you to Antonios Augoustakis for his service on the Coffin Traveling Fellowship Committee. Welcome to new member, Greta Ham. Henry Bender is the new Chair. Thank you to Frances Titchener for her service on the Committee on the Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics. Welcome to new member, Mary English. Kathryn Morgan is the new Chair.
Finally, the incoming and outgoing Vice Presidents attended the meeting at APA of the National Committee for Latin and Greek, a subcommittee of the American Classical League, of which APA is a sponsoring organization. The VPs encouraged NCLG to keep APA members informed of its activities by sending reports to the APA for inclusion in its Newsletter or in other kinds of posting (e-blast, blog etc.). The commercially produced video promoting Latin, now posted on its website and YouTube, is just one example of material that could be publicized appropriately to the APA membership.
Respectfully submitted,
Ronnie Ancona
January 8, 2010
Outreach. Since I submitted my last report in September 2009, the Division of Outreach has continued its efforts to expand the intellectual scope of classical antiquity and its legacy, and to share this knowledge more widely, both within and beyond the North American professional classics community. The major focus of our activity was the annual APA meeting, held in Anaheim, California from January 6-9, 2010. Official Outreach events included three panels: ”Classics and the Great Books” sponsored by the Outreach Committee itself, “Visualizing Ancient Narrative” sponsored by the Committee on the Classical Tradition, and “Contexts for Ancient Greek and Roman Drama,” sponsored by the Committee on Classical and Modern Performance. Each of these panels featured excellent papers, drew strong audiences, and was enthusiastically received.
CAMP was offered an unusual opportunity this year to sponsor a screening of silent films treating classical topics, and decided to hold the screening in place of a live performance. The screening took place on Friday, January 8 and attracted a large audience of over 200. We are grateful to Andrew Simpson of the Catholic University of America for providing superlative, improvised piano accompaniment to these films, and to Jon Solomon, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, for his generosity of time and treasure in helping to digitize them. Special thanks also go to Heather Hartz Gasda of the APA office, who undertook the complicated logistical arrangements for the screening of the silent cinematic clips, The organizers of this screening, Pantelis Michelakis of Bristol University, and Maria Wyke of University College, London, also organized a paper session the following day which situated these films—from France and Italy as well as the US— in their historical and cultural contexts. In addition to Michelakis and Wyke, Margaret Malamud of New Mexico State University and Ruth Scodel of the University of Michigan presented papers.
Another special opportunity was afforded CAMP and Outreach: Stephen Scully and Herbert Golder, with support provided by the Boston University Department of Classical Studies, offered to show My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? as an extra added attraction that same evening. A new Hollywood film directed by Werner Herzog and co-written by Herzog and Golder, it is based on a true story about an actor who murdered his own mother after performing the role of the mythic matricide Orestes in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Despite the late hour, the audience enjoyed this screening. CAMP is eager to give film a more prominent place in future APA sessions and programs that it sponsors at other venues.
All three committees held meetings in Anaheim, as did the editorial board of Amphora, the APA’s Outreach publication. Both the Amphora editor, Davina McClain, Louisiana Scholars’ College of Northwestern State University, and the assistant editor, Diane Johnson, Western Washington University, have been reappointed to second terms. We are greatly in their debt for their heroic work in transforming Amphora to an annual, mostly on-line, publication with no sacrifice in range or quality. At its board meeting, McClain welcomed two new members: Antony Augoustakis, Baylor University and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and Matthew Dillon, Loyola-Marymount University. The forthcoming 2010 issue includes articles on such varied topics as the Catullus translator Carl Sesar and the classically-inspired artist Anita Huffington, classical magic in the Harry Potter novels and films, living history and classical archaeology in Gallo-Roman France, and the Herodotus digital “earth” project.
The Committee on the Classical Tradition thanked its outgoing chair, Judith Fletcher, Wilfrid Laurier University, and outgoing member Michele Valerie Ronnick, Wayne State University, for their extraordinary contributions to the committee. Fletcher, who oversaw the planning for the 2010 panel, also organized two sessions—on the topic of “Borders: geographical, social, political, temporal or conceptual”—sponsored by Outreach at the 2009 meeting of the Classical Association of Canada. Ronnick organized two sessions, each on the topic of “Black Classics”, sponsored by Outreach at the 2009 meeting of the College Language Association. Dirk Held, Connecticut College, the new committee chair, welcomed two new members: Paul Kimball, Bilkent University, and Barbara McManus, College of New Rochelle. The committee is planning a panel on children’s literature about classical antiquity for the 2011 APA meeting, and to sponsor sessions at several other meetings, among them that of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States. The committee also discussed the possibility of changing its name, so as to acknowledge the increasing currency of the more inclusive term “classical receptions” in identifying its purview.
I am delighted that Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz has agreed to serve as the chair of the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance for a second year. I would also like to thank outgoing committee members Hallie Rebecca Marshall, University of British Columbia, and Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Columbia University, for their outstanding service to the committee. Marshall, who coordinates “The Dionysiac”–the committee’s e-mail list announcing performances and other events of interest to classicists—organized the 2010 CAMP panel; Scharffenberger, who has starred in several of the annual CAMP productions, spoke on the importance of comedy in undergraduate “great books” programs at the 2010 Outreach panel. At its meeting, the committee welcomed Alison Futrell, University of Arizona, and George Kovacs, Trent University, as new members. And it extended its warmest congratulations to Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California, Santa Cruz, former chair of CAMP, who was honored with the APA scholarly Outreach prize this year.
CAMP is planning to return to the tradition of “live” APA dramatic performances at the 2011 meeting with a production of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, translated and directed by Bella Vivante, University of Arizona. Its 2011 panel will explore the relationship between democratic ideology and classical tradition in modern performance, coordinating its theme with that of the year-long conference on “Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn” sponsored by the Classical Reception Studies Network at the Open University in the UK. CAMP will investigate the possibilities of linking the APA Outreach Committee, which is an overseas affiliate of the CRSN, and the US institutional members of the CRSN (the classics departments at University of Michigan, New York University, and Northwestern University) through a website, following the model of the CRS network in Australia. It is also working with the Outreach Committee to assemble a roster of classicists with musical interests and expertise.
At its meeting, the Committee on Outreach thanked outgoing members Alison Futrell and David Porter, Skidmore College, for their contributions, among them helping to organize the 2010 panel on Classics and the Great Books. It welcomed as its new members Ward Briggs, University of South Carolina, and Clara Shaw Hardy, Carleton College. The topic of the 2011 panel, organized by Robert Ketterer, University of Iowa, and Andrew Simpson, is the classical reception of musical texts. I would like to express my appreciation to committee member Judith Sebesta, University of South Dakota, for her contributions to this panel.
The Outreach Committee and CAMP organized an informal gathering of “musical classicists” on January 9, which attracted a substantial attendance and great interest among many unable to attend. As noted earlier, efforts at assembling a roster of “musical classicists” are already underway, organized by myself and Ted Gellar-Goad, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with the assistance of Nancy Rabinowitz, chair of CAMP, and Outreach committee member Keely Lake, Wayland Academy. We are especially interested in identifying classicists who would be willing to share their knowledge of both music and classical antiquity with individuals writing or performing works that are set in the ancient Greco-Roman world, draw on ancient Greek and Latin literary texts, or feature classical figures and themes.
Keely Lake is collaborating with APA president-elect Kathleen Coleman, Harvard University, to propose a session sponsored by APA Outreach at the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages meeting, to be held in Boston this coming November. My thanks again to committee member Benjamin Stevens, Bard College, for his leadership in revising the description of the Outreach Committee and its activities on the APA website, and to several committee members for their excellent ideas about refocusing the APA speakers’ bureau. I have implemented these ideas about the speakers’ bureau, among them according greater emphasis to recently published research and including Canadian as well as US classicists on the speakers’ bureau roster, in a mailing sent in mid-January to those already on the roster, as well as individuals recommended by committee members. Please contact me at jeph@umd.edu if you would like to be among our speakers.
Other committee members are working to promote the new APA President’s Award, which honors an individual, group or organization outside of the classics profession that has made significant contributions to advancing public appreciation and awareness of classical antiquity; to expand the involvement of classicists with programs in libraries, bookstores and prisons; to present a lecture series at the Embassy of Greece in Washington, DC; to consider how to forge close connections with outreach projects by classicists abroad, such as EuGeStA, the new European Gender Studies network launched by classicists in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the UK; and to facilitate discussion of issues and events of concern to classicists through the use of blogs.
It is a pleasure and privilege to work with the talented, energetic, and above all generous colleagues on the many facets of APA Outreach, above all our Executive Director Adam Blistein. Maximas gratias vobis omnibus ago.
Respectfully submitted,
Judith P. Hallett
February 2010
Professional Matters. The Division of Professional Matters includes under its jurisdiction the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics, the Placement Committee, the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, and the Classics Advisory Service.
At its general meeting at the APA convention in Anaheim, the Professional Matters Committee heard reports from the individual standing committees (see individual reports appended below); discussed a proposal concerning making available information on attrition, time to degree, and placement in classics graduate programs (further development of this proposal continues); and strategized concerning more effective and timely methods for data collection. The departmental census form has been converted to an electronic format, which should increase participation and aid greatly in tabulating results in the future. Special thanks were given to Carin Green, Kristina Milnor, and Stephen Nimis, outgoing chairs of our committees.
Subcommittee on Professional Ethics. Various questions were presented for consideration by the committee; as always, our deliberations are strictly confidential. Two on-going complaints continue to be adjudicated by the committee; we are confident that resolutions in these cases will be forthcoming in the near future.
Placement Committee (Submitted by Carin Green). The Placement Committee continued to monitor the process of placement for candidates who are members of the APA or the AIA, providing oversight for announcements of positions and interviewing/hiring of candidates. The Committee also continued to review problems created (generally inadvertently) by either institutions or candidates who did not quite follow the rules. In some cases the rules needed clarification, in others the individuals concerned needed guidance as to how to rectify the situation.
The new early registration process is a resounding success. In accordance with the advice of Renie Plonski, the deadline for early registration will be moved up to Nov. 1. In 2009 there were increased concerns about institutions pushing the limits on the ways in which they did their hiring. One institution made an offer, then withdrew it when immigration issues arose. The Subcommittee on Professional Ethics helped them to resolve the issue appropriately. Other institutions have begun interviewing by phone and making offers before the convention. After discussion we decided that it was unfortunate, but acceptable. New discussions about “going electronic” have been raised in committee, and the on-going members will be doing research on this in the coming year and reporting at next year's meeting. The committee's panel for graduate students was again well attended, and plans for next year's have been made. The focus will be on high school positions for Ph.D.'s.
Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (Submitted by Stephen Trzaskoma and Kristina Milnor). Because of the (continued) lack of data from previous years, CSWMG once again did not produce any reports this year. The annual meeting of the committee and further discussions with the Professional Matters Committee in Anaheim led to 1) renewed commitments to get these data and 2) a new approach that would in the future have members of CSWMG partnering with members of other relevant committees to produce reports that are of relevance to the entire profession while continuing to address in particular the areas that CSWMG is charged with investigating. Thus, the placement report would be produced by the Placement Committee and CSWMG, and so forth. Once the data are obtained, work will begin in the upcoming year in establishing an effectivemodus operandi for these partnerships.
The members of CSWMG have continued discussions around ways in which it can perform its advocacy role. One example of success here was the panel discussion on “Recruiting and Retaining Minorities and Women in Classics: From Undergraduate to Tenured Faculty” at the meeting in Anaheim. Organized by CSWMG under the leadership of Kristina Milnor, the panel consisted of members of the committee and other members of the profession, as well as one administrative outsider, and attracted an audience of about 20. This audience was demographically diverse and notably included two students of color who shared their experiences. The committee will look for other opportunities to further the professional discussion of the status of women and minority groups in the professions and ways to create synergies with the Women's Classical Caucus and other groups.
Classics Advisory Service (Submitted by Stephen Nimis). The past year has seen the usual array of requests for program reviews of Classics programs. However, there has been an unusual number of threats to classics programs and departments, a trend that shows no sign of abating, and it is to this issue I would like to address my report this year.
Because of recent difficulties in the American economy, institutions of higher learning have suffered serious financial difficulties that have affected Classics programs in various ways. The easiest way for colleges to deal with budget cuts is not to replace faculty who retire or who leave for some other reason, or to replace tenure lines with visiting appointments or adjuncts, aggravating at many institutions what James O'Donnell has aptly called “adjunctivitis.” In the long run, this means a greater gap between those who have the security of tenure, along with access to research leaves, travel support, etc., and the swelling number of classicists who do not. Classics is a key fault line in the battle for the soul of academia, which often shapes up in times of financial troubles as a battle between the ideals of a liberal education versus the vocational benefits of college education. Often Classics will be viewed as “non-essential” or old fashioned. The current renewed emphasis on foreign language study, for example, has often been articulated with a strong presentist bias, privileging “critical” languages like Arabic and Chinese, which are viewed as crucial for preparing students to participate in the world economy, at the expense of well-established language programs that focus on literature and culture (Classics, but also German, Russian, and many others). Colleges and universities anxious to cut administrative costs increasingly seek to combine departments and programs to save money on chair stipends, support staff, office equipment, etc., often without much sensitivity to the curricular and professional consequences of such changes.
What is the best response? Righteous indignation can only get us so far. It is annoying to find it suddenly necessary to defend, once again, the role of Classics in a liberal education and the role of a liberal education in the modern university. However, it is also important to respond in a way that is meaningful to those who are responsible for making difficult decisions about the future of the university. Here are some thoughts on these issues from my own experiences and from the tales of woe I have heard lately. I offer them as a way of starting a conversation about these issues with the intent of girding ourselves for future battles.
1. Viability
Classics will rarely win the numbers game. It has been estimated that there is one tenured professor of Classics for every six Classics majors in the country [N.B. this is an unverified statistic from Frank Donahue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities]. Most Classics departments have a similar profile: a respectable number of majors per faculty member, a respectable number of Latin language students, a smaller number of Greek language students, in both cases thinning to smaller numbers (less than 10) in advanced courses in either language. At the same time, most departments field larger classical humanities courses (where all reading is in English) that cover both literature and material culture. These popular “bread and butter” courses usually are what make our departments viable. From the standpoint of bean-counters, it is easy to view our curriculum as something that is superfluous: there are other languages that students can take, whether they are more useful or not; and they can study literature and culture in translation in English and History departments. Classics is nice, in this scenario, but hardly essential. While it is always important to assert that Classics is relatively cheap (and we are, generally), it is more persuasive to argue our case on the basis of two other key criteria: quality and centrality.
2. Quality
Classics as a field and as a department has been around a long time at most universities; often, Classics is the oldest department at the institution. Although this is sometimes considered an aspersion, it is not difficult to argue that a field like Classics, with its well-established professional organizations, journals, conferences, scholarships and endowments, has what newer programs aspire to, but may never achieve: long-standing criteria of disciplinary authority that have evolved and stood the test of time, well-tested educational materials in the form of textbooks, long-standing graduate programs with proven excellence and track records. The classics section of most academic libraries is large; but that is only part of the story. Classics has been a leader in the implementation of technology in scholarship and teaching, as witnessed by innovative projects like the TLG, Perseus, and many others.
A defense based on quality is especially relevant when administrators suggest that newer interdisciplinary programs are more hip and room must be made for them in the curriculum at the expense of these older outdated programs. It is important to point out that a balance between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work is essential for the good health of both kinds of endeavor. The Achilles heel of interdisciplinary programs is lack of disciplinary depth, whereas disciplines tend to become excessively narrow. Students and scholars suffer in both cases: in the former, they can end up never engaging any subject deeply, with a superficial acquaintance of numerous fields; in the latter, they can end up unable to relate narrow disciplinary work to any other context. Aside from its very solid traditions of teaching and research, Classics has also been an interdisciplinary field for a long time, combining many specialties and always increasing the number of ways that classical antiquity can be studied or included in emerging fields (gender studies and identity studies are salient examples).
Emerging fields like Arabic and Chinese language instruction often lack the resources and personnel in cognate areas (history, religion, philosophy, etc.) with the result that language becomes taught and learned in a vacuum. Classics has the kind of broad representation in the curriculum outside of our departments that is required for the study of literature and language to be meaningful. The expansion of the curriculum into underrepresented areas is certainly a valid goal, but it is risky to replace tried and tested programs like Classics with emerging or evolving programs that may take years to implement properly. This is particularly true if those new programs rely heavily on individual faculty members whose expertise is not easy to reproduce when that faculty goes on leave or departs the institution completely. A better approach is to make room for these new programs within existing curricular and administrative structures, and classicists should be making strategic alliances that can move such an approach forward (Mediterranean Studies, for example).
High-achieving high school students frequently select Latin as their foreign language because of its reputation as a prestigious choice. High school Latin programs are often excellent in part because of the self-selection of these high-achieving students. College programs that wish to attract the best students will see Classics as a key resource. It is a good idea to get some data about these trends from relevant schools to help make this point. Contacting high school Latin teachers and guidance counselors can help build a case centered around recruitment.
A defense based on quality will inevitably make reference to the prestige that a classics curriculum adds to a liberal arts curriculum. It is easy to point to peer and aspirational institutions that have classics programs and argue that this should be part of the “arms race” in which all colleges seem to be embroiled.
3. Centrality
The centrality of Classics is a direct result of the institutional history of American universities. The centrality of Classics in the modern university will be evidenced in the way classicists participate in other kinds of programs, contributing a perspective and a set of tools that are distinctive and interesting. Again, gender studies and identity studies are good instances of the way Classics can occupy an important position in emerging fields of study. One way of putting ourselves in a stronger position in difficult times is to make ourselves useful and relevant to other programs around the university: history, art, religion, literature, etc. This can range from curricular support to collaborative research to just being a good citizen of the university. The role that Greek science and philosophy played in the development of Islam makes that now suddenly important field of study a source of new collaborative and curricular opportunities for classicists. Perhaps more to the point is the versatility that the skills involved in the study of Classics brings to our students. Studying the Classics provides students with the central components of a liberal education, as opposed to an education more narrowly focused on a specific occupation; and that is a preparation for a life of learning new skills and of transferring skills to other goals and arenas of activity.
Respectfully submitted,
James M. May
Program. I have several items to present at this time for the information of the Board and the membership. Only the last requires Board action.
The program of our current meetings has been well run and well received, and though (or perhaps rather, because) it has included somewhat fewer sessions than usual, attendance at individual sessions has been robust. I received word of a few technical glitches in the course of the weekend; a more systematic overview will be available once the annual survey of session-presiders has been completed. It remains only to thank, on the Committee’s behalf, all members who participated, whether as presenters, presiders, or discussants, with particular thanks to Barbara Weiden Boyd, who stepped in to serve as a presider when a family emergency prevented an originally scheduled presider from participating. As always, greatest thanks are due to Heather Hartz Gasda, the APA’s coordinator of meetings, programs, and administration, for the ceaseless energy and efficiency she brings to making the program work.
The first of the joint Classical Association / APA panels was presented on Friday, January 8: organized by Tim Whitmarsh on the theme of “Religious Controversies”, with papers by Mary Beard and Robin Lane Fox (CA) and Sarah Iles Johnston and James Porter (APA), it was a great success and good omen for the future, even though Tim Whitmarsh himself was very unfortunately prevented from attending by abysmal winter weather in the UK. The next panel, organized by Elizabeth Asmis of the Program Committee on a Ciceronian theme, with papers by Erich Gruen and Joy Connolly (APA) and Peter Wiseman and Ingo Gildenhard (CA), will be presented at the meetings of the Classical Association in spring 2011.
The workshop on the art and craft of abstract-writing that the Program Committee organized for Thursday, January 7, was reasonably well attended, and each of the Committee members who participated—Sharon James, Jeff Rusten, and myself—was subsequently stopped by someone who had been present and thanked for the effort. In connection with the workshop, the Committee has assembled a set of bullet-points on abstracts and abstract-writing that will be posted at some appropriate spot on the APA website.
As members of the Board and the Association more generally probably know, each author of an individual abstract is asked to assign the abstract to a category—for example, “Greek Epic” or “Latin Epic”—for administrative purposes in preparation for the Committee’s deliberations each June. (I note in passing that these categories exist only to allow the APA staff to marshal the 300-400 abstracts received in some orderly fashion: the Committee deliberates without thought of quota for any given category and without comparing abstracts within a category, and it assembles the final paper sessions without reference to the original abstract categories.) In response to a proposal from the WCC, the Committee has agreed to add a category on “Gender and Sexuality.”
Finally, on the subject of laptop computers used for PowerPoint presentations at paper sessions: though it has been the APA practice to bear the cost of computer rentals for members who are unwilling or unable to bring their own machines to the sessions, the cost of doing so is not really supportable in the current budgetary climate, and the members have not responded as well as they might to Heather Gasda’s gentle suasion. Heather therefore suggests—and I strongly endorse the suggestion—that the APA adopt the same policy as the AIA in this regard:
Presenters are responsible for supplying their own laptops, as they are not provided in the session rooms. In order to ensure proper display of your presentation while using a Mac, please have the appropriate connection cable available or a copy of your presentation on an external hard drive or CD for use on a PC. Please provide this copy to your session organizer.
Heather further suggests that any presenter who nonetheless still wishes to rent a computer for the occasion be required to deal directly with the local AV provider, eliminating the need for her to act as go-between; and again I strongly endorse the suggestion. [Editor's Note: The Board approved Prof. Kaster's proposals concerning computer rental.]
Respectfully submitted,
Bob Kaster
9 January 2010
Publications. The major activity of the Publications Division during the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 was a retreat of Publications Committee members and selected others held in Chicago on December 3-4, after which a summary of principles and preliminary recommendations was drafted, circulated, discussed, and revised, most recently at the annual meeting of the Committee in Anaheim on January 7, with some further revision in light of e-mail comment/discussion between that meeting and the APA Board of Directors meeting of January 9. We are very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its intellectual and financial support of these discussions.
We continue to refine the recommendations and investigate the possibility of implementation. In the interim, we offer the following principles to the membership for comment.
1. The Association should support publication of research of the highest quality and distinctive character.
2. A distinctive feature of publication from a learned society is that it can and should embody a collective sense of the focus, standards, and ambitions of the society itself: "performing the profession" as we understand it, in all its breadth and richness, for all that this performance evolves as our understanding of the profession does.
3. At the same time, it is appropriate to place emphasis on ensuring that we also publish what is unique and differentiating, what might not be published elsewhere by entities more bound to attend to commercial concerns. One goal is to encourage members but also the institutions where they are employed to pursue arduous work that might not otherwise easily be encouraged in an institutional culture whose goals are not completely aligned with what the APA imagines its ambitions to comprise.
4. Assuring preservation, that is, durable access, to work published is an important contribution of an Association that has an ambition of continuing to exist for the foreseeable future.
5. The Association should then seek the widest audience congruent with the intellectual ambitions and standards of the work published.
6. Supporting the work of younger colleagues and advancing their careers is a high priority. Inter alia, we can and should support a peer review mechanism that emphasizes evaluation that can be developmentally helpful to scholars early in their careers
Report on the Meeting of the Committee on the Web Site and Newsletter. The "website committee" has been instituted to give the Association's vice presidents an opportunity to discuss common communication and information concerns across divisional boundaries with the Web Editor and the Executive Director. This year, the conversation continued and expanded on work of the Publications and Research retreats and the first Anaheim meeting of the Board.
We confirmed that spending up to $10K for enhancements to the current website capability is necessary and justifiable. Velleities were expressed for better content management, outbound RSS feeds, and blogging capability; Prof. Mitchell-Boyask will experiment within the capabilities that we have and what is freely available. Summer 2010 will see the end of Robin's term; I will work with the President and Executive Director on the search process. [Editor's Note: We are grateful to Prof. Mitchell-Boyask for agreeing to extend his current term through January 2011 to give the Association time for a proper search and to put the term of the Web Editor on the same schedule as that of other editors.]
We discerned a first order set of concerns: making what we do and have in the organization more widely known to prospective members, members, scholars in adjacent and congruent fields, and a wider public. Our second order concerns were like unto the first, but looked to making a better communication capability work for the benefit of sibling or nepotial1 organizations and activities among students and teachers of the ancient world (from the American Society of Papyrologists to theater groups producing Aristophanic reimaginations).
These concerns point to two different kinds of desiderata:
-- a technology framework
-- a credentialing and editorial mechanism
We spoke again a bit of the possibility of a "publisher function" for the association, whether continuing or consultantly, whether unique to APA or shared with one or more other associations. The ACLS comes to mind as a vehicle for linking like-minded societies. The Committee on the Web Site and Newsletter anticipates meeting again this spring in New York in consultation with ACLS leadership to explore these issues further, before the Publications Committee returns to discussion of the specific issues of our current and prospective scholarly publications.
James J. O'Donnell
January 9, 2010
[1] Lest I be accused again of neologism, Google Books advises me that I can blame this word on Joe Russo in a 1999 essay.
Research. Since the September meeting of the Directors, I have mostly been engaged in creating the task forces charged with looking at the various areas the Committee on Research recommended as possible areas for new Association initiatives. So far, task forces on a digital Latin textual corpus (co-chairs: Helma Dik and Robert Kaster), on prosopography (chair: Richard Talbert), on the biography of classical scholars (chair: Ward Briggs), and on an archive of performances (chair: C. W. Marshall) have been appointed, and several more should be appointed within the next few weeks. I am grateful to all who have agreed to serve on these bodies. We have asked them for interim reports by the September meeting of the Directors, but their mandates are otherwise fairly open-ended at this stage.
Of the long-standing projects with which the Association is involved, it is certainly l’Année philologique that has had the most notable developments in the past year. Thanks to a grant from the Packard Humanities Institute and hard work by Lora Holland, it was possible during summer 2009 to clear up a significant part of the long-standing backlog of collective volumes that had not yet been analyzed by article; a significant number of these, however, remain and are a source of concern to the Committee. The offices of the American Office moved to Duke University this summer; the Association is profoundly grateful to the Department of Classics of the University of Cincinnati for its long and generous hosting of the American Office. Three major initiatives on the digital side of the project are also noteworthy: (1) the beginning of the publication of provisional records for recently entered items that are not yet in the permanent database, thus giving access to records much sooner than used to be possible; (2) a new website with improved search interface for APh, which will become available later this winter; and (3) a project to make possible the linking of citations of classical authors in APh to textual databanks containing those authors. This effort, developed through a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is now the subject of an implementation proposal to Mellon that the Association will submit next week.
Roger S. Bagnall
January 9, 2010
Roger Allen Hornsby, Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Iowa, died on October 20, 2009 at his home in Iowa City. He was 83. A memorial service took place in the senate chamber of the Old Capitol on the University of Iowa campus on December 6, 2009. His remains will be interred in Toronto with those of his wife Jessie.
Roger was born at Nye, Wisconsin on August 8, 1926. He received his B.A. at Adelbert College of Western Reserve University in 1949. He attended Princeton University to receive his A.M. in 1951 and PhD. in 1952. Between 1952 and 1954 he served in the U.S. Army. He taught at the University of Iowa from 1954 until his retirement in 1991. He married Jessie Lynn Gillespie, professor of French at the University of Iowa on June 8, 1960.
Roger was active throughout his life in service to the field of Classics. He served as chairman of the department of Classics at Iowa from 1966 to 1981. He was chief reader for the Latin IV advanced placement exam for the Educational Testing Service between 1965 and 1969. He was president of CAMWS in 1968-69, and on the board of directors of the APA from 1974-1977. He was particularly devoted to the American Academy in Rome, for which he was a member of the council in 1974, a resident in 1983, and a trustee in the years 1990-92. He was also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1984-2000) and served on the council of the American Numismatic Society (1973-, and 1984-2000).
Roger had wide interests in the study of the ancient world and the teaching of the languages it spoke. His publications focused on Latin poetry and included Reading Latin Poetry (1967), Patterns of Action in the Aeneid (1970) and articles and reviews in professional journals. Over the years he took his own, personal approach to Classical learning on the road, visiting at Trinity College, UCLA and Georgetown University. After his retirement in 1997-98 he was the Whichard Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University.
Roger’s friends and students—two groups that frequently overlapped—remember fondly his passionate devotion to the life of the mind and his power as a teacher. His mordant judgments held us all to high intellectual standards, and to the end he reveled in the sheer joy of conversation and debate. The Hornsby parties, given by Roger and Jessie in the grand style, enlivened the Iowa academic scene for many years. He is greatly missed.
Robert Ketterer
The University of Iowa
Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor of Greek emeritus at Oxford University and Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and four other national academies, died on 5 October 2009 at age 87, after routine surgery overcame a constitution weakened by several years of declining health. With his passing an era has ended and the world of classical studies has lost one of its unforgettable personalities and most dominant figures, a staunch champion of traditional scholarship who nevertheless took a keen interest in the important scholarly and intellectual developments of his time, encouraging what he found valuable and attacking what he considered unsound, and who addressed specialist and general audiences prolifically and over an exceptionally broad range of subjects, always with a forceful enthusiasm that embraced both fun and ferocity.
To his scholarship Lloyd-Jones brought a matchless command of the Greek language, mastery of philological technique, a prodigious memory, a comprehensive understanding of the history and methods of classical scholarship, and an abiding enthusiasm for Greek culture and thought in all periods ancient and modern. Although his principal focus lay in Greek poetry, drama, and thought, especially religious thought, he followed no particular program but read everything and took up whatever attracted his interest or provoked his intervention, producing articles, essays, notes, and reviews in great profusion (a sampling is gathered in three large volumes of collected papers), and rarely did a new literary papyrus or critical edition escape his jeweler’s eye. Even in well-trodden fields his work was always original and cut right to the chase: wanting above all to learn about the Greeks, he worked directly on primary evidence and pursued it wherever it led, taking no account of previous scholarship, particular methodological approaches, or conventional views unless they could help him discover something new and true; if they were derivative, false, or exemplified incompetence, he denounced them with relish. He was open to any and all new ideas however wild, requiring only that you “knew Greek,” were not boring, and were ready to defend yourself.
Among his large-scale contributions are editions of the fragments of Aeschylus (Lloyd-Jones to Mette: desinas ineptire!), the works in the monumental Supplementum Hellenisticum (with Peter Parsons), Menander’s Dyscolus, and Sophocles (the now-standard OCT with Nigel Wilson) with two volumes of critical notes; his fine translations of Aeschylus’ Oresteia and (for the Loeb) the plays and fragments of Sophocles; his books Females of the Species: Semonides on Women (1975), Myths of the Zodiac (1978),
Mythical Beasts (1980), and, perhaps best known, The Justice of Zeus (his 1969 Sather Lectures, published in 1971), which challenged the then-prevalent notion of a divine evolution in Aeschylus toward a more just relationship of god(s) to mankind (for Lloyd-Jones, who held both Christianity and most forms of social progressivism in Nietzschean contempt, the Greek gods ever and always held power in their own interest, not man’s, so that the Greek universe was “necessarily adverse to human aspirations”); and his explorations of classical scholarship and traditions (including studies of Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner, Marx, and Freud) in Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1982), Classical Survivals: The Classics in the Modern World (1982), and Greek in a Cold Climate (1991).
Lloyd-Jones was educated at the French Lycée in London, the Westminster School, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1940, as soon as he turned 18, he interrupted his undergraduate studies to volunteer for the war effort. Assigned to the Intelligence Corps, he quickly learned Japanese and, declining the relative safety of Bletchley Park, secured a post at the front in India and Burma, where he saw action, held an independent command, and attained the rank of Captain. Upon graduating with a First in Greats in 1948, he was appointed Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, then moved to Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1955 to became the inaugural E. P. Warren Praelector in Classics. Warren, the American benefactor, had stipulated that the Praelector not teach women or lecture in their presence, but Lloyd-Jones, ever impatient of whatever academic rituals and protocols he considered impediments to learning, did what he could to evade the restriction, removed after his incumbency, by arranging to teach joint courses listed under a colleague’s name.
In 1960, at the unusually young age of 38, Lloyd-Jones was elected to succeed E. R. Dodds as the Regius Professor of Greek, a position he held with distinction until his retirement and knighthood in 1989. Fluent in French and German, alert to sound and interesting scholarship wherever it was to be found, and thinking that Oxford classics was still too parochial (“slowly awakening from the clerical slumbers of the previous century”), he cultivated many contacts abroad and fostered an international exchange of ideas and approaches, and by adopting from Eduard Fraenkel the practice of offering regular seminars, mainly on text-critical subjects, he drew scholars from far and wide. Not a few of the graduates he supervised went on to become leading scholars themselves. From 1989 his main residence was in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he enjoyed a happy retirement with his second wife (since 1982), the distinguished classicist Mary Lefkowitz, and his beloved cats (Siamese preferred). There he pursued his scholarly interests and participated energetically in his new classics community, giving and hearing talks and regularly attending professional meetings, engaging whomever sought his conversation and enriching paper sessions with his pungent questions and often provocative comments.
As a personality Hugh radiated the same enthusiasm that animates his writing, but even more intensely: for him, classical scholarship was “great fun” to be enjoyed with gusto and at fever pitch every waking hour, and he wanted everyone in his company to share the fun regardless of the ambient social temperature. Restlessly energetic, arresting in gaze, thrust forward in a slight crouch, with his index finger tracing patterns up and down, around and back, his speech histrionically contoured to its subject, by turns soft and vehement and seasoned with a mad guttural laugh, he enjoyed discussing his or your current work, exchanging the latest news about colleagues whether positive or scandalous, entertaining you with anecdotes from his extensive and vivid recollections, and provoking you with indiscreet or outrageous remarks, at which only the squeamish could take real offense; my own scholarly shortcomings he was always thoughtful enough to attribute to the poor training I received from Professors X, Y, and Z. He was incapable of making small talk truly small; he forever endeared himself to my children when, years ago, he asked them about our cat (shy of most people but interested in Hugh) and pronounced him “a magnificent beast.”
Of my own fondest memories of Hugh the one that stands out happened on a sidewalk in San Francisco during a lunch break at a conference on tragedy. I was telling him something about the meter of the horsemen’s ode to Poseidon in Aristophanes’ Knights when he suddenly lit up and, entrancing me and stopping passersby in their tracks, he performed the whole ode in perfect rollicking Greek, complete with choreography.
He is survived by his wife Mary and by two sons and a daughter from his first marriage. A memorial event took place in Christ Church, Oxford on Saturday 13 February, 2010. Addresses delivered on that occasion are online at http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/2010/tributes-sir-hugh-lloyd-jones-1
Jeffrey Henderson
Boston University
Prof. Bryan Peter Reardon died after a long illness on November 16, 2009 at his home in Lion-sur-Mer in Normandy. Janette his wife of nearly fifty years was with him at the end. There was no funeral; he donated his body to science. In the past year or so many colleagues and friends came to Normandy to visit Bryan, most memorably on his eightieth birthday in December 2008 when John Morgan from Wales and Kathryn Chew from California arrived with the typescript of a Festschrift in his honor. This benevolent conspiracy took Bryan totally by surprise. He was much moved. The completed volume will be forthcoming as a special supplement to the Groningen journal Ancient Narrative. It is a fitting tribute to an original and hugely influential scholar who almost single-handedly revived the international study of ancient fiction.
Reardon was born in Manchester on December 30, 1928, and had his primary education and grammar school education in Derby; he then transferred to secondary school in Glasgow when his family moved there in 1941. In Glasgow he found himself ahead of the locals because he had started Latin and Greek before the move. He won a scholarship to the University of Glasgow, where he studied for five years in both English and Humanity (the term in Scottish universities for the study of Latin language and literature), receiving his M.A. with Honours in Classics in 1951. One of his most important teachers and mentors was the Greek historian and commentator on Thucydides and Menander, A. W. Gomme. He was awarded a University of Glasgow scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he completed his B.A. in Classics in 1953. To his amusement, many colleagues later wondered how he had managed to earn an M.A. before a B.A., not realizing that in Scotland the M.A. is by long tradition the first university degree awarded. By the time he was at Cambridge he had also acquired two other passions as well as Classics, for theater and for cricket. In the 1953 production of the Cambridge Greek Play he played a memorable Agamemnon opposite Frances Lloyd-Jones’ Clytemnestra. The demands of professional life eventually put an end to cricket and acting (except in lecturing and conversation) but he remained a keen and informed critic of both.
After Cambridge Reardon was required to perform two years of military service, which he did in the R.A.F., from 1953 to 1955. Following a two-year stint of teaching in schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow he accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Classics at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where he taught from 1958 to 1967. There, by “pure tyche,” as he put it, he also met Janette Hamard, a Lecturer in French; they were married in 1960. Together with Janette he embarked on a life that made him an authoritative figure in France, as he was in turn a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure, and the University of Caen. As his fame as a scholar grew and his work became more widely known, some who met him for the first time were actually surprised to learn he was not French himself. When he opened an international conference with a lecture on Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe entitled “Mythos ou Logos,” an eminent German Classicist wittily inquired whether Prof. Reardon was going to speak to his audience in ancient Greek (ou, “not”) or French (ou, “or”).
Bryan’s first book was a translation of selected works of Lucian, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1965. He went on research leave from 1964 to 1966 to the University of Nantes, where he wrote his doctorate under the supervision of Jacques Bompaire, Courants littéraires Grecs des IIe et IIIe Siècles après J. –C. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971). Only the final part ofCourants littéraires was devoted to the novel, but in retrospect this wide-ranging study of Imperial Greek literature now reads like a prolegomenon to what would become the defining focus of Reardon’s work for the rest of his life, the Greek novel. To this day CLG remains the only study to tackle its range of authors in depth.
In 1967 Bryan was invited to Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, to chair a fledgling Classics department, where he taught until 1974. The department flourished under his leadership and he remains well regarded there to the present day. While supervising the publication of Courants littéraires and performing all his other duties he published a general introduction to the subject, “The Greek Novel,” in 1969 in Phoenix. This single article marked the beginning of the field of ancient fiction for many Classicists and students of Comparative Literature, and remains required reading for the topic. In due course Glen Bowersock invited him to participate in a panel at the APA in 1973, “Approaches to the Second Sophistic,” with George Kennedy and other leading scholars, and from that point onwards his engagement with ancient fiction accelerated all the more. In 1974 he was appointed Chair of the combined Greek and Latin departments at the University College of North Wales in Bangor. Not unlike the peripatetic heroes and heroines he studied, Bryan set up a major event in what APA members used to North American confines seemed to lie in Ultima Thule: not only Wales, but North Wales at that. In fact Reardon put Bangor into the center of many a scholar’s map, as the founding site of what would eventually become a proliferating series of international conferences on the ancient novel, all known by the acronym he devised: ICAN, the International Conference on the Ancient Novel. None of the organizers of the successor conferences at Dartmouth (1989), Groningen (2000), or Lisbon (2008) ever thought of changing Reardon’s acronym; what they mainly accomplished was a series of successive adaptations and expansions of the original ICAN program of 1976. Although the conference came in July, in the middle of all the hoopla over the bicentennial of the American Revolution, ICAN was designed to commemorate the centennial of the publication of Erwin Rohde’s Der Griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. It is characteristic of Reardon’s generous spirit that he also honored a scholar with whom he disagreed more often than not, Ben Edwin Perry (1892-1968), whose revised Sather Lectures (The Ancient Romances, 1967), along with Reinhold Merkelbach’s Roman und Mysterium in der Antike (1962), provided virtually the only substantial critical discussion of ancient Greek fiction until Reardon’s ICAN and all the work that flowed from it.
In 1978 Prof. Reardon was invited to chair the Department of Classics at the University of California at Irvine, and he spent the rest of his teaching career with the University. He found a way to supplement the resources of the Irvine department by working with his former St. John’s College contemporary J. P. Sullivan at Santa Barbara to establish a Resource Sharing Consortium whereby faculty could be exchanged on a regular basis between the Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Santa Barbara campuses. An obvious move in hindsight, the Consortium enriched the graduate curriculum of Irvine and other campuses in the UC system by introducing students to distinguished visiting faculty with a wide range of research specialties.
His generosity in supporting his students—and, more impressively, those who were never his students—was seemingly limitless. He was much loved as well as respected by those who were fortunate enough to work with him. He was a sharp critic, but when he saw something he valued, he pushed it enthusiastically; at the same time he never failed to let his charges know exactly what he valued and what he didn't. In his years at Irvine he guided the studies of three graduate students who would themselves contribute much to scholarship on ancient fiction: Bracht Branham, Kathryn Chew and Brigitte Egger. The consortium program remains active to the present day. He served his final two years with California as the Director of the entire UC system’s Education Abroad Program in Lyon and Grenoble. In 1995 he and Janette retired to their new house in Lion-sur-Mer, there to enjoy together Bryan’s still vigorous scholarly activity, roguish wit and discerning gastronomy.
In the years at Irvine and afterwards Bryan advanced the reading and interpretation of Greek fiction with work distinguished by great learning and critical acumen, always written with a characteristic elegance. His decade-long editorial work with seven other scholars culminated in the University of California Press’s publication in 1989 of Collected Ancient Greek Novels, which appeared just as the second ICAN began at Dartmouth. A second paperback edition appeared in 2008, with a new introduction by John Morgan, and coincided with the fourth International Conference at Lisbon. In 1991 he published (with Princeton University Press) an introductory book for general readers and students of ancient fiction, The Form of Greek Romance. In 1987-1988 he was a Visiting Mellon Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he began the final years of work on a new edition of Chariton for Teubner. Chariton De Callirhoe Narrationes Amatoriae was published in 2004. He regarded this as the culmination of a lifetime’s work, and he brought to it not only his unmatched knowledge of Chariton’s Greek but also a discerning literary sensibility. It is a testimony to his industry and his devotion to his favorite author that in his last years, even as his health was declining, he spent much time reconsidering issues raised in reviews and gathering corrections for a possible editio altera.
B. P. Reardon moved back and forth across the whole range of humane learning, from translation to literary criticism to textual criticism, with great contributions as a teacher and an administrator, and he did so in a career of almost unparalleled diversity. As he jokingly observed at one point, he had somehow managed to acquire retirement accounts in four different countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and the United States. He was a loyal and generous member of the APA, and the enduring relevance of his many contributions to classics as an international discipline is sure to last as long as any great scholar’s. When the news of his death reached Trent University, the Canadian flag atop the University Library was lowered to half-mast in his honor. It was a remarkable tribute, expressing the enduring gratitude of a University Bryan Reardon had left over thirty years before.
A memorial service will be held on Wednesday, April 28th at the University of California at Irvine.
Ewen Bowie, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Kathryn Chew, California State University, Long Beach
John Morgan, University of Wales, Swansea
Ian Storey, Trent University, Peterborough
Dana Sutton, University of California at Irvine
James Tatum, Dartmouth College
Stephen Trzaskoma, University of New Hampshire
Colin M. Wells died on 11 March, at Bangor in North Wales, with his family around him, after a short illness. He was born on 15 November 1933. After Nottingham High School, where he was very well taught, he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, to read Lit. Hum. After taking Honour Moderations, he interrupted his studies in order to do his military service, during which he was stationed in Egypt and enjoyed early-morning riding in the desert. Returning to Oxford, he completed his Greats work. At this stage, he was especially interested in philosophy. But he nearly opted for a military career. Instead he began his teaching at Beaumont, an appropriate choice as he had become a Roman Catholic at 21. In 1960 he married Kate Hughes, daughter of the novelist Richard Hughes. He was asked by Fr. Etienne Gareau O. M. I. to accept an appointment at the University of Ottawa. After two years’ teaching and the birth of a son, Christopher, Kate and Colin returned to England so that he could start a doctorate in Roman Archaeology under the supervision of Ian Richmond. The seed for his work on the frontiers under Augustus was in an essay he had written as an undergraduate for P. A. Brunt, his tutor, who was a major influence. Another son, Dominic, was born during their two-year stay in England.
Colin served the University of Ottawa with energy, enthusiasm and vision. He was one of the pioneers of an interdisciplinary Classical Civilisation course. He served as chairman of the Department of Classical Studies / Département des Etudes anciennes (overseeing a period of growth) and as Vice-Dean and was secretary to an important committee which reviewed the structures of the university. Concurrently he was editing Echos du monde classique / Classical News & Views. At the same time, he was active in research and participation in learned societies. The Wells house in New Edinburgh was a centre of hospitality for classicists and other guests from all over the world. After over a quarter of a century, he regretfully left Ottawa in 1987 to take up a new and exciting post in Texas as Distinguished Professor at Trinity University, San Antonio. Here, with a new culture to explore, an office big enough for most of his books on Roman history and archaeology and a strikingly elegant house designed for entertaining, he and Kate entered upon a new period of their lives, making new friends while maintaining old contacts. Teaching continued to fascinate and pre-occupy him until he was seventy. At that point, they came back to their house in Oxford, before moving definitively to a house in Normandy, which offered a barn which could become a library. He had always loved France.
An able administrator, Colin served many organisations in the course of his career: the AAH, AIA, APA, CAC, Rei Cretariae Romanae Fautores, the Limes Congresses (he only missed one congress) and others. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Visiting Professor at Berkeley. He was Visiting Fellow at Brasenose (1973-4) and ever after, as a member of Common Room, enjoyed the hospitality and communal life of the college.
The German Policy of Augustus, the fruit of his work on frontiers, came out in 1972. It was followed by the exceptional introduction, The Roman Empire (1984), which has delighted and stimulated undergraduates ever since. An impressive production of articles in history and archaeology went on all the time, the rhythm accelerated recently, as the history and archaeology of northern France seized his attention. From 1976, initially with the late Edith Wightman, Colin was directing the Canadian team excavating in Carthage, an involvement which continued for over twenty years. His lectures on the dig, delivered in his inimitable style, will be long remembered. He was happily engaged in writing a short history of the Roman army and had just finished the first chapter. A book on the hellenistic period was in view.
A man of manifold interests and warm sympathies, Colin Wells made the most of his exceptionally full life up to the end. He will leave a big gap in the many circles to which he belonged.
All of us offer our sympathy to his wife, sons, grandsons and the whole family. The funeral was held on 18 March and there will be a memorial service in July.
Susan Treggiari
Highlights of the 141st Annual Meeting
The APA held its 141st Annual Meeting in conjunction with the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in Anaheim, California, from January 6-9, 2010. About 2,300 members, guests, and volunteers from both societies registered. Maria Pantelia chaired the APA's Local Arrangements Committee, and with her colleagues provided extremely valuable support to the staff and made it possible to carry out the many tasks associated with the meeting.
The APA Program consisted of 51 paper sessions. Seventeen of these were developed by the Program Committee from submitted abstracts. Panels proposed by APA committees, affiliated groups, and individual APA members were also presented. APA once again collaborated with AIA in presenting Roundtable Discussion Sessions.
Josiah Ober's Presidential Panel was entitled, "Classical Antiquity and Social Science". The following day at the Plenary Session President Ober gave a Presidential Address entitled "Wealthy Hellas".
Instead of the usual staged reading, the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance organized a screening of silent films with Classical themes. Andrew Simpson provided improvised piano accompaniment. Four members won prizes consisting of books donated by exhibitors at the Minority Scholarship Committee's annual raffle.
Once again, the Executive Director's report, normally presented at the annual business meeting, was published in advance of the annual meeting and can be found on the web site http://apaclassics.org/index.php/about_the_APA/director_report/executive_director_report_for_2009/ and in the October-December 2009 Newsletter (pages 26-33). The briefer business meeting was devoted to a short report from President Ober, the announcement of election results (see page 2 of the August 2009 Newsletter), and a brief report by Executive Director Adam D. Blistein (see next itme) acknowledging the contributions of both members and nonmembers to the success of the annual meeting and to the operations of the Association during the past year. The business meeting concluded with the transition of the Presidency from Prof. Ober to Prof. Dee L. Clayman.
As has become traditional, the list of APA members whose deaths were reported to the Association during the past year was read at the Plenary Session. That list was published on page 37 of the October-December 2009 Newsletter.
Acknowledgment of Service to the Association
Many people contributed to a very successful 141st meeting of the Association here in Anaheim, and, in addition, a number of people conclude significant terms of service to the Association at this meeting. We need to thank each one.
Maria Pantelia (UC-Irvine) served as Local Arrangements Chair and recruited the volunteers that we need to run the meeting. She also found for us a valuable online scheduling tool that we will use again and that will make life easier for her successors at future meetings.
The Anaheim Marriott provided sleeping and meeting rooms and an enthusiastic staff that made us very welcome. The staff of Experient, Inc., Linda Walter and Molly Witges, helped us and the AIA to negotiate contracts for this meeting, and they provided extremely valuable assistance in both making arrangements in advance of the meeting and in handling events here.
This year's Program Committee consisted of Robert Kaster, Chair, Elizabeth Asmis, Sharon James, Steven Oberhelman, and Jeffrey Rusten. Sharon completes a 3 year term on the Committee at this meeting, and we appreciate her hard work on the last 3 programs. Our new agreement to exchange panels with the Classical Association began at this meeting. We thank Tim Whitmarsh for organizing an outstanding session and regret that bad weather in England kept him from presiding at the session itself.
Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke organized the showing of silent movies on a classical themes with piano accompaniment by Andrew Simpson. We are also grateful to Boston University for its sponsorship of the special showing of Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.
The Presidential Panel was entitled "Classical Antiquity and Social Science" Josh invited Ryan Balot, Emily Mackil, and Ian Morris to give provocative talks on this topic. Josh's Presidential Address, "Wealthy Hellas", gave us an original and persuasive view of economic conditions in 5th and 4th Century BCE Greece.
A number of officers conclude terms of service on the Board of Directors as this meeting. They are are
* Kurt A. Raaflaub, President (2008)
* Ward W. Briggs, Financial Trustee (2004-2010)
* Lee T. Pearcy, Vice President for Education (2006-2010)
* Cynthia Damon, Director (2007-2010)
* Donald J. Mastronarde, Director (2007-2010)
In addition, Allen Miller concluded a four-year term as Editor of TAPA this Fall. We appreciate his efforts to produce eight outstanding issues of the journal.
Andri Cauldwell, AIA meeting coordinator, successfully managed the book exhibit and organized the opening reception at the Bowers Museum.
Heather Gasda, as usual, successfully attended to all the details of the meeting.
Renie Plonski made the Placement Service as welcoming as possible in a bad job market and was again able to notify all candidates in advance of the meeting whether any institutions had requested interviews with them.
Julie Carew, our Development Director, was an extra pair of eyes and ears for me here at the meeting and has been essential to the progress we have made in annual giving and the Gateway campaigns. Most notably this year, she made it possible for members to make contributions to the Association online.
Thank you all for attending this meeting, particularly, if, like me, you braved the increased difficulty of air travel to get here. Please join me in thanking the people I have listed for their contributions to this meeting and to the Association.
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
Call for Volunteers for 2011 Annual Meeting
Members are invited to serve as volunteers at the 142nd Annual Meeting of the Association in San Antonio, TX this coming January. Assignments include assistance in the Registration Area, monitoring session rooms, and supporting the Placement Service. Interested members should contact Heather Gasda in the Association Office by July 9, 2010. The Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee will develop a schedule of volunteer activity in late Fall.
In exchange for eight hours of service (either in one continuous or in two 4-hour assignments), volunteers receive a waiver of their annual meeting registration fees. It is not necessary to be an APA member to volunteer.
The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will present a special exhibition entitled Ancient Rome and America from February 18-August 1, 2010. The exhibition showcases the cultural, political, and social connections between ancient Rome and modern America. It features more than 300 artifacts from Italy and the United States, bringing together a never-before-seen collection from Italy’s leading archaeological institutions in Florence, Naples, and Rome, paired with objects from over 40 lending institutions in the United States. For more information visit the Center's web site: http://constitutioncenter.org/Rome/.
The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc. (CAAS) in 2002 established a Lectureship Fund named in honor of Jerry Clack. Professor Clack was one of the foremost leaders of the Association, editing Classical World from 1978-1993 and serving as the first Executive Director of CAAS from 1993-2000. Contributions to this fund are designed to build up principal, the income of which will be used to bring a distinguished lecturer each year from outside the CAAS region – the rest of North America, Europe, or beyond – to speak to the membership about work on the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. We are now more than 80% of the way toward completing the original fundraising goal of $10,000. Contributions are earnestly solicited. Checks made out to CAAS, with “Jerry Clack Lectureship Fund” written in the memo line, may be sent to the CAAS Treasurer, Professor Donald H. Mills, 203 Radcliffe Road, Dewitt, New York 13214
Philip Freeman, Luther College, has received a fellowship from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation to study the Latin letters of St. Patrick and early Patrician literature.
Homer in the 21st Century: Orality, Neoanalysis, Intepretation, 4th Trends in Classics International Conference, 28-30 May 2010, Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece. The aim of this conference is to offer a critical reassessment of the progress made in recent years with respect to the main trends in Homeric research. The three terms (Orality, Neoanalysis, Interpretation) in the second part of the conference's title represent three large areas we intend to explore. Starting from the end, we may say that interpreting Homer in the 21st century asks for a holistic approach that allows us to reconsider some of our methodological tools and preconceptions concerning what we call Homeric poetry. The neoanalytical and oral 'booms', which have to a large extent influenced the way we see Homer today, may be re-evaluated provided that we are willing to endorse a more flexible approach to certain scholarly taboos pertaining to these two schools of interpretation. Song-traditions, formula, performance, multiformity on the one hand, and Motivforschung, Epic Cycle, on the other may not be so incompatible as we often tend to think.
For more information, see the conference web site: http://www.lit.auth.gr/sites/default/files/newsattach/Program%202010(Final).pdf or contact Christos Tsagalis by e-mail: christos.tsagalis@gmail.com
Conventiculum Latinum Vasintoniense, Washington Spoken-Latin Seminar 2010, Wenatchee Valley College, June 30-July 8, 2010. This Conventiculum Vasintoniense will be an excellent opportunity for practicing speaking Latin. Most days we will take an excursion during which the participants, with the help of moderators, will not only chat among themselves in Latin but also describe in Latin everything they do and see. In the countryside and in parks we will discuss trees and plants, mountains and glaciers, rivers, animals, birds, insects, weather, and many other things. In town, our topics will be all things urban: the arts and entertainment, buildings and transportation, the harbor and ships, business, shopping, books, clothing, sports, etc. This seminar will be of special interest to those who enjoy the outdoors, sightseeing, etc. and who would like to improve their Latin skills "kinesthetically" in friendly conversation while engaging in a variety of activities in a multitude of contexts and settings.
All Latin teachers at the elementary and secondary levels are invited, as well as college and university professors. We especially recommend this seminar to graduate students in Classics and related fields since, just as with any language, the ability to speak Latin immensely strengthens one’s ability to read and write Latin well. Also, in order for spoken Latin to flourish, which is our common goal, it is especially necessary for future Latin instructors to see that our language is fully capable of serving as an instrument for daily life and for expressing all human concerns, even the most modern. We encourage those who already know the fundamentals of Latin grammar and can already read Latin quite well but who have never spoken Latin to attend the Conventiculum and have their first Latin conversations with us. Those who do not yet speak Latin should in no way feel intimidated at our seminars, since almost all of us have begun to speak Latin relatively recently and thus we all understand perfectly well the difficulty of getting started. All those who would like to practice the general elements of conversational Latin are invited to arrive on June 30th and July 1st before the formal beginning of the seminar.
For further information and registration materials see the Conventiculum web site: http://commons.wvc.edu/sberard/boreoccidentales/latin/Conventiculum%20Vasintoniense/Home.aspx
Fellowships/Funding Opportunities
The Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studiesis an independent private institution founded in 1930 to create a community of scholars focused on intellectual inquiry, free from teaching and other university obligations. Scholars from around the world come to the Institute to pursue their own research. Candidates of any nationality may apply for a single term or a full academic year. Scholars may apply for a stipend, but those with sabbatical funding, other grants, retirement funding or other means are also invited to apply for a non-stipendiary membership. Some short-term visitorships (for less than a full term, and without stipend) are also available on an ad-hoc basis. Open to all fields of historical research, the School of Historical Studies' principal interests are the history of western, near eastern and Asian civilizations, with particular emphasis upon Greek and Roman civilization, the history of Europe (medieval, early modern, and modern), the Islamic world, East Asian studies, the history of art, the history of science, philosophy, modern international relations, and music studies. Residence in Princeton during term time is required. The only other obligation of Members is to pursue their own research. The Ph.D. (or equivalent) and substantial publications are required. Information and application forms may be found on the School's web site, www.hs.ias.edu, or contact the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Dr., Princeton, N.J. 08540 (E-mail address: mzelazny@ias.edu). Deadline: November 1 2010.
The American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) is a non-profit educational institution dedicated to promoting North American and Turkish research and exchanges related to Turkey in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. ARIT provides support for these scholarly endeavors by maintaining research centers in Istanbul and Ankara, and by administering programs of fellowships to support research in Turkey at doctoral and advanced research levels. Also, since 1982, ARIT has administered a program of intensive advanced Turkish language study in cooperation with Bogaziçi University, now complemented by the U.S. Department of State's Critical Language Institutes.
See the Institute's web site for information about its fellowship programs (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ARIT/FellowshipPrograms.html) and the Summer language institute (http://www.clscholarship.org/index.html).
Editorial Policies for APA Newsletter
1. The editor of the Newsletter has the right to edit all submissions to conform to proper style and appearance.
2. The editor of the Newsletter will accept announcements by affiliated organizations and Association members, under the following conditions:
a. The editor will accept submissions up to 250 words. Submissions exceeding this word limit may be edited at the discretion of the editor.
b. No affiliated group or member can expect to have more than one submission published in a calendar year. Additional submissions will be published, space permitting, and at the discretion of the editor. No submission from a member or affiliated group with financial indebtedness to the APA will be printed unless any debts to the Association are fully paid.
c. The editor may defer publication of a submission for reasons of space or layout.
d. The editor may reject any submission which he/she does not deem to be of interest to the members of the Association, or which is more properly a paid advertisement.
e. The editor has final decision in the layout of all submissions.
3. Submissions sent to the editor via e-mail as an attached word processing file are preferred. Submissions may be returned if they are not in a form suitable for publication. Heavily formatted electronic files, e.g., of posters, will not be accepted. To the extent possible, please follow the style regularly used in the Newsletter for announcements of meetings and of funding opportunities.
4. Submissions should be received by the 15th of February, May, August, or November for publication in that season's issue.
5. Persons wishing to ensure prompt publication of their announcements on the APA's Web Site (as well as in the Newsletter) should submit information separately to the Editor of the Web Site. See the link, "Guidelines for Submissions" at www.apaclassics.org.
Adam D. Blistein
Newsletter Editor
blistein@sas.upenn.edu
Important Dates For APA Members
(All deadlines are receipt deadlines unless otherwise indicated.)
October-December 2009
Table of Contents
Response to Message from the President
New Newsletter Publication Schedule
Temporary Publication Schedule for Amphora
Minutes of Board of Directors Meetings
Vice President Reports (Fall 2009)
Report of the Executive Director
Acknowledgment of Annual Giving and Capital Campaign Gifts
Supplement to Dissertation Listings
Funding Opportunities/Fellowships
Cambridge University Press Advertisement
Response to Message from the President
I would like to thank Josh Ober, Adam Blistein, and the APA for giving me this opportunity to engage in a dialogue with Prof Ober and the classics community about publishing in the field. In a recent presidential column (http://apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/newsletters/April_2009.pdf) , Prof Ober acknowledged the contributions of Companions and Handbooks in proving overviews of various fields. He expressed reservations, however, that Companions are driven by the agenda of publishers, and worried about the "explosive rise" in the number of Companions having an adverse affect on other genres of scholarly publishing, especially journals.
As a response to this critique, it might be helpful to start with some background and context. Companions are not unique to classics: at Wiley-Blackwell, for example, we have now published around 400 companions and handbooks to subjects ranging from economics, sociology, and psychology, to religion, literature, and classics. 400 might sound like a lot, and we are proud now to have the facility to give scholars and students access to this comprehensive collection through Blackwell Reference Online (www.blackwellreference.com), which is the largest academic online reference library in the humanities and social sciences.
But this collection has grown to this size over a span of 16 years, from the publication of Peter Singer's Companion to Ethics in 1993. Over this period, Companions have made up about 10% of our publishing: the vast majority of our output remains textbooks and scholarly books. So perhaps Companions have not so much risen explosively as grown slowly. They may seem to have sprung fully grown on the world in the last few years, but in fact have had a long childhood and adolescence. But this still leaves the question of why have they grown up?
As publishers we can't (as much as we might wish!) dictate to students, scholars, or librarians what to read or buy. We set out to meet the needs of our readers, and the success of the Companions implies that they meet a variety of needs. The fact that we are able to commission these books suggests that scholars want to edit them and write for them; the sales suggest that librarians and individual students and scholars find them useful - in getting up to speed in a particular field, in preparing to teach a class, or in studying for general exams. We hope too that the Companions help to foster creative scholarship by allowing scholars to be inspired by the work of their colleagues in other sub-fields - work that they might not otherwise read or even know about.
In other words, this last generation has seen the rise of a new type of scholarly communication, the multi-authored overview, or Companion, not because publishers have been pushing a particular agenda, but because this new genre gets the job done for a variety of audiences.
Has this been at the expense of the journal article? Certainly not if we measure the health of journals by the number of papers published: across the humanities and social sciences, the number of articles published has risen steadily since 1990.
Of course, journals themselves have undergone rapid change over the past ten years: in an online word, journals are regularly available in more than 3,000 institutions globally, as well as in the developing world at a free or reduced price.
In the online environment, it is possible to measure usage of articles, and in fact the usage of journal articles in the humanities has risen dramatically since the beginnings of Companion and Handbook publishing. A typical humanities journal would have had about 15,000 downloads in 2002; by the end of 2008 this number would have increased to 100,000.
So where is the problem/is there a problem? Perhaps it lies in the visibility of journals in academics' mental map of scholarly publishing in the humanities. It may be that editing or publishing in a Companion has come to increase the visibility of a scholar's work and ability to influence the discourse in a given field more than publishing in a journal.
But this strikes me as an argument not so much for publishing fewer Companions than for increasing the visibility of journals. And in fact at Wiley-Blackwell we work with our journal clients to do precisely this. How we do it varies according to the needs of a journal, but it essentially involves providing marketing and sales support, and working with a journal editorial team to establish a clear identity/brand for the journal, build a profile internationally, and increase services to authors. In our experience, these activities lead to an increase in the quality of papers, prestige, and visibility of a journal.
The online reach enjoyed by journals is only now becoming possible for books published in online form; and what we may see in the next few years is a coming together of what has been traditionally "book" and "journal" content, as reading and research habits change in an online environment. Companions, for example, might become "gateways" to more sophisticated treatments of particular topics in journals and online scholarly monographs.
This vision of a possible future is another reason that we continue to invest in Companion and other reference content. We believe that this reference content may draw students and other beginners to a hub of a variety of resources, and may increase access and usage of more scholarly resources, such as monographs and journals.
I would be happy to receive comments and questions: please send them to abertrand@wiley.com.
Al Bertrand
Editorial Director, Social Science and Humanities Books, Wiley-Blackwell John Wiley & Sons
New Newsletter Publication Schedule
One of the cost-saving measures the APA introduced in the last year was to require members to request printed copies of the Newsletter. Many members were already reading this publication on the Association's web site, and this seemed to be a logical area in which we could save both printing and postage costs. On the other hand, it has become clear that, if we simply replace a printed document with a pdf file, particularly one as lengthy as a typical Newsletter, we are not taking full advantage of the web site's capabilities. Instead, it would make more sense to post information on the web site as it becomes available, ideally in the new blog that Web Editor, Robin Mitchell-Boyask has set up (http://apaclassics.blogspot.com/), and in other venues, and then periodically compile those postings into a traditional Newsletter. This compilation would serve those members who still prefer to receive a printed version, and it would perform an archival function. In addition, as we move to electronic mechanisms for participation in important APA activities like voting and abstract submission, we have less need for the inserts that have appeared in four of the six regular issues of the Newsletterfor most of the last two decades.
In light of these changes, I have discussed the Newsletter publication schedule with the Board of Directors and at greater length with the divisional vice presidents who, with Robin and myself, make up the committee that oversees the web site and the Newsletter. We agree that it makes good financial sense and will be a better use of my office's time if we reduce the number of printed issues from six to four each year. (This was, in fact, the publication schedule for most of the 1980's.) The next issue of the Newsletter, therefore, will be a Winter 2010 issue and we will produce Spring, Summer, and Fall issues as well.
As I explain in my report elsewhere in this issue, the new web host we implemented in Fall 2009 makes it possible for APA staff members to post updates to the site without making work for Robin. As long as we take full advantage of that new capability, I am optimistic that we can improve the level of communication with members in spite of the reduced publication schedule. As we move in that direction, I welcome members' comments and suggestions.
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
Temporary Change in Publication Schedule for Amphora
Over the last three decades the APA has built up an endowment, its General Fund, that generates income to supplement publication revenue; grants and contributions; and membership, annual meeting, and placement fees. This investment income allows the APA, despite its relatively modest size, to offer programs and services that are usually offered only by much larger disciplinary societies like the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association, and the American Academy of Religion.
To preserve the endowment in the General Fund, the APA's Finance Committee has developed guidelines that limit our withdrawals to 5% of the Fund's average value over the previous three years. The recent declines in financial markets have therefore reduced the amount that it is prudent to withdraw from the General Fund. As a result, when it approved the budget for the current fiscal year (July 2009-June 2010), the APA Board instituted a number of changes in programs that would reduce expenses. These changes included suspension of automatic mailing of the Newsletterand the annual meeting Program to members, a major reduction in the amount of food to be offered at the President's Reception in Anaheim, and a reluctant decision to publish only one issue of Amphora during the current fiscal year.
The next issue of Amphorawill therefore be published in March 2010 rather than the customary December 2009. APA members in good standing for 2010 will receive that issue by mail onlyif they have checked the box on their 2010 dues bills requesting a printed copy. Nonmember subscribers will, of course, receive a printed copy as usual. The issue will also, as usual, appear on the APA web site.
The publication schedule for the subsequent issue of Amphora will be determined in Spring 2010 when the Association develops its budget for the next fiscal year. In the interim, we appreciate the support of both members and nonmembers for this effort to bring the excitement of the Classical world to the widest possible audience.
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
Conference Call of the Board of Directors of the
American Philological Association
June 11, 2009
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met via conference call on June 11, 2009. Those participating were Profs. Josiah Ober, President, and Roger S. Bagnall, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ward W. Briggs, Dee L. Clayman, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, Donald Mastronarde, James M. May, Carole E. Newlands, and James J. O'Donnell, Dr. Lee T. Pearcy, and Prof. Kurt A. Raaflaub. Profs. Cynthia Damon, John Marincola, and S. Georgia Nugent were absent.
Prof. Ober called the meeting to order at 4:30 p.m. The Directors had previously received an agenda for the meeting as well as minutes of their meetings on January 8 and 11, 2009.
Action: The agenda for the meeting was approved.
Action: After the correction of a typographical error in the list of Directors attending the meetings of January 8 and 11, 2009, the minutes of those meetings were approved.
President's Report
Prof. Ober stated that the Association would need to focus on the capital campaign and on making appropriate adjustments to its budget during the current decline in the economy. It was therefore not a time to consider any significant new initiatives, but the APA did need to confront new challenges and opportunities in information technology, some of which might bring costs savings with them.
Executive Director's Report
Dr. Blistein informed the Board of developments in several Association activities since the January meeting. A new location for the Association's offices was still not determined. The Publications and Research Divisions would hold retreats later in the year, with the former funded by the Mellon Foundation, and the latter, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World and Yale University. The Advisory Board to the American Office of l'Année philologique had approved the transfer of that office from the Universityof Cincinnati to Duke Universityduring the second half of the year. A grant from the Packard Humanities Institute was being used at Cincinnati to create citations for a backlog of essay collections.
A planning grant from the Mellon Foundation to explore the possibility of improvements to the online version of l'Année philologique had concluded. The Société Internationale de Bibliographie Classique had agreed to bear the expense of modifying the interface itself while the Mellon Foundation had expressed interest in funding work that would permit links from l'Année entries to ancient texts being cited and to the modern works themselves. Prof. Clayman reported that the new interface might be ready by the end of the Summer, and that the site now contained all data from the Database of Classical Bibliography.
Dr. Blistein had been working with staff of the Social Science Research Network to manage online submission of annual meeting abstract and panel proposals, and he was optimistic that this would be in place in time for the publication of the Program Guide for the January 2011 meeting to be published in the Fall. He was also exploring the implementation of online voting for the election to be held this Summer. Finally, he reported on preparations for the annual meeting and the implementation of a new web site design.
Financial Matters
In advance of the call, Directors had received minutes of the Finance Committee's meeting of May 18, 2009, a table showing investment results for the fiscal year that would end on June 30, 2009, a projected financial statement for that fiscal year, and a budget for the next fiscal year. In addition, prior to the conference call, Prof. Briggs had distributed to the Board an e-mail containing recommendations from the Finance Committee to reduce Association expenses during the next fiscal year so that the Association could adhere to its policy of withdrawing only 5% of the average value over the previous three years of the General Fund for operating expenses. Expense reductions would be necessary to meet this goal both because the value of the endowment had decreased, and because other sources of income, particularly annual meeting registrations, placement service fees, and gifts were expected to decline.
In September 2008 and January 2009 the Board had already approved several operational changes that would reduce expenses. These included sending a printed Newsletter to members only on request; reducing the budget for meals at the annual meeting, in large part by eliminating almost all food service from the President's Reception; and eliminating budget provisions for marketing expenses and book subventions. In addition, when Dr. Blistein had prepared a draft budget for the Finance Committee's meeting the previous month, he had assumed that Amphora would be treated like the Newsletter and would be sent to members only on request.
The resulting budget still showed a deficit of $28,000, and the Committee felt it needed to find additional cost savings to reach a balanced budget in case decreases in revenue were even more severe than anticipated. It proposed that the APA achieve additional savings through changes in its publication procedures for TAPA and Amphora and reducing costs for audio-visual services and the reception for first-time members at the annual meeting. The Board discussed these proposals at length.
Action: Effective with the Spring 2010 issue, the Board voted to send printed copies of TAPA to members only on request.
Action: The Board voted to publish only one issue of Amphoraduring the upcoming fiscal year and to send it to members only on request.
Action: The Board asked Dr. Blistein to find ways of cutting the audio-visual budget by $2,500.
Action: The Board agreed not to hold the reception for first-time registrants.
Action: Subject to the incorporation of the above changes, the Board approved the budget for the 2010 fiscal year.
Dr. Blistein reported on the status of annual giving and capital campaign contributions.
Document Retention and "Whistleblower" Policies
In advance of the meeting the Board had received draft policies concerning retention of documents and "whistleblowers" as well as a memorandum from the Association's attorney concerning these documents. The two documents incorporated suggestions made by the Directors at their meeting of January 8, 2009 when they had reviewed earlier versions. The Directors had no objection to any of the specific schedules outlined in the document retention policy but felt that the relationship between the policy and the APA's permanent archives at Columbia University should be clarified.
Action: Dr. Blistein was asked to bring a proposal to the Board in September to establish a Committee on Archives that would establish policy for transferring materials from the Association Office to the archives.
Action: The Board approved the "Whistleblower" policy it had received.
Other Business
Action: The Board approved the creation of a "President's Award" to honor an individual, group, or organization outside of the Classics profession that has made significant contributions to advancing public appreciation and awareness of Classical antiquity. The Board also approved the following procedures for selecting Award winners: Nominations will be open to the profession and the public. Nominations, containing a letter describing the nominee's contributions, along with a brief biography or C.V., will be due in the Executive Director's office no later than June 1 of each year. The selection will be made by the APA's Executive Committee, enhanced for this purpose by the Vice President for Outreach and the Chair of the Development Committee (unless they happen to be members of the Executive Committee), at its summer meeting by conference call. The Committee's recommendation will be presented for decision to the Full APA Board at its September meeting. The Award will be announced and presented at the subsequent Annual Meeting of the APA in January. The Award will consist of an inscribed gift from the Association. During this initial year, Directors could make nominations for consideration by the Board at its September 2009 meeting.
Dr. Blistein reminded Directors that their next meeting would take place in Washington, DC on September 25-26, prior to a capital campaign event at the Center for Hellenic Studies at which Prof. Garry Wills would speak.
Prof. Hallett reported that the leaders of research projects in Europe concerning the classical tradition and gender studies had approached her about collaboration with the APA. She would coordinate any response with the Research Division.
Action: At Prof. Raaflaub's suggestion, the Board asked Prof. Ober to send a letter of greetings to the FIEC Congress to take place in August.
Dr. Pearcy reported that over the next three years the College Board would implement a single Advanced Placement exam covering Vergil and Caesar.
There being no further business, the call was concluded at 6:15 p.m.
Meeting of the Board of Directors of the
American Philological Association
September 25-26, 2009
Washington, DC
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the Churchill Hotel, Washington, DC, on September 25, 2009. Those present were Profs. Josiah Ober, President, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ward W. Briggs, Dee L. Clayman, Cynthia Damon, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, Donald Mastronarde, James M. May, Carole E. Newlands, and James J. O'Donnell, Dr. Lee T. Pearcy, and Prof. Kurt A. Raaflaub. Profs. Roger S. Bagnall, John Marincola, and S. Georgia Nugent were absent.
Prof. Ober called the meeting to order at 7:50 p.m. He asked the Directors to discuss how APA could help its members to disseminate their work electronically. As an example, he had distributed in advance of the meeting a proposal from the Social Science Research Network to host an electronic conference proceedings journal for another learned society. If the APA increased its activity in electronic publishing, it would both fulfill the current capital campaign's promise to serve as a gateway, and it would offer opportunities for participation in the Association's activities to younger scholars who were usually more accustomed to working in electronic media.
The Board discussed the possibility of a conference proceedings series emanating from the annual meeting as well as other electronic vehicles to communicate both scholarship and Association business. To implement any of these ideas it would be necessary to institute appropriate levels of peer review, recruit volunteers, obtain other necessary resources, and overcome the lack of recognition that electronic publishing continued to receive in promotion and tenure decisions. APA endorsement could make participation in its electronic publications a more valuable addition to a curriculum vitae.
The Board then adjourned for the evening at 9:45 p.m.
The Board resumed its meeting on September 26, 2009. Prof. Ober called the meeting to order at 8:40 a.m. All Directors present on the previous evening plus Prof. Bagnall were in attendance. In addition, Mr. Carl Hogan, of Briggs, Bunting & Dougherty, the Association's auditors, was present via speakerphone by invitation. The Board had received an agenda for the meeting as well as minutes of its conference call of June 11, 2009.
Action: The Board approved the agenda for the meeting.
Action: After the addition of an acknowledgment of Yale University for its support of a retreat by the Research Division, the Board approved the minutes of its conference call on June 11, 2009.
Financial Matters
Auditors' Report. In April the Directors had received copies of the final report for the 2008 fiscal year and had discussed it briefly during the June conference call. Mr. Hogan now reviewed the document in detail.
He stated that the auditors depend on information submitted by staff, but they had made few adjustments to those figures. Their report was unqualified, indicating that they had reasonable but not absolute assurance that the financial report was accurate. In addition, the Association had made no changes in its accounting policies.
The Association's funds were divided among permanently restricted, temporarily restricted, and unrestricted assets. Unrestricted assets, those available for any Board-approved expenditure, were the best measure of an organization's financial health. These had declined in value by $248,000 during the Fiscal Year. In the previous fiscal year, unrestricted assets had increased in value by almost $150,000. In both years investment income, which had decreased in 2008 and increased in 2007, was a significant component of these assets.
Mr. Hogan pointed out that the Association had received similar amounts of income in its various categories in the 2007 and 2008 fiscal years except that grants and contributions were considerably higher in 2008 even though that figure included some discounts because they were payable over more than a year. Similarly, expense categories were very similar in the two fiscal years except that fund-raising expenses had increased substantially in 2008 because the Association's development director had begun work on the first day of the fiscal year. Supporting services (general administration and membership services as well as fund-raising) now constituted 20% of the Association's budget (an increase from 12%). Mr. Hogan also described the Association's investment activity during the fiscal year as well as its financial liabilities.
Finally, Mr. Hogan reviewed the auditors' professional standards letter which reminded the Board that some of the figures in the report, particularly those allocating certain expenses among various programs, were based on estimates. The letter also stated that the auditors had received good cooperation from staff, had no disagreements with staff concerning the report, and were not aware that staff had consulted with any other auditors. The auditors had not identified any deficiencies in the Association's financial management procedures that they needed to point out to the Board. The speakerphone conversation with Mr. Hogan was then concluded.
Investments. Dr. Blistein had distributed to the Board a summary of the Association's investment activity during the 2009 fiscal year preceded by a covering memorandum describing some changes that had taken place in its holdings during that time. The changes involved moving investments to mutual funds with similar scopes but different managers and taking positions in funds with new scopes. In the latter category were mutual funds investing in high-yield bonds, commodities, and a combination of long and short positions in large cap stocks.
The first half of the 2009 fiscal year had coincided with the worst of the recent declines in financial markets. As a result, over the entire year the Coffin, Pearson, and General Funds had lost about 15% of their value net of additions and withdrawals, and the Research and Teaching Fund, whose investment guidelines were more aggressive, had lost about 20% of its value. On the other hand, the latter fund had received a substantial infusion of cash (over $500,000) during the Fall from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and other donors. The Association's advisors had kept these gifts in a money market fund until they were confident that markets had reached their lowest points. They had begun purchasing equity and bond funds again, first in February 2009 and then in June, with the result that as of June 30, equities represented 64% of the portfolio, very near to the goal of 70%.
In his memorandum Dr. Blistein had provided asset values for all four funds as of September 22 and had pointed out that the Coffin Fund was now again worth more than the original gifts that had established it. Directors expressed concern that the Pearson Fund could no longer support a fellowship that would cover all expenses for a year in a British university. Increases in tuition fees in the U.K.and the weakness of the dollar versus the British pound, as well as the decline in the Fund's value, were responsible for this problem.
Action: The Board asked Dr. Blistein to determine whether the terms of the Pearson gift would permit the Association to award a larger fellowship in alternating years, with eligibility expanded to students in a gap year or their first year of graduate school.
Preliminary Financial Statement for 2009 Fiscal Year and Updated Budget for 2010 Fiscal Year. Dr. Blistein had distributed a document that projected an operating deficit of around $9,000 for the fiscal year. Withdrawals from invested funds were included in this calculation but not either investment income produced by dividends and capital gains or losses in investment values.
The Board had approved a budget for 2010 during its conference call in June. The new version of this document that Dr. Blistein had distributed reflected changes in conditions and expectations but no new expenses. The document reflected two major changes. First, the Association would pay less rent than originally budgeted to the University of Pennsylvaniabecause it had been permitted to remain in Claudia Cohen Hall for another year. In addition, the American Office of l'Année philologique was expected to move from the University of Cincinnati to Duke Universityin January, and this would reduce salary expenses because Duke's charges for administering fringe benefits were lower. As a result, the new budget predicted a surplus of about $12,000 as opposed to a deficit of $11,000 approved in June. Dr. Blistein noted however, that the estimate of registration revenue (based on 2,000 registrants in Anaheim, 500 fewer than in Philadelphia) might still be too high, and that it was unclear whether the APA would be able to claim its next installment of challenge grant matching funds, $80,000 of which was projected to offset fund-raising costs.
Annual Giving. The Directors had received a document showing that in the 2009 fiscal year annual giving contributions had declined by about $6,500 from 2008. The decrease was caused in part by an earlier cutoff in the way responses to the Spring annual giving appeal were treated. About $2,000 in gifts received over the Summer (but using the Spring response form) would be attributed to the next fiscal year. During the Spring 15 members had taken advantage of a new online giving mechanism and had donated a total of $1,230.
Gateway Campaign. Dr. Blistein reported that 387 donors had pledged $1,447,000 and had already given $1,118,000 of that amount. There had been no major gifts for some time, and it would be difficult to meet the next matching funds deadline (Jan. 31). One foundation expected to make a major donation had declined to contribute, but the Campaign Committee had some hopes for a new appeal to Greek foundations and was developing approaches to several other foundations and individuals. It hoped to identify new donors at the fund-raising event at the Center for Hellenic Studies after the Board meeting.
Association Archives
During its June conference call the Board had adopted in principle a draft of a policy concerning retention of Association documents but had asked that the document clarify the relationship between this policy and the APA's permanent archives at the Columbia University. In addition, the Board had asked for a proposal to form a committee to establish policies for the transfer of materials to the archive at Columbia.
Action: The Board approved with some modifications a Document Retention Policy that Dr. Blistein had distributed to them in advance of the September meeting.
Action: The Board approved the establishment of an Ad Hoc Committee on Archives and Records to be appointed by the President with the assistance of Profs. Briggs and Bagnall. It would consist of a recent Past President as chair, the senior Financial Trustee, one member representing each current programmatic division of the Association, and the Executive Director serving as an ex officio member with voice but without vote. The Committee would meet via e-mail and, if necessary, conference calls or at the annual meeting to recommend guidelines and schedules for the transfer of documents from the Association's current office to its permanent archives. Once the Board of Directors approved a report from this Committee, it would dissolve, but any President, with the approval of the Board of Directors, could appoint a new Committee to conduct a review of existing policies. The Board asked the Committee to submit a report to the Board for its meeting in September 2010.
Reports of Vice Presidents
Publications. Prof. O'Donnell described a retreat that the Publications Division would hold in early December to consider the future of the Association's publications program. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was supporting this meeting. Both of the Association's publishing agreements - with the Johns Hopkins University Press and Oxford University Press - were due to be renewed automatically during the Fall, but the former had already granted an extension of that deadline and the APA was about to ask Oxford for a similar extension. These extensions would give the Association more flexibility if the retreat deliberations suggested a change in the direction of the publishing program. Kathryn Gutzwiller's term as Editor of the Monographs Series was due to expire at the end of the year, but she had agreed to serve for an additional year, again to allow for the possibility of changes in that series emanating from the retreat.
Research. The Directors had received a report from Prof. Bagnall describing a retreat of the Research Division hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World with additional support from Yale University. The participants had identified a number of areas in which the Division might be active, and recommended the establishment of several task forces to consider these projects and recommend which ones the Association should pursue. It would be appropriate for other Association divisions to participate in some of these projects. Directors discussed various points raised in the report, including the validation of digital work as useful scholarship, the Association's proper role in identifying and recommending research resources, the volunteer efforts that would be necessary to fulfill that role, and its position on the ranking of scholarly journals.
Action: The Board authorized the President to work with the Vice President for Research and others as necessary to appoint ad hoctask forces to consider the issues raised during the Research Division's retreat.
Education. Dr. Pearcy reported that the task force that had developed Standards for Latin Teacher Training and Certification would meet in October to review comments received since the publication of an initial draft in January and to develop final language to be approved by the boards of both APA and the American Classical League. He summarized the comments that the task force had received.
After the publication of the College Board's new advanced placement curriculum for Latin, expected in January, the Education Committee would work on developing resources for that curriculum. Former Vice President for Education, Kenneth Kitchell, was representing the APA in a group organized by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages to develop a reading proficiency test for Latin teachers. Dr. Pearcy had responded to queries asking why the Common Application used by many colleges and universities did not include Classics as a possible major. The ultimate source of the categories on the application turned out to be the National Center for Education Statistics in the U. S. Department of Education, and Dr. Blistein would attempt to identify appropriate staff at that agency for a discussion of the categories.
Outreach. Prof. Hallett reported that during the past year the Outreach Division's collaboration with the Aquila Theater's Page and Stage program had been very successful. Aquilahad just submitted a new application to the National Endowment for the Humanities to enlarge this program. The Division had become an overseas affiliate of the Classical Reception Studies Network which was organizing conferences and developing teaching tools on the classical tradition. Members volunteering in the Outreach Division had expressed interest in contributing to blogs under the APA's name, but it would be necessary to develop appropriate oversight for such activities.
The Committee on Outreach was attempting to expand its Speakers Bureau program to add new talks and to reach areas of the country with little access to Classics scholarship. It had put on two successful sessions on "Black Classics" at the March 2009 meeting of the College Language Association. Prof. Hallett hoped to add more expertise on music and film to the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance and would organize a group to review activities centered on classically-themed music.
Professional Matters. Prof. May reported that the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics was reviewing a number of cases, some of which were very complex, and might require Board action. The Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups was clearing up a backlog of the reports it issued. Prof. May also described the work of the Placement Committee on various problems that had arisen during the year as well as the Classics Advisory Service's efforts to help several departments with outside reviews and responses to possible reductions in staffing.
Action: At the request of Prof. Ober, the Board authorized him to write a letter of support for the continuation of the Classics Department at the University of Tel Aviv.
Program. Prof. Kaster reported that the 2010 meeting would have about the same number of panels as the 2009 meeting, but that the number of sessions from individual abstracts had declined both because of a lower number of submissions and a lower acceptance rate. The Committee was unsure why
the acceptance rate for women was particularly low. In response to what it considered to be a large number of inadequate abstracts, the Committee had decided to organize a workshop at the upcoming meeting on abstract writing.
Action: The Board approved a request from the Program Committee to expand the guidelines for workshops to include discussions of recently published books of broad interest in the field among the possible session topics.
Action: The Board authorized the Committee to end its practice of providing detailed comments on panel proposals that it rejected.
Report of the Executive Director
Association Office. Dr. Blistein was pleased that the Association had been able to remain in its offices in Claudia Cohen Hall for an additional year. In the Spring he would need to take more responsibility for finding new space at the University of Pennsylvaniabut continued to hope that it would be possible to find a location that would not require the Association to pay market rates for rent.
Placement Service. The Placement Service had received notices of 45 jobs so far this year versus 74 at the same time the previous year. On the other hand, three of the jobs posted in the current year were for searches cancelled the previous year.
Membership. In late January Prof. Raaflaub had sent a letter to about 200 nonmembers in Classics departments, and fifteen of them responded to his invitation to join or rejoin the Association. Some - despite their appointments in Classics departments - turned out to be archaeologists or specialists in another area. In some cases his letter served as reminder to people who had simply forgotten to pay 2009 dues.
During the Summer the Association's work-study student sent reminders (mainly by e-mail) to approximately 600 members who had paid for 2008 but not yet for 2009. While Dr. Blistein had not yet analyzed the success of this effort, he could report that the APA had about 20 more paid members now than at the same time last year. The Johns Hopkins University Press had reduced the cost of dues billing this year by sending out e-mail renewal notices for 2010 before rather than simultaneously with paper notices.
Annual Meetings. 2010. With assistance from Local Arrangements Chair Maria Pantelia, the Office was making special efforts to encourage attendance. The meeting hotels had recognized the necessity of additional incentives in the current difficult economy and had agreed to reduce the room rates originally negotiated. The number of sessions was lower than at any other meeting Dr. Blistein had overseen, but the number was not far below last year's when there had been good attendance.
2011. During the Spring Dr. Blistein and Heather Gasda had worked closely with the Social Science Research Network to offer online submission of individual abstracts for the 2010 meeting, but this had not been possible. Because of the progress made at that time, however, Dr. Blistein was confident that both panel and abstract submissions for 2011 could be made online.
Action: The Board authorized the APA Office to require online submissions from all presenters for the 2011 meeting.
2013 and beyond. Dr. Blistein had been unable to persuade AIA staff to continue to use a third-party planner to negotiate hotel contracts. During the next few months the Associations would attempt to negotiate contracts for 2013-2015 that would provide both reasonable hotel room rates and subsidies for the advance planning and on-site help that the third-party planning company currently provided.
ACLS E-Book Project. Dr. Blistein had circulated to the Directors a proposal from the ACLS E-Book program to offer subscriptions to individual members whose institutions were not subscribers. He hoped to obtain similar offers from services such as JSTOR.
New Association Web Site. The work of uploading the current web site to the new design was nearly complete. Dr. Blistein hoped that the new site would be in use in a few weeks.
Election. Dr. Blistein reported on the progress of the Association's first election to offer online balloting. As of September 24, 1,083 members had voted out of a total of 2,813, and the deadline for voting was still almost a week away. The participation was more than double the highest number (491) in his experience. Other ACLS societies had reported 20% or 30% increases when they first offered electronic balloting, but he could not recall anyone reporting 100% increases. Prof. Bagnall thought that participation had been in the 700 to 800 range when he was Secretary-Treasurer.
Almost 100 members had used the mechanism at the end of the ballot to offer comments, all of which were favorable. The suggestion offered most frequently was to make biographical sketches HTML instead of PDF files, and Dr. Blistein said that this change would take place next year.
All eligible members had received their notice of the election via first class mail as well as e-mail, and over 100 had submitted the enclosed paper ballot rather than voting online. (Almost all of these had been entered into the ballot data base by the APA's work-study student). Dr. Blistein asked the Board to consider whether to mail a paper ballot to all members again next year.
Action: The Board asked Dr. Blistein to confer with the Association's attorney to determine whether government regulation made it necessary to mail paper ballots to all members for regular elections or the amendment of By-Laws.
Association Awards
Dr. Blistein reported the decision of the 2009 Goodwin Award Committee to the Directors.
Action: The Directors accepted the report of the Outreach Prize Committee to give the 2009 award to Mary-Kay Gamel for her work on ancient drama.
Dr. Blistein had gathered information (including prize amounts) on awards offered by other learned societies in the humanities.
Action: The Board asked Prof. Ober to organize an ad hoc Committee to review all the Association's awards.
Other Business
Dr. Blistein stated that the next Board meetings would take place at the annual meeting in Anaheim, on January 6, 2010, from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. and on January 9, 2010, from 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 4:15 p.m.
Education. During the first eight months of 2009 the Education Division devoted the majority of its time and effort to the final phase of developing Standards for Classical Teaching and Teacher Training. In addition, the Division saw to it that the APA was represented at the early stages of an important project to measure teachers' proficiency in Latin, and it contributed to the continuing national discussion about Advanced Placement Latin and the College Board.
Standards for Latin Teacher Training and Certification: In September, 2008, the APA Board of Directors approved a draft of Standards for Latin Teacher Training and Certification, the work of a joint task force created by the APA and the American Classical League in 2007. Since then the draft standards have been submitted to members of our profession for comment and review. The Standardsfigured in discussions on LatinTeach and other on-line discussion groups and in presentations at regional meetings. An electronic survey available through the APA and ACL websites allowed members of both organizations to register their opinions and to comment on each element of the Standards; in addition, ACL President Sherwin Little gave a presentation on the Standards at the ACL Institute in June, 2009. Both President Little and I, as co-chairs of the Joint Task Force, have received many comments on the standards and suggestions for refining them.
The Joint Task Force will hold its final meeting at Bryn Mawr College on October 16 and 17. At that time we will review the feedback that we have received on the draft Standards, prepare a final version, and develop final plans for publication and dissemination of them.
ACL/ACTFL Latin Reading Proficiency Test: As mentioned in my January, 2008, report to the Board, ACL and the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages have been working together to develop a reading proficiency test for Latin. This test will be an important instrument as state boards of education and other certifying bodies specify levels of proficiency for licensed or highly qualified teachers. In May, ACL and ACTFL invited the APA to appoint a member of the committee that will select passages for the test and develop scoring rubrics. Prof. Kenneth Kitchell (University of Massachusetts), a former APA Vice-President for Education, agreed to serve and attended a meeting of the committee in White Plains, NY, on June 15-17. He was one of three classicists on the committee.
Prof. Kitchell reports that despite some initial difficulties in communicating the special nature of Latin texts to the specialists in modern language instruction and assessment who made up most of the committee, the work went well. He feels that "standards based proficiency tests are in the future" for Latin teachers, and that it is important that the APA be involved in developing them. On behalf of the APA, I thank Prof. Kitchell for his willingness to undertake this important service.
Advanced Placement Latin: Vigorous protests by the APA and other classical organizations and repeated but fruitless attempts by our profession to engage responsible officials of the College Board in meaningful dialogue have had no effect on the CB's decision, announced on April 4, 2008, to have only one AP Latin exam. The AP Latin Development Committee has announced that the one remaining exam will be based on Caesar and Vergil, although the exact passages of each author to be included in the syllabus have yet to be determined. As I reported in January, the Education Committee and the JCCAE believe that it is now important to move forward by working with ACL and other organizations to support Latin teachers as they prepare to implement the new syllabus. To this end the Education Division and the College Board will sponsor a workshop on the new AP Latin exam at the annual meeting in Anaheim.
Other matters: Members of this Board may be interested to know that the Teagle Foundation has released a white paper on "The Classics Major and Liberal Education," prepared by the Center for Hellenic Studies. The paper may be found at www.teaglefoundation.org/learning/publications.aspx.
Last year a member of the Association brought it to my attention that the on-line version of the Common Application used by many colleges and universities does not include "Classics" in the list of fields of study to be indicated by interested applicants. The Executive Director of the Common Application informs me that the Common Application gets its list of "academic categories" from the College Board, which in turn gets them from an agency of the Federal government, the National Center for Education Statistics. He adds that member institutions can use their supplements to the Common Application to ask about specific majors. I encourage members of the APA at institutions that have a Classics major and use the Common Application to make sure that the supplement to their application includes an option for prospective Classics majors.
Respectfully submitted,
Lee T. Pearcy
September 1, 2009
Outreach. Over the past year, my second year as Vice-President for Outreach, our division has continued to strengthen this important area of APA professional endeavor, owing to the impressive efforts by a number of individuals working on the "operations" formally housed under our division. The major item in the Outreach portfolio is the APA publication Amphora: Davina McClain, of Louisiana Scholars' College at Northwestern State University, continues to serve as its editor, and Diane Johnson, of Western Washington University, as its assistant editor. Outreach activities also include projects undertaken by the three committees under the purview of Outreach: the Outreach Committee itself, the Committee on the Classical Tradition (COCT), and the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (CAMP), to be described in fuller detail below.
Some additional developments warrant mention as well. At this time last year it was my happy duty to report that the National Endowment for the Humanities, in connection with the America's Historical and Cultural Organization Implementation, had awarded a grant of $292,585 to Aquila Theatre, Company-in-Residence at the Center for Ancient Studies, New York University, for 'Page and Stage: Theatre, Tradition, and Culture in America". These funds were used to implement a series of library-based reading and performance discussion programs led by Program Scholars in seven states as well as to create a website about how the themes of classical Greek and Roman literature continue to resonate today across a variety of racial and ethnic subcultures.
Working with the Project Director Peter Meineck, Artistic Director of Aquila and a faculty member at NYU, have been Martin Gomez, President of the Urban Libraries Council; Jay Kaplan, Director of Programs and Exhibitions at the Brooklyn Public Library; Matthew Santirocco, Dean of the College of Arts and Science and Director of the Center for Ancient Studies at NYU; myself in my capacity as APA Vice-President for Outreach; and in particular the past and present chairs of CAMP: Mary-Kay Gamel, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Nancy Rabinowitz, of Hamilton College. Together with Kathryn Bosher of Northwestern University, a member of CAMP, they helped to identify and select, through an open call for self-nomination and after a lengthy application process, the 2009 Program Scholars.
Those chosen, a diverse group of classicists and theater specialists, ranged from graduate students to senior eminences in our field. They are Rosa Andujar, Princeton University; Joy Connolly, New York University; CAMP committee member Dorota Dutsch, University of California, Santa Barbara; Anthony Edwards, University of California, San Diego; Angus Fletcher, University of Southern California; Kathy Gaca, Vanderbilt University; Pamela Gordon, University of Kansas; Mike Lippman, now of the University of Arizona; Stanley Lombardo, University of Kansas; Peter Meineck; Kenneth Morrell, Rhodes College; Konstantinos Nikoloutsos, now of Berea College; Vassiliki (Lily) Panoussi, College of William and Mary; Melinda Powers, John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Laura Slatkin, New York University. Lillian Doherty, University of Maryland, College Park, worked on the Program as well, by preparing materials about the Homeric texts performed.
At the January APA meeting in Philadelphia, Peter Meineck led a roundtable discussion, open to all APA attendees, to publicize the project; Gamel and Meineck also held an organizational meeting for the Program Scholars, working with them in a rigorous training process. In addition to celebrating the value of ancient Mediterranean drama, this project helped to raise public awareness of the APA itself, and garnered extensive publicity in the various performance locales.
As a result of the success of the 2009 "Page and Stage", Meineck has submitted another proposal to the NEH, with a focus on "Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives." It, too, combines the resources of Aquila, the APA, the NYU Centerfor Ancient Studies, and the University Library Council. But it also adds those of Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies, increases the number of production venues from sixteen public libraries allied with local performing arts centers to fifty; and enlarges its geographical scope to include Washington, DC, the Chicago metropolitan area, cities in New England (Hartford and Providence) and the Pacific Northwest (Portland and Seattle), Salt Lake City and Tucson.
The new "Page and Stage" project centers not only on Homer's Odyssey, but also on several Athenian tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides which foreground the notion of the warrior's return. An expanded focus on cross-cultural impact related to the African-American, Asian-American and Latino experiences builds on the strengths of the 2009 program, particularly its presentations on "From Homer to Hip-Hop." It incorporates the cutting-edge work of Brian Doerries' The Philoctetes Project/Theater of War, and plans to feature several of the 2009 Program Scholars as well.
Another new Outreach initiative involves the Classical Reception Studies Network, based at the Open University (UK), which the Outreach Division, representing the APA as a whole, has just joined as an Overseas Affiliate Partner. The director of the CRSN, Lorna Hardwick, was particularly pleased that the Division included committees investigating the classical tradition, and ancient and modern performance, since these topics are at the core of CRSN activities. I will serve on the CRSN Steering Group, which will be addressing two major issues: how to extend the scope of CRSN to include exchange of information and ideas on the teaching of classical reception to undergraduate students and "taught Masters' students" (and thereby complement the work CRSN currently undertakes to organize national and international workshops for research students); how to formulate proposals for extending research collaborations between groups of scholars in different countries.
A conference on Classics in the modern world: a 'Democratic Turn'? will be held at the Open University in June 2010, and should provide a further forum for researchers from the USto meet and debate with CRSN colleagues. An email seminar is being held from October through December 2009 to identify and discuss some of the underlying research questions relating to this topic; many US scholars are already on the circulation list. Graduate students are welcome to attend this conference. There will be a workshop for them before the opening of the main conference and opportunities for more advanced doctoral students to present their work-in-progress during the conference.
We are also exploring possibilities for a similar APA affiliation with the emerging scholarly collaborative project known as EuGeStA, based at the Université de Lille and directed by Jacqueline Fabre-Serris. Focused on gender studies in classical antiquity, it already includes classicists and ancient historians from such European countries as Belgium (Brussels), Germany (Berlin), Switzerland (Basel), Italy (Torino) and the UK (Cambridge, Manchester) as well as France (Paris and Lille itself). Alison Keith, University of Toronto, and I will be presenting papers at a December 2009 conference sponsored by EuGeStA, entitled Women and War [in classical antiquity]: the feminine perspective.
At the September 1, 2009 APA Research retreat organized by Vice President for Research Roger Bagnall, several participants with connections to the Outreach Committee, first and foremost Christopher Marshall, University of British Columbia, as well as myself took an active part. Among the long-term APA research priorities identified were research into modern performances of ancient literature (not limited to drama) where a number of partial projects remain incompletely developed; and biographical databases of classical scholars, from the Renaissance to the present, where there is a patchwork of printed sources. These fall into the purview of CAMP and COCT respectively, and may provide ideas for future panels sponsored by these committees.
Like my predecessors in the APA Outreach Vice Presidency, Jennifer Roberts, City University of New York, and Barbara Gold, Hamilton College, I have made it a priority to develop and pursue different strategies for reaching out beyond the professional classics community, first and foremost by collaborating with colleagues around the US and Canada to gather information on classically related events in their geographical regions, and to publicize these events globally as well as locally. Barbara, Mary-Kay and I have continued to share articles from various North American media outlets about the classical world and its cultural presence today on a section of the APA website entitled "Events: What's Current in Classics?" which is maintained by Robin Mitchell-Boyask of Temple University.
Mary-Kay, Barbara and I have made similar contributions to The Dionysiac, a listserv announcing classical plays, theatrical events and conferences, run by Hallie Rebecca Marshall of the University of British Columbia. Both the website and listserv enable us to publish information about plays, lectures, exhibit openings and other events connected with Greco-Roman antiquity in a far more timely fashion than would be possible if we were to include it in Amphora.
Thanks to the leadership of Benjamin Stevens, Bard College, an Outreach committee member, we are in the process of updating the description of the Outreach committee and its activities on the APA website. The APA Research retreat also prompted some new ideas about how best to utilize and refocus our Speakers' Bureau. Chief among them is the possibility of connecting its presentations by classicists (and particularly presentations to audiences and geographical regions with few opportunities to engage with scholars and teachers in our field) with the publication by these speakers, in books and journals, of new scholarship. Obviously we would need to privilege scholarly efforts that can easily be made accessible to a non-specialist audience. It would, moreover, be valuable to host events of this kind at bookstores likely to carry scholarly publications, following the model of the highly successful series at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC, which has recently featured book-launch talks by classicists Daniel Mendelsohn, Bard College, and James O'Donnell, Georgetown University.
Amphora. Amphorawill finish its eighth year in December. The editor, Davina McClain, has prepared the following statement for this report:
" The 8.1 issue ofAmphora arrived slightly late due to technical difficulties on the part of the editor, but it nonetheless came off the presses in time for the American Classical League meeting at the end of June. Submissions were up, and we again had more readily available articles and reviews than we had pages on which to print them. Submissions are now coming from Europe as well as across North America. The quality of submissions varies immensely, but all of the authors of accepted submissions have been wonderful at revising and meeting deadlines for production. Assistant Editor Diane Johnson and the members of the editorial board have done a superb job of proofreading the issue.
Because of budget difficulties, the next issue of Amphora will have a limited print-run and be availably primarily on-line for all APA members. Members may, however, request a paper copy. Amphora will also move to one issue a year during the current budget crisis. The likely date on which this issue will appear will be in late February/early March, so that it can be ready for meetings of regional classics organizations, and so that we can avoid the winter holiday period when it is not easy to work on revisions. Work will soon begin on reorganizing the content of the Amphora webpage to be loaded into the template of the new APA website. Discussion has commenced about how to make the on-line Amphora more than just a pdf file, and to design it in such a way that it proves more interactive with, and useful for, its audience.
The various committees in the Outreach division have planned a number of exciting events for the 2010 APA meeting in Anaheim:
Outreach Committee (Chair, Judith P. Hallett). The 2010 Outreach panel will feature "Classics and the Great Books" and has been organized by myself and three members of the Committee on Outreach: Alison Futrell, Universityof Arizona; David Porter, Skidmore College; and Benjamin Stevens. It examines a longstanding, influential classical outreach initiative in North American under graduate institutions of higher education" "Great Books" core curricular programs that teach selected ancient Greek and Roman texts in translation along with other primary source texts awarded "canonical" status in the western liberal arts tradition. Inaugurated after World War I by John Erskine of Columbia University, Great Books gained prominence as the curricular centerpiece at the University of Chicago during the presidency of Robert Maynard Hutchins (1929-1945), and as the sole academic fare at St. John's College in Annapolis beginning in 1937 and at Shimer College beginning in 1950.
The original Great Books program remains a fundamental component of the undergraduate general education curricula at Chicago and Columbia today, and continues to hold sway at Shimer and St. John's, on both its Annapolis and Santa Fe campuses. In addition, numerous undergraduate programs in the US and Canada, public and Catholic as well as private colleges and universities, offer Great Books curricula in a variety of guises. In Great Books programs, classicists share with those trained in other academic disciplines responsibility for elucidating not only works of Greek and Roman literature, but also later western texts deemed relevant to the major ideologies and intellectual paradigms of the past twenty-five centuries. A complex relationship has always obtained between the goals and objectives of Great Books and the study of canonical texts, both ancient and modern, from time-honored disciplinary perspectives, particularly that of classics.
Panel presenters, all Great Books "veterans" in different capacities, will consider these programs from the larger historical perspective of American higher education as well as in specific institutional locales, considering their academic and intellectual limitations as well as their strengths. The first two papers reflect on the history of Great Books programs: within the academy, at Chicago, and beyond, at the Aspen Seminar founded in 1950 by Hutchins' associate Mortimer Adler. Drawing partially on personal experience--as both offspring of a Great Books faculty pioneer, and a visiting instructor at Chicago--Owen Cramer, Colorado College, emphasizes the role played by the general education tradition, the arts and close reading in the early years of the Chicago core courses. After providing some basic background on the Aspen Seminar, Marian Makins, University of Pennsylvania, raises questions about the use of classical texts in its ideologically motivated and goal-oriented setting, arguing for the importance of fostering engagement with classical texts outside academia proper.
Our third presenter, Elizabeth Vandiver, Whitman College, is a graduate of the Shimer Great Books Program who has subsequently taught in Great Books-based core programs. She will problematize two assumptions of the Great Books curriculum--that all interpreters have equal access to a Great Books text, and that these texts speak equally to all readers across different times and cultures--in stressing the need to contextualize the classical texts assigned. Our fourth, H. Christian Blood, a St. John's alumnus now doing graduate work at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in an interdisciplinary department of literature that radically interrogates the canon, will maintain that Great Books at St. John's produces the "best classics students" and the "worst classicists" as a result of "extirpating" Latin and dislocating the origins of western civilization.
Addressing the problem of "canonicity"--how Great Books courses create and perpetuate a collection of widely read and studied texts--the fifth paper, by Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Columbia University, takes issue with the routine marginalization of comic texts in these courses, calling attention to the unique capacity of comedy to unfold diversities of perspective. The response by Michael Broder, a Columbiaalumnus now doing graduate work at CUNY, advocates approaching the Great Books through the lens of reception rather than tradition.
We received over three times as many abstracts as we could hope to accommodate within the confines of an APA session; as a result, we are also holding a session on this topic at the fall meeting of Classical Association of the Atlantic States in Wilmington, Delaware. The Saturday luncheon speaker at CAAS, moreover, will be journalist Alex Beam, author of a new book on the history of the Great Books phenomenon.
Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (Submitted by Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz). At the 2009 APA Meeting in Philadelphia, CAMP again sponsored its annual, well-attended production of a play from or about classical antiquity. This year's choice was the first comedy in English inspired by an earlier classical text, Thersites; it was directed by Christopher (Toph) Marshall. An "interlude" composed ca. 1537, possibly by Nicholas Udall of Ralph RoisterDoisterfame, the play starred Susanna Morton Braund, University of British Columbia, in the title role. Photos of the performance appear on the APA website.
In 2010 we will present a screening of selected silent films on classical topics instead of a live dramatic production, in order to highlight the importance of cinema as a medium of performance, and to capitalize on the location of our meeting near the American film mecca of Hollywood. The organizers of the screening, Pantelis Michelakis, Bristol University, and Maria Wyke, University College. London, are linking this event to the launch of an international, collaborative film project on the ancient world in silent cinema. With the help of the British Film Institute, two screenings of silent films with piano accompaniment and lectures have already been held in London, on January 28 and June 22, 2009. Andrew Simpson, of the Catholic University of America, will be accompanying the films on the piano. Wyke and Michelakis have also organized an APA panel that will place these films in a larger cultural and intellectual context. We are delighted to be participating in an international project of this nature, since both performance and reception studies increasingly require collaboration with scholars from outside our borders.
CAMP will return to the tradition of a live performance in 2011, with a production of Aristophanes' Thesmophoriasuzae directed by Bella Vivante, University of Arizona. We have also continued our practice of sponsoring panels based on an open call for papers. In 2009, we held a panel entitled "Modern Performances of Ancient Drama: Theory and Practice"; in 2010 we are sponsoring a panel on "Contexts for Ancient Greek and Roman Drama", organized by Hallie Rebecca Marshall. The presentations will be by Konstantinos Nikoloutsos, on "Morality and Politics in Jose Triana's Medea en el espejo"; Amanda Wrigley, Northwestern University, on "Greek Tragedy as Cultural Project" in twentieth century England; and Melinda Powers, on "Camping Out on Kithairon: Celebrating Bakkhai in West Hollywood." We have already sent out the call for papers on "Democratic Inflection: Modern Performance of Ancient Drama" for the 2011 APA meeting.
In Philadelphia we also had the opportunity to prepare for the next phrase of the APA collaboration with Peter Meineck on his NEH-funded project, "Page and Stage." Participating scholars have been extremely enthusiastic about their experiences with this project, and CAMP looks forward to working further with Aquila and expanding outreach efforts through their programs.
Essays from our three-year colloquium on political performance have now appeared in a volume of Syllecta Classica (2008); the next group of essays will be published as a special issue of Helios, edited by Gesine Manuwald, University of London. We are pleased to be participating in the Classical Reception Studies Network's project on "Classics in the Modern Word: A Democratic Turn?" in classical reception studies, have planned our 2011 panel with this CRSN theme in mind, and are proposing a panel for the CRSN meeting in June 2011.
Committee on the Classical Tradition (Submitted by Judith Fletcher). At the 2008 COCT Committee meeting in Chicago I was charged with the duty of creating a panel for the May 2009 meeting of the Classical Association of Canada, at the University of British Columbia, to be held under the auspices of the APA Committee on Outreach. The proposal met with enthusiastic approval from the executive board of the CAC, especially Jonathan Edmundson, York University, president of the association. The CAC agreed to waive the association fees for members of the APA, "for a special panel jointly run by the Classical Association of Canada and the American Philological Association's Outreach and Classical Tradition Committees."
After consultation with Judith P. Hallett, I devised a call for papers on the topic of "Borders" that yielded twenty-four abstracts from APA and CAC members, including graduate students and senior scholars. The CFP stated that " In recognition of the borders between Canadaand the United States, we solicit abstracts on the topic of 'Borders: geographical, social, political, temporal or conceptual." Papers can address such topics as the establishment, maintenance and control of geo-political borders in the ancient Mediterranean basin, the blurring of social boundaries through ritual activity, the fractured social identities of border-dwellers, etc."
Leanne Bablitz of British Columbia, organizing chair of the CAC meeting in Vancouver, allowed us two panels with eight paper slots in total, and provided valuable assistance in collecting the abstracts and contacting those who submitted abstracts. Both panels featured an even distribution of US and Canadian scholars, and presentations on such topics as myths of the Underworld, viticulture in southern France, religious cults in classical Athens, and Roman poetry.
In 2010 COCT will sponsor an APA panel on "Visualizing Ancient Narrative from Manuscript to Comic Book." The panelists will be Julia Haig Gaisser, Bryn Mawr College, on the illumination of an Italian manuscript from the 14th century that could be the earliest Renaissance interpretation of Apuleius' Golden Ass; Nina Kallmyer, University of Delaware, on the depiction of reading and receiving an ancient text by Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema's "A Reading from Homer (1885);" Thomas Jenkins, Trinity University, on N.C. Wyeth's illustrations for Palmer's translation of the Odyssey;and Christopher Marshall on Homer's Odysseyin comic books of the twenty-first century. Mary Louise Hart of the Getty Museum will be the respondent. We look forward to stimulating presentations on the representation of Classical literature in different media over a span of six centuries."
Finally, it was my pleasure to organize, with COCT committee member Michele Ronnick, Wayne State University, two panels on "Black Classics" at the March 2009 meeting of the College Language Association, held at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, and sponsored by COCT as well; special thanks go to the two COCT members--Dirk Held of Connecticut College and Sheila Murnaghan of the University of Pennsylvania--who helped select the eight papers on these panels from an impressive number of submissions. Presenters included Ronnick, Kenneth Goings and Eugene O'Connor of Ohio State University, Lisa Hughes of Colorado College, Katrina Keefer of Trent University, Margaret Malamud of New Mexico State University, and Susan Wood of Oakland University. The topics of these presentations ranged from antiquity and debates over slavery in antebellum America, to the role of the classics curriculum in historically black colleges and universities (HCBUs), to the writings of W.E.B. DuBois and Nella Larsen, to the paintings of Guillaume Guillon dit Lethiere, to the classical library holdings of Frederick Douglass. We look forward to a continuing classics presence at the CLA meetings, and to integrating the scholarly findings and insights shared at this meeting into other professional venues concerned with classics teaching, research and reception.
Respectfully Submitted,
Judith P. Hallett
September 2009
Professional Matters. The Division of Professional Matters includes under its jurisdiction the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics, the Placement Committee, the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, and the Campus Advisory Service.
Subcommittee on Professional Ethics. Various questions were presented for consideration by the Committee; as always, our deliberations are strictly confidential. Issues coming before the committee included, but were not limited to, a dispute resulting from the withdrawal of a job offer, a complaint that a publisher had reneged on a previous publication agreement, and a question about course content and the parameters of academic freedom. There were also a few requests for information available in our database, to which answers were provided. The APA office and I are working to update the data that we received earlier in the year from past Vice-President, David Konstan.
Placement Committee (Submitted by Carin Green). The Placement Committee continued to monitor the process of placement for candidates who are members of the APA or the AIA, providing oversight for announcements of positions and interviewing/hiring of candidates. The Committee also continued to review problems created (generally inadvertently) by either institutions or candidates who did not quite follow the rules. In some cases the rules needed clarification ("please don't eat the daisies" may sometimes be a necessary clarification, at it were), in others the individuals concerned needed guidance as to how to rectify the situation. In one or two cases, the diplomatic efforts of Director Adam Blistein were needed, and in every case the issues were speedily resolved in a way that met the approval of the Committee. In the last year, in response to concerns that had been voiced on the Committee, Adam Blistein and Renie Plonski devised and set in practice the process by which candidates who had submitted their materials to the Placement Service in a timely fashion were notified before the convention if they had interviews. This has been a major accomplishment and will do much to address the pressing concerns of candidates who want to know whether they should spend the money to come to the meetings.
Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (Submitted by Kristina Milnor). The Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups continues to write reports on women/minority involvement in placement, departments, and journals, using data generated by the APA office. The reports are supposed to be written in a revolving three-year cycle--i.e., "journals" in 2007, "placement" in 2008, "departments" in 2009, and back to "journals" in 2010. Unfortunately, the data gathering and processing have not proceeded smoothly over the past couple of years, so that the placement report from last year has been delayed until this fall. We hope to have both a placement report and a departments report to submit in January. The journals report from 2007 has recently been published. I would like to take this opportunity to say, once again, that if the APA really wants these reports written in a timely fashion and with real authority, it will need to hire a professional statistician to process the data.
In addition to the writing of reports, the Committee also has a responsibility to foster conversations within the APA membership on the status of women and minority groups. To this end, in Anaheim we are sponsoring a panel discussion on "Recruiting and Retaining Minorities and Women in Classics: from Undergraduate to Tenured Faculty."
Campus Advisory Service (Submitted by Stephen Nimis). As Director of the Campus Advisory Committee this past year, I received two requests for Program Review teams for Classics Departments and one unusual request for a team of reviewers to assess written projects from advanced undergraduate courses in Classics as part of an assessment project. I sent names of reviewers from our vetted list for this purpose.
A more serious appeal came to me from a college in the midwest, where an interim administration charged with saving money refused to replace a retiring faculty member. In this case it was not possible to offer more than advice and sympathy. The remaining faculty there were mobilizing alumni and donors to save the program. I have not heard from the faculty there recently, but I noticed that they hired a new Visiting Assistant Professor this fall; so it appears that they have at least managed to buy some time for themselves.
Another appeal came to me from a university in the midwest, where another small program was being put in jeopardy by administrators, not persuaded of the value of the Classics. Good faith attempts by the current faculty to revise their program in order to make better use of their resources proved to be of no avail. The administration seemed committed to ending the offering of ancient Greek. The department still hopes to work with the large, local Greek American community, who have been generous donors in the past, to persuade the administration that both Modern and Ancient Greek should be preserved. They have a promising new major on the drawing board (not yet approved) that will pool all their majors, allowing a specialization in advanced Latin or Greek (if offered) for students who want to study the field in depth (the High and Highest Distinction tracks), while allowing a simple honors track for students who want to do Classics-in-translation with no more than 2 years of Latin or Greek (if offered).
Unfortunately, given the state of the economy and its long-term prospects, this kind of non-renewal of faculty as a form of budget-cutting is likely to become more common in the future, and the APA must be prepared to meet the challenges this places before us. One suggestion that I have not had time to implement would be to prepare some kind of set of answers to frequently asked questions, e.g., what to say if there is a proposal to cut Classics; what to say if there is a proposal to eliminate Greek to make way for Arabic or Chinese; what to say if there is a proposal to get rid of more traditional departments to make way for more hip interdisciplinary or postdisciplinary programs. I have been deeply involved at my own campus in discussing these kinds of issues and I am a little surprised I have not heard from more at-risk programs in the past year. The most recent issue of Critical Inquiry has essays on disciplinarity, with two especially on philology (Sheldon Pollock, "Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World" and François Hartog, "The Double Fate of the Classics"), which is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of commentary on the future of the humanities, of classics, of the university as we know it. The APA needs to be engaged in this discussion.
Respectfully submitted,
James M. May
Vice-President for Professional Matters
Program. The elected members of the 2009 Program Committee were Elizabeth Asmis, Sharon James, Steven Oberhelman, Jeffrey Rusten, and myself. We met twice in Philadelphia to consider submissions for the 2010 meetings, to be held in Anaheim. Heather Hartz Gasda and Adam Blistein provided indispensable support in making our meetings possible and our deliberations efficient.
1. At our first spring meeting (April 18) the Committee evaluated 23 proposals for panels (including 4 Organizer-Refereed Panels), 1 seminar, 1 workshop, and 2 roundtable discussions; we also approved the charter renewal of 12 existing Affiliated Groups (Category II), and invited resubmission of the charter application of 1 new group (the group subsequently decided not to resubmit its application). 13 applications for At-Large Panels were submitted (5 of these APA/AIA Joint Submissions), of which we accepted 4 (in the process reclassifying 1 as a workshop), rejected 9, and invited 1 to revise and resubmit (this panel subsequently declined the invitation). AIA did not accept any of the 5 APA/AIA Joint Submissions, but the panel accepted by your Committee will of course be given on the APA program.
The Committee approved the proposed seminar, workshop, and roundtable discussions and 2 of the 4 proposals for Organizer-Refereed Panels, inviting the other 2 Organizer-Refereed panels to revise and resubmit. 3 of the 6 panels submitted by APA Committees were accepted, the other 3 being invited to revise and resubmit. The now-traditional panel sponsored by the APA / AIA Joint Committee on Placement was scheduled to follow the reception on the opening night of the meetings: the theme this year will be "The University and Beyond: Careers for Classicists." We also reviewed 18 panels submitted by affiliated groups: the committee asked two affiliated groups to insure that there would be adequate time for discussion at their sessions and asked another group to provide a more legible copy of its report.
2. At the April meeting the Committee also discussed the APA / CA Joint Panel to be organized by the APA for the CA Annual Conference in late March or April 2011. According to the protocols approved by the Board in 2008, the organizer of the APA-sponsored panels is to be a member of the Program Committee or a membe of the association chosen by the Committee. In the Committee's discussion, Elizabeth Asmis said that she would consider organizing the panel, and the Committee agreed to revisit the matter again at its June meeting.
3. The Committee met again for two days on June 12-13. We approved all 5 of the resubmitted proposals mentioned above (requesting, in the case of one panel, that one paper be dropped) and the proposal for the first of the APA / CA Joint Panels, organized by Tim Whitmarsh of the CA for the Anaheim meetings. The adjudication of 312 individual abstracts was the main item of business. This number was down 6.5% from the 334 abstracts submitted for the Philadelphiameetings just past and 30% from the record 446 abstracts submitted for the meeting in San Diegoin 2007: as always, it is very difficult to draw any correlation between the meetings' venue and the number of abstracts submitted. (Our experience with other recent meetings was 358 for San Francisco in 2004, 378 abstracts forBoston in 2005, 390 for Montrealin 2006, and 381 for Chicagoin 2008. On the afternoon of the second day the Committee organized the accepted papers into sessions, identified potential presiders, and drafted a preliminary program for the meetings in Chicago.
Every year before the June meeting, each of the five members of the Committee independently reads, writes comments upon, and rates every individual abstract on a scale of 1 to 4; thanks to Adam Blistein and Heather Gasda, the committee continued to enjoyed the benefit of receiving the abstracts a full week earlier than had once been customary, making the process a good deal less pressurized. After the committee members have submitted their ratings, Heather Gasda collates them in tabular form in advance of the meeting: the collated ratings provide the basis for our discussions. In cases where the committee members agree, there is little discussion. Otherwise we discuss each abstract until a consensus is reached. The discussion of the abstracts, which is often extensive and always collegial, constitutes the most enjoyable part of our work. There are no quotas. We consider all abstracts on their own merits and in accordance with the published guidelines.
Of the 312 abstracts submitted, the Committee accepted 76 or 24.4%, down from the acceptance rate (31.5%) of last year. Women submitted 136 abstracts (43.6%), men 176 (56.4%), proportions almost identical to those of last year. The acceptance rate for men (30.8%) was roughly equivalent to the overall acceptance rate of last year, while the acceptance rate for women (16.1%) was down markedly: the Committee is in equal parts troubled and puzzled by the latter statistic. We received (roughly speaking) 163 proposals on Greek subjects (52.2%), 122 on Roman topics (39.1%), with the remaining 27 (8.6%) devoted to topics such as linguistics, reception, and pedagogy. The top three categories for submissions were Greek tragedy (27), Latin Epic (23), and Latin poetry other than epic, drama, and elegy (23); submissions in Roman history, which last year was tied with Latin Epic as the most popular category, were down by over one half. The accompanying tables provide further statistics on this year's abstracts and a comparison with last year's.
4. At its June meetings the Committee also took up several other items of business. Elizabeth Asmis confirmed her willingness to organize the APA / CA Joint Panel, and the Committee accepted her suggested topic, on current issues in ancient philosophy. Professor Asmis also proposed that the workshop format of the annual meetings be expanded to include discussions of recent and important books in the field: I will present a formal proposal on this matter to the Board at the conclusion of this report. The Committee reviewed with Adam Blistein the prospect of having a system of online submissions in place in time for next year's round of meetings, and in that connection discussed measures to guarantee that abstracts' formats conform to APA requirements. We also took up the issues raised by sessions jointly sponsored by an APA committee and an affiliated group, when the procedures of the two different kinds of groups do not quite mesh (this discussion was occasioned by our acceptance of a proposal for a panel jointly sponsored by the Committee on Ancient History and the Women's Classical Caucus, to be held in 2011). Finally, the Committee also decided to hold a workshop of its own in Anaheim, to discuss the craft of writing a successful abstract.
5. There will be one seminar in Anaheim: "The Text of Propertius," organized by Richard J. Tarrant. As in the past, the papers for these seminars will be circulated to interested members in advance of the meetings, and the session itself will concentrate on extensive discussion of the papers; participation will be limited according to the space available. We warmly urge members to consider submitting proposals for seminars at future meetings.
6. Josh Ober's presidential panel will be on "Classical Antiquity and Social Science." His presidential address is titled "Wealthy Hellas."
7. As always, we are eager to learn of any initiatives that the membership would like the Committee to undertake to enrich the annual program, and I invite the members to send their suggestions and comments to me or any of the continuing members of the committee.
8. On the Committee's behalf I warmly thank all those who have submitted abstracts, organized panels, and agreed to chair sessions for the meeting in Philadelphia; and Adam Blistein and Heather Gasda for their help in all aspects of preparing the program. Speaking for myself, and I am sure the membership at large, I also warmly thank my colleagues on the Program Committee, whose service demands weeks of their time each year, and in particular the colleague whose term is now ending, Sharon James: I can say that I have never so enjoyed disagreeing with someone, or learned so much in the process.
Respectfully submitted,
Robert A. Kaster
Proposal for Change in Program Guide Language [approved by the Board of Directors on September 26, 2009]
The Program Committee wishes to propose a slight revision of the description of one of the annual meeting's programmatic categories, intended to broaden the scope of the workshop format. The proposed revision comprises the words underlined in the description below, which stands in the annual program insert that appears at the same time as the October issue of the Newsletter.
"Workshops as a rule concentrate on timely pedagogical issues, recently published books of broad interest in the field, or major research projects of interest to a broad spectrum of the membership. They usually consist of a presentation by the organizer(s) or a small panel of invited commentators, followed by a lengthy discussion period."
Publications. As VP for Publications, I attended a one-day retreat held in New Yorkon 1 September by VP for Research Roger Bagnall, who will report on that separately. I mention only to emphasize that we are looking at both the process (research) and the methods of reporting the process (publications) in a more connected way that has been possible in the past.
In early December, I will host a retreat, with costs funded by a small grant from the Mellon Foundation, of the Publications Committee and a selection of other leading scholars and APA officers. We will review the goals of APA publishing, the possibilities of new media and new business models, and develop recommendations for how best to use the limited resources of the Association to advance the profession. I will be able to report preliminarily to the Board at the January meetings.
Of particular interest is the continuing transformation of the Association's website, the emergence of the portal concept, and the connection to the fundraising campaign. None of these steps is under the committee's purview, but we are well aware that there are important links, and I will participate actively in the coming discussions. Robin Mitchell-Boyask's service to the Association as our web editor has been of literally incomparable value and sets a high standard for us to equal when he comes to step down.
Below I include summary reports from the three editors of APA Publications. Sander Goldberg is in his first year with Textbooks, Allen Miller is in his final year and Katharina Volk is in her "pre-year" with TAPA, and Kathryn Gutzwiller is in her final year with Monographs. Given the uncertainties surrounding the goals and directions of the monograph series in particular, I have postponed a search for her replacement and she and I are discussing how best to handle an extended transition. I particularly express my gratitude on behalf of the Association to Kathryn and Allen, as they conclude their terms, and to Sander and Katharina, for their initiative and commitment to the profession and the Association. [Editor's Note: Prof. Gutzwiller subsequently agreed to serve an additional year as Monographs Editor so that the selection of her successor could be based on decisions reached during the Publications Division Retreat described above.]
Report of the Editor of the APA Monograph Series (submitted by Kathryn Gutzwiller). As my term as Editor of the APA Monographs nears a close, I report a healthy stream of publications, manuscripts in production, manuscripts under review, and proposals received. Since last years' report, two manuscripts have been published:
Bruce Heiden, Homer's Cosmic Fabrication: Choice and Design in the "Iliad..
Judson Herrman, Hyperides: Funeral Oration.
One manuscript is currently in page proofs:
Noel Robertson, Religion and Reconciliation in Greek Cities: Rules of Sacrifice at Selinus and Cyrene.
Two manuscripts are expected to go into production this fall:
Scott Garner, Traditional Elegy: The Interplay of Meter, Tradition, and Context in Early Greek Poetry.
Bob Kaster, Studies on the Text of Macrobius' "Saturnalia".
Of three proposals received, two were accepted and one rejected. Of two manuscripts submitted for review, one was accepted and one rejected. A number of authors whose proposals have been accepted have recently been in contact with me as they prepare their manuscripts for submission. I anticipate that the new editor will inherit an active series, with works in various stages of completion.
Report of the Editor of the APA Textbook Series (submitted by Sander Goldberg). I inherited four projects from my predecessor, Justina Gregory, two in the Textbook series and two under the Resources heading. Of the latter, a study of ancient Roman philology remains in the formative stage. The proposal for a Guide to Information-literate Research for Classicists has been withdrawn. The desirability of such a guide and the appropriate form it should take may well be subjects for discussion at our December retreat.
As for Textbooks, a commentary on Cicero, De divinatione 1 is being prepared for submission; one on Plautus' Truculentus continues to work its way through the refereeing process. Four new projects have joined the list under my watch. The complete MS. of a translation of H. Hausmaninger and R. Gamauf's Casebook zur römischen Sachenrecht, 10th ed. (Vienna 2003) has begun the refereeing process. Commentaries on Euripides, Bacchae and Thucydides, Books 6-7 have been proposed: the authors have been encouraged to submit their work. Finally, a proposed commentary on Seneca, De constantia sapientis is now being developed as a digital, probably web-based work.
Report of the Editors of TAPA (submitted by Paul Allen Miller and Katharina Volk). TAPAproduced issue 139. 1 on time and 139.2 has gone to press. The transition from Paul Allen Miller's editorship to that of Katharina Volk has been very smooth, with the incoming and outgoing editor coordinating their work. Professor Volk started receiving submissions in May. Issue 140.1 is well into the planning stages. The following statistics are somewhat incomplete, since they do not include submissions for which Professor Volk has been in charge of refereeing.
Since August 2008 TAPA has received 35 new submissions and 3 resubmissions. Of these 38 authors 24 were male and 14 female. 37 of 38 submissions were refereed. The rejection rate for refereed articles is 75.6% (28 of 37 rejected), the acceptance rate for refereed articles is 24.4% (9 of 37 accepted), and the rate of requests for revision is 16.2% (6 of 37). Of the 38 submissions, 20 treated Greek topics (52.6%), and 18 treated Latin topics (47.4%).
Professor Volk reports that since taking over, she has received 14 submissions and one resubmission. All were or are being reviewed. 9 were on Greek topics, 6 on Roman ones. 11 authors are male, 4 female. So far, she have rejected 4 papers, accepted 2, and asked 2 authors to revise and resubmit. The others are still in the process of being reviewed.
James J. O'Donnell
Research. The Research Committee met on September 1, 2009, at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, with its full membership present and with Vice Presidents Judith Hallett and James O'Donnell also in attendance; Tom Elliott, associate director for digital programs at ISAW was also present as a guest. The discussion ranged widely and without fixed agenda. It started from the widely shared view that the agenda set out in Research Tools for the Classics (1980) had been successfully realized to a remarkable extent. There is a great deal to celebrate, thanks to the collaborative efforts of a group of energetic and entrepreneurial project directors, a series of effective vice presidents, steady hands in the APA's executive office, and the advisory wisdom, and often active engagement, of a host of committee and subcommittee members.
At the same time, it is clear that the world of research resources today is so different from that of a generation ago that we need to rethink the terrain and ask what a useful role for the Association in this domain will be in the years ahead. The committee strongly reaffirmed the Association's main strategy of playing a role as catalyst, organizer, supporter, reviewer, and adviser of projects, rather than actually running them itself. Although the Association is, in terms of staff and finances, far more robust than it was in 1980 (as Adam Blistein remarked), its resources remain stretched by the services it provides, and it is not likely to have the funding or space to undertake large projects on its own in the foreseeable future.
First, despite the success of the APA's research agenda over the last three decades, there remain significant gaps in the research tools available for the field, broadly construed. These offer possibilities for major projects to be undertaken, even if the way they would be approached now would be different from what it was even twenty years ago. (Many things could also be done much more easily now than they could have been a generation ago.) Among the main areas mentioned in this connection were
a. The Latin literary textual corpus, over its full chronological range, in a form both widely (and preferably freely) available and of high quality. Existing resources are either patchy and expensive, or of poor quality.
b. Biographical databases of ancient persons ("prosopographies"), especially for the Roman world below the level of the elite, but in many other areas as well. The TLL's files for names in Latin texts, which are largely unexploited, might contribute to this end.
c. Modern performances of ancient literature (not limited to drama), where a number of partial projects remain incompletely developed.
d. Biographical databases of scholars of classical antiquity, from the Renaissance to the present, where there is a patchwork of printed sources.
e. Epigraphy: many databases exist, total coverage is good but incoherence of incompatible databases continues to make research difficult.
Several of these projects would involve other APA divisions as well as Research and offer the opportunity for collaboration. They also offer opportunities for international collaboration in their creation.
Future projects, in the committee's view, need to avoid idiosyncratic technological platforms and structures, using instead standard formats for data and reusable tooling to reduce costs and promote interchange of data between databases. They are also likely to need, at least after an initial phase, to rely heavily on volunteer contributions of content ("crowdsourcing"). At the same time, such an approach will require some form of quality control through peer review. The APA can usefully provide guidance on technological approaches and standards that will maximize the possibilities for new or ongoing projects to be part of a larger information infrastructure and will minimize costs. It can in this role also be a persistent advocate for improvement of existing resources.
Beyond the potential projects mentioned above, a significant area of need, in which Research would again need to work with other APA divisions, is translations into English (but potentially also other modern languages) of ancient works not now readily available in translation. Late antique and technical literature were singled out as areas where a large amount of material is not now available in English, and sometimes not in any modern language. Given the bulkiness of many of these works, and the idiosyncrasies of their Greek and Latin, few users have real access to them in the original. Experience shows that good translations of such works can bring them into the mainstream of scholarship more effectively than any other method. A starting point would be a database of published translations. Volunteer labor would be critical to such a venture. Many members of the committee expressed strong support for such a project, which would probably involve both digital and print publication.
A second major area of discussion was peer review, which is a central competency of the APA, visible in the large majority of its activities. Both in its portal and in other respects the Association has an important opportunity to use this strength to assess digital resources (to serve as an "enlightened gatekeeper"). Such assessment would have two important uses: (a) Guiding users at all levels to those web resources that are of high quality and (b) validating digital work, especially long-term collaborative digital projects, as part of the scholarly work of classicists being evaluated for promotion, tenure, and other purposes. This assessment might usefully be carried out in collaboration with British (and perhaps other) scholarly organizations with similar concerns. Different types of peer review may be appropriate for different types of work, especially where collaboration is involved.
In this respect, the recent trend toward quality or prestige rankings of journals (usually for the purpose of evaluation of faculty) may offer an opportunity for the APA to use its peer review capabilities in a beneficial fashion. Some members of the committee thought that we should create our own rankings instead of letting others do so. But there was little unanimity on exactly what we should or could do. The annual gathering of editors of classical and archaeological journals should be used for a discussion of what role the APA (and perhaps other organizations) might usefully play in this respect. Here again, international cooperation may be more fruitful than a purely American approach.
A third pervasive theme of comments during the meeting was the need for the APA to use its influence as far as possible to maximize opportunities for access to classical resources by all interested persons, of whatever status and in whatever country. The varieties of charging policies now in use complicate this task, but in collaboration with other societies and organizations like the ACLS there may be ways of helping to democratize access and thus expanding the public for the study of classical antiquity.
The fourth major area of discussion, on which many remarks during the day centered, was the development of the discipline's human resources. Some key points concerned
a. The importance of special opportunities for students and faculty from multiple institutions and levels to learn together and develop networks. The great use of venues like the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, excavations, summer seminars, and similar events for the simultaneous acquisition of skills and development of national and international professional networks was stressed.
b. The various stages of educational development, which offer different opportunities, including high school students, college students, postbacs, graduate students, and younger faculty. Summer programs ("Tanglewood for classicists") seem particularly promising. In all cases, the focus would be on research skills and opportunities, but these will vary by level. A number of models were discussed, including both centralized and distributed ones, and rotating and permanent. It might be possible to find external funding for some of these (NEH for faculty; the APA's new endowment funds and private foundations for others, most likely).
c. Providing financial aid for participants, which would be a central concern of all such enterprises, to avoid simply providing additional opportunities to those who have the most already. Both research and APA experience show that intervention with financial aid really does make a difference in enabling both minorities and all students who are first-generation college students to enter the academic track.
d. Providing tutorial instruction (probably on-line, but sometimes perhaps also in some of the venues already mentioned) in the use of the main research tools, so that students and faculty can get the most from them.
e. Offering guidance, perhaps through short pamphlets (or their online equivalents) for younger members of the profession, on practical topics related to research (including time management).
A fifth set of concerns revolved around professional issues in the area of research. The APA has various existing statements of principle and counsel for the profession about research, faculty evaluation, and professional ethics. These need to be reviewed to make sure they are adequate for the contemporary conditions of work in the academy and the nature of research today. New statements may be needed in some areas, such as the responsibilities of researchers or best practice for reviewers of books and articles. At the same time, the Division should think about ways to inform the membership more regularly about relevant developments through the Newsletter. Targeted sessions at the annual meeting should also be considered.
Preservation was a sixth area of discussion. As the first great generation of ancient world digital projects comes to an end, the need for procedures to preserve born-digital files, curate them, and keep them usable by future generations is increasingly obvious. The APA can play a role in helping develop such a facility and establishing procedures and principles for it.
As I mentioned at the outset, the basic principle that the APA's role is not to manage or operate projects, but rather to advise, support, and legitimate them, was reaffirmed. This honest broker role could be extended. The Association may also be able to serve as a clearinghouse or exchange between needs and opportunities. For example, people with libraries or slide collections they are looking for homes for at the end of their careers and those who need these resources; people looking for volunteer opportunities (perhaps in retirement) and editors needing help in improving the English of articles submitted by authors whose native language is not English. Collaborative projects online might be good opportunities for "gypsy" scholars who have limited time for scholarly work to contribute--with credit--to large undertakings, and the APA could help facilitate such involvement.
A final pervasive theme, referred to in several of the points above, is the need for the Research Division to look both to other divisions of the APA and to both domestic and foreign counterparts for collaborators in most future undertakings. Not only is scholarship more globalized than it was a generation ago, but the distinctions between different areas of the Association's work are significantly effaced. Other learned societies face the same issues that we do, and there may be significant savings in addressing them together.
It will be evident that the committee's discussions provided enough ideas to generate work for years to come for many brains and hands. As was true of the proposals of the ad hoc committee thirty years ago, the ideas put forth here will need much work simply to be formulated into coherent and viable plans. The next step, in my opinion, is for us to start creating ad hoc task forces to develop some of these ideas and see if they can be turned into real projects. Many, although not all, of these task forces should be cross-divisional. Given the fact that the membership of the committee is overwhelmingly ex officio (there are only four members appointed directly to the Research Committee itself), we will in any case need to involve many people from outside the committee in this work--building, perhaps, the foundations for longer-term committees of the kind that have proven so successful in guiding research tool projects for a generation.
Roger S. Bagnall
8 September 2009
Executive Director's Report
http://apaclassics.org/index.php/about_the_APA/director_report/executive_director_report_for_2009/
Virginia Brown, Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, died at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 4, 2009. The cause of her death was bilio-pancreatic cancer. She was 68 years old. She is survived by her husband, James Hankins.
Ginny was a distinguished paleographer, medievalist, and editor. She was recognized as a leading authority in medieval Latin paleography, and especially on Beneventan script, which was widely written in southern Italy and along the Dalmatian coast from 800 to 1600. Ever on the hunt for what she loved to call "the precious script," she discovered thousands of new examples of it in libraries all over Europe. Combining her paleographical skills with a profound historical knowledge, she was able to date and localize examples of the script, associating its use with particular monastic centers and liturgical practices. She edited medieval and Renaissance texts, but also the work of contemporary scholars--in some ways an even more formidable task. Her books include The Textual Transmission of Caesar's Civil War (1972) and Terra Sancti Benedicti: Studies in the Palaeography, History, and Liturgy of Medieval Southern Italy (2004). She collaborated with E.A. Lowe on the supplement volume (1971) and the revised and expanded volume 2 (1972) of Codices latini antiquiores: A Palaeographical Guide to Manuscripts prior to the Ninth Century. With L. Bieler she edited E. A. Lowe's Palaeographical Papers 1907-1965 (1972). She edited, revised, and expanded E. A. Lowe's 1914 work, The Beneventan Script (1980). She was a founder of the series Monumenta Liturgica Beneventana and an editor of three of its volumes. In addition, she edited the journal Mediaeval Studiesal Studies from 1975 to 1988 and was the editor in chief of Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, vols. 7-9. She also edited and translated Boccaccio's work On Famous Women, the inaugural volume of the I Tatti Renaissance Library series edited by her husband James Hankins (2001). This book sold out its initial press run of 4500 copies in two months and came out as a paperback in 2003.
Ginny's accomplishments won her many awards and distinctions. She was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome (1966-68). In 2005 the Medieval Academy of America honored her with its distinguished teaching award. In the same year she received the prestigious Killam Research Leave Fellowship from the Canada Council for her project on "Writing Centres in the Lands of St. Benedict," a major work that was unfinished at the time of her death. Also in 2005 her students and colleagues held a symposium in her honor at Ohio State University; the resulting Festschrift, entitled Classica et Beneventana: Essays Presented to Virginia Brown on the Occasion of her 65th Birthday, was edited by Frank Coulson and Anna Grotans and published in 2005. A symposium honoring both Ginny and James Hankins was held at UCLA in 2007. The symposium volume, Thrice-born Latinity, is now in press. Ginny also achieved great prominence in her beloved southern Italy. She was made an honorary citizen of Benevento in 2006, and was celebrated in a conference in her honor at Montecassino in 2008.
Ginny was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on October 11, 1940. Her parents lived in Lake Providence, Louisiana--which was too small to boast a hospital. Her mother was a Latin teacher; her father owned Lake Providence's local newspaper, the Banner-Democrat. She attended the Academy of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans, graduating in 1958, and winning a distinction that would be prophetic of her later accomplishments: she was the first girl ever to win the coveted Latin prize previously assumed to be safely in the hands of the boys trained by the Jesuits. She earned her B.A. from Manhattenville College in 1962 and her M.A. from the University of North Carolina in 1964. In the fall of 1964 she entered the graduate program in classics at Harvard.
I came to Harvard at the same time, and Ginny and I met in our first week in Cambridge, in the old Radcliffe Graduate Centeron Ash Street, where both of us lived. We were drawn together initially by the fact that we were both two years older than the other first-year students (I had been studying at the Universityof Edinburgh while she was at North Carolina), and we soon became boon companions in a friendship that continued for the next forty-five years. Harvard was not an easy place for women in those days (we could not even come to the talks by outside speakers, which were typically held in men's residence houses that were off limits to female students). But Ginny and I both survived--I because I soon married and lived at a distance from the hotbed of the department, and Ginny because of her formidable talent and determination.
In 1966 Ginny won the Rome Prize and went off for two years at the American Academy to work on the dissertation on the manuscript tradition of Caesar that she was writing under the direction of Wendell Clausen. In Rome she perfected her Italian, which she soon spoke with perfect fluency (and always with a strong southern accent), and she enrolled in the famous course in paleography and diplomatics at the Vatican Library. She earned the diploma di paleografo-archivista in 1968, becoming the first American ever to earn that distinction. She returned to the United States in 1968 to take up a position as assistant to the renowned paleographer, E. A. Lowe, then in his nineties, and remained with him at the Institute for Advanced Studies until his death a year later. She brought his last works to fruition and saw them through publication. In 1969 she received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard. I emphasize the field of her Ph.D. because I know that Ginny would want me to. She made her career in medieval studies, but she began as a classicist and considered a sound classical and (above all) philological training indispensable to work in the later periods. She joined the American Philological Association in 1980 and became a life member in 1984.
Ginny joined the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto as a Junior Fellow in 1970, thereby achieving another first. She was the first woman ever to be appointed to that position. She became a Senior Fellow in 1974 and was appointed Professor at the University of Toronto in 1975. She remained at the PIMS until her retirement in 2006. She taught a wide range of subjects, but especially editing of Latin texts, codicology, and of course paleography. The workload was heavy: Ginny told me not long after her retirement that she had corrected over 5000 paleographical exercises in her career at the PIMS. She taught with the same meticulous care and intellectual honesty that characterized her scholarship, winning the gratitude and affection of the scholars she trained and supervised. Her teaching was recognized by the Medieval Academy with its teaching award and by the Festschrift in her honor, but I think that she was most moved by the album of tributes and reminiscences that she received from her students a few weeks before her death.
One of Ginny's greatest tasks at the PIMS was single handedly editing its journal, Mediaeval Studies. The fourteen volumes she edited, each dense with hundreds of codicological and philological details, were typically 500 to 600 pages long. She was finally able to relinquish the duty in 1989. The next volume, she reported with great satisfaction, was edited by four men.
Ginny's teaching and editing are an essential part of her scholarly legacy and would be sufficient in their own right. Above all, however, she will be remembered for her original scholarship and her contribution to the understanding of the diffusion of Beneventan script and its role in the historical and religious life of medieval southern Italy. But I am sure that she would not have separated her activities into categories as I have done. Her intellectual life was all of a piece, and it all arose from the same set of qualities. The photographic visual memory that made her one of the most distinguished paleographers of her generation, her meticulous concern for accuracy, her intellectual integrity, and her determination to get to the bottom of things (she was the most insatiably curious person I ever knew), operated together across all her activities.
One of the greatest sources of happiness in Ginny's life was her marriage with James Hankins, which turned out to be a perfect partnership of interests and affection. Together they traveled to Italy, edited texts, and relaxed in Barbados, where Ginny loved to go each winter to escape the cold she hated in Toronto and Cambridge. Jim was an associate editor of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, and Ginny served on the advisory board of the I Tatti Renaissance Library.
Ginny was deeply and genuinely modest by nature. She knew what she had accomplished and enjoyed the distinctions she had received, but she was always a little surprised by them. She had a naturally cheerful nature, and she could charm the birds out of the trees. One of my favorite memories is of an outing Ginny and Jim and my husband and I made in Naples a few years ago. The four of us decided to make a pilgrimage first to Vergil's tomb and then to Sannazaro's. All went well enough with Vergil's, but when we arrived at the site of Sannazaro's, the church that housed it was closed, shut up tight as only a church in Italy can be. While the rest of us were milling around deciding what to do, we suddenly missed Ginny, and I said facetiously that she was no doubt off somewhere persuading the priest to let us in. At that moment she and the priest appeared, already thick as thieves, and we enjoyed a splendid half hour admiring the tomb. It was always fun to be with her. Even when we had not seen each other for several years, we always picked up just where we had left off and were soon laughing and talking just as we had first done at Harvard so long ago.
Ginny launched many students and colleagues into profitable areas of research, and I have my own debt of gratitude to record. Many years ago she encouraged me to write the article on Catullus for the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, guided me through the pitfalls of manuscript research, and edited my work with a ruthless but essentially kindly eye--thereby bringing me into a field I would never have thought of without her.
Virginia Brown had the gift of friendship. Communications from all over the world poured into her apartment at the time of her death--over five hundred cards, letters, e-mails, and flower baskets, bearing words of sorrow and affection in several languages. A memorial service was held for her by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies on October 22, 2009. A tribute also appears on the PIMS website (http://www.pims.ca/amici/vbrown.html). A detailed account of her life and accomplishments by Lucia Gualdo Rosa will be published in Aevum.
Julia Gaisser
Bryn Mawr College
Jørgen Mejer died at his home in Copenhagenon September 7, 2009, at the age of 67 after a long and distinguished career. He had been Reader of Classics at the University of Copenhagensince 1974.
After beginning his undergraduate work at Copenhagen, Mejer attended Harvard on a Ford Foundation Fellowship, receiving an MA degree in 1964. He earned the Magister Artium degree, the equivalent of an American doctorate, from Copenhagenthree years later, and completed his Danish doctorate, the equivalent of a German Habilitation, there in 1979. In that year he became Chair of the Board of Directors of the University Extension in Copenhagen, an independent organization, supported by the government and run by university professors. During his fourteen years as chair, the Extension increased its enrollment from 4,000 to 12,000 part-time students.
A Junior Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. in 1972-1973, Mejer enjoyed a truly international academic career. He held a series of visiting positions in the United States (Princeton, CUNY Graduate Center, Texas, and for several semesters and sixteen consecutive summers at Maryland). In 1995 he was a guest professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, China; and from 2001-2003 he served as Director of the Danish Institute at Athens and Cultural Councilor at the Danish Embassy in Athens. In all these positions, in addition to his academic work, he spread good will through his direct personal touch, taking time with students and colleagues to talk about their interests, to which he always had something to contribute. He joined the APA in 1976, attended many annual meetings, and developed many close, long-lasting relationships with American colleagues. During his years in Athenshe hosted a steady stream of international visitors and actively fostered cooperation among the Foreign Schools.
Mejer was a specialist in the history of ancient philosophy in antiquity, always seeking to better understand our current view of ancient philosophy by exploring its roots in antiquity. His books -- Diogenes Laertius and his Hellenistic Background (l978) and Die Überlieferung der Philosophie im Altertum (2000) -- and many articles have made him a major figure in this area. But he was not a narrow specialist, and he published on many other classical authors including the Presocratics, Plato, the Attic tragedians, Theophrastus and Cicero.
In addition, as Secretary-General of the Scandinavian Society for the Classical Tradition ("The Plato Society") from 1979-1987, and as a member of the Society's board from 1987-1993, Mejer played a pioneering role in launching classical reception studies in Scandinavia. He instituted a program on the classical tradition at his own university and made a substantial impact on cultural life in Denmark through his extraordinary efforts in the area of classical outreach. He developed and administered Classical Civilization programs for adult learners at the University Extension, and shared the insights of classical learning with the wider public in lectures and radio and television appearances.
From the beginning, Mejer was concerned with the future of classical studies in Denmark. He often lamented the absence or inadequacy of translations of ancient works, and did his part to remedy this, beginning with a Danish translation with commentary of the Presocratic philosophers in 1971 (a kind of Danish Kirk-Raven-Schofield), which was completely revised and expanded for a two-volume second edition in 1994-95. A translation of Cicero's Laelius De Amicitia soon followed (1975), and since 2000 Mejer has been the main editor of a seven-volume Danish translation of the Platonic corpus.
Mejer also translated several Greek tragedies into contemporary Danish in collaboration with the poet Søren Ulrik Thomsen. Hans Hertel, with whom Mejer collaborated on a seven-volume history of world literature (1985-93), praises these translations for uniting philological precision and the power of language to a most unusual degree. To Hertel, Mejer provided a paradigm for the classical humanist: curious, precise in detail, broad in both perspective and involvements, and gifted at rendering the superfluous necessary. Hertel also notes Mejer's "self-irony" in dividing his many scholarly publications into those in Danish, "unknown abroad," and "those in other languages that were ignored in Denmark."
A Festschrift for Mejer, published in 2002 on the occasion of his 60th birthday, brought together his Danish and non-Danish friends and readers to celebrate the panoramic scope of his intellectual interests and personal interactions. Entitled Noctes Atticae: Articles on Greco-Roman Antiquity and its Nachleben, and edited by five of his Copenhagen students, it contains 34 articles by scholars in Denmark, Germany, Greece, Holland, the UK and the US in English, German and French, on ancient philosophy, Greek literature, Greek archaeology, Roman literature, textual criticism and history, and the "Nachleben and Rezeption" of Antiquity. It hails Mejer as "a driving force, sometimes a prime mover, of international and indeed breathtaking dimensions," "an inspiring teacher," and a "dear friend," a description that is echoed by many who knew him. He will be much missed in many parts of the world.
To recall Ovid's words when lamenting the loss of his beloved literary colleague, the poet Tibullus:
Auxisti numeros, culte sodalis, pios.
In fond farewell:
Michael Gagarin, University of Texas
Judith P. Hallett, University of Maryland, College Park
Stephen Tracy, Institute for Advanced Study
Deceased Members
During 2009 the Association learned of the deaths of the following members, some of whom, in fact, passed away before this year. We offer condolences to their families, friends, and colleagues. The names of life members are followed by an asterisk [*].
Lucy Brokaw*
Virginia Brown*
Lionel Casson*
Roger Hornsby
Harriet Jameson*
Edith Kovach
Donald Laing
Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Jorgen Mejer
Michael J. O'Brien*
Harland Berkley Peabody
Bryan P. Reardon
John Shayner
Peter G. Theis
Douglas F. S. Thomson
Elizabeth Lyding Will*
The APA salutes the following members who have supported its work for a half century or more. The year in which each joined the Association is given in parentheses. Please advise us if you observe any errors or omissions.
William S.Anderson (1955)
James I. Armstrong (1948)
Harry C.Avery (1955)
Charles L. Babcock (1951)
E. Badian (1960)
Anastasius C.Bandy (1957)
Hazel E. Barnes (1940)
Herbert W. Benario (1950)
Janice M. Benario (1953)
Anna Shaw Benjamin (1952)
Charles R.Beye (1955)
J. David Bishop (1946)
Francis R. Bliss (1951)
Edward W. Bodnar (1948)
Alan L. Boegehold (1957)
Edwin L. Brown (1956)
T. V. Buttrey (1959)
William M. Calder III (1953)
Howard Don Cameron (1956)
Mary Eileen Carter (1948)
Mortimer H. Chambers (1954)
John R. Clark (1953)
David D. Coffin (1947)
Edward E. Cohen (1959)
Robert E. Colton (1960)
W. Robert Connor (1958)
Edith Croft (1949)
Stephen G.Daitz (1955)
Mervin R. Dilts (1959)
Norman A.Doenges (1955)
Samuel F. Etris (1946)
Louis H. Feldman (1950)
Edwin D. Floyd (1959)
Gordon Buell Ford (1956)
Charles W. Fornara (1960)
Ernst A. Fredricksmeyer (1957)
Frank J. Frost (1959)
Charles Fuqua (1960)
Daniel J. Geagen (1959)
Douglas E. Gerber (1956)
Marie Giuriceo (1953)
Leon Golden (1957)
Frank J. Groten (1949)
RichmondHathorn (1948)
James M. Heath (1957)
Charles Henderson (1950)
Kevin Herbert (1955)
Herbert M. Howe (1942)
Louise Price Hoy (1947)
Rolf O. Hubbe (1950)
Henry R. Immerwahr (1941)
William T. Jolly (1957)
Elias Kapetanopoulos (1958)
George A. Kennedy (1952)
B. M. W. Knox (1959)
Edgar Krentz (1954)
Mabel Lang (1945)
Gilbert Lawall (1958)
M. Owen Lee (1960)
Valdis Leinieks(1955)
John O. Lenaghan (1956)
Lydia H. Lenaghan (1960)
Robert J. Lenardon (1952)
Flora R. Levin (1956)
Saul Levin (1948)
Philip Levine (1952)
L. R. Lind (1932)
Robert B. Lloyd (1952)
T. James Luce (1956)
Hubert M. Martin (1956)
Philip Mayerson (1949)
William E. McCulloh (1960)
P. J. McLaughlin (1944)
Elizabeth M.McLeod (1955)
Wallace McLeod (1957)
Fred C. Mench (1960)
Edwin P. Menes (1958)
Robert T. Meyer (1948)
Mary E. Milham (1952)
Anna Lydia Motto (1953)
Charles E. Murgia (1960)
Grace Freed Muscarella (1953)
Chester F. Natunewicz (1958)
Mary Ann T. Natunewicz (1960)
Francis Newton (1951)
Helen F. North (1946)
Jacob E. Nyenhuis (1960)
Martin Ostwald (1949)
Cecil Bennett Pascal (1955)
John Peradotto (1959)
Anthony J. Podlecki (1960)
Hans A. Pohlsander (1960)
Emil J. Polak (1959)
Sarah B. Pomeroy (1957)
Pietro Pucci (1959)
Michael C. J. Putnam (1959)
Beryl M. Rawson (1960)
Kenneth J. Reckford (1958)
Margaret Elaine Reesor (1950)
L. Richardson, Jr. (1951)
S. Dominic Ruegg (1958)
Ursula Schoenheim (1956)
William C. Scott (1956)
James E. Seaver (1948)
StanleyJ. Shechter (1959)
Wesley D. Smith (1957)
Robert P. Sonkowsky (1957)
Olin J. Storvick (1952)
Thomas A. Suits (1956)
P. Michael Swan (1958)
Roy Arthur Swanson(1955)
MyraL. Uhlfelder (1946)
Martha Heath Wiencke (1956)
Michael Wigodsky (1958)
John C. Williams (1951)
Alice S. Wilson (1950)
E. C. Witke (1960)
G. Michael Woloch (1960)
William F. Wyatt (1959)
Annual Giving and Campaign Acknowledgments
http://apaclassics.org/images/uploads/documents/FY09Acknowledgments.pdf
Supplement to Dissertation Listings for 2008-09
Ohio State University
Erica Kallis reporting
In Progress:
Gabriel Fuchs, The Reception of Ovid's Poetry from Exile in the Renaissance (Frank Coulson).
Announcement
The APA Division of Outreach and the APA Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance are creating a list of classicists with backgrounds in musical performance and the history of music. We are especially eager to identify individuals who would be willing to share their knowledge of both music and classical antiquity with individuals writing or performing works that are set in the ancient Greco-Roman world, draw on ancient Greek and Latin literary texts, or feature classical figures and themes.
Sander Goldberg, UCLA, along with his co-author, Tom Beghin, received the Ruth A. Solie Award from the American Musicological Society for their book Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 2007). The Award honors a collection of musicological essays of exceptional merit published during the preceding calendar year in any language and in any country and edited by a scholar or scholars who are members of the AMS or citizens or permanent residents of Canada or the United States.
Integration and Identity in the Roman Republic, Manchester, UK, July 1-3, 2010. The project 'Integration and identity in the Roman Republic' is currently carried out by Saskia Roselaar at the University of Manchester. It aims to clarify the processes of integration between Italians and Romans in the period 340-91 BC. The issue of integration has been studied mainly in the context of the Romanization of Italy and the formation of identities in Italy, which are considered the result of increased contact between Romans and Italians. However, it still remains unclear in what contexts Romans and Italians came into contact with each other. The project's aim therefore is to study the points of contact between these groups: before we can say anything about the cultural and linguistic consequences of integration, we must know where and why exactly Romans and Italians met.
We would welcome papers on any aspect of integration and the formation of identity in the Roman Republic. We would particularly like to invite archaeologists and linguists, since it is clear that integration and identity cannot be studied by ancient historians alone. Some suggested topics are:
-Colonial landscapes
-Legal barriers for integration
-Ideas about integration among Romans and Italians
-Different modes of integration for various social classes
-Regional variations in the methods and results of integration
The deadline for abstracts is 1 March 2010. For further information write to mailto:Saskia.Roselaar@manchester.ac.uk
Ovid and Ovidianism, April 16-18, 2010, Omni Richmond Hotel, Richmond, VA. This conference is sponsored by the University of Richmond¹s Department of Classical Studies, and hosted by Carole Newlands, National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Visiting Professor in Classics for 2009-2010. The aim of this conference is to come to a more complete and nuanced understanding of what is involved in the concept of Ovidianism, with a particular focus on metamorphosis. To that end classicists, art historians, and specialists in European literature will come together to explore not only how writers and artists of various eras have drawn on, imitated and critiqued Ovid's works, but also how they have re-contextualized them. Others again have created Ovidian-style myths that cannot be sourced directly to Ovid, but whose formal features permit a play of ideological and stylistic affinities and differences with the Latin poet. A working definition of the term Ovidianism encompasses more than Nachleben for it calls attention to how later literature and art employs particular features of the style and method that we associate with Ovid in new and provocative ways--which of course in itself is very Ovidian.
For more information, see the conference web site: http://classics.richmond.edu/program/ovid/index.html, or contact Michele Bedsaul by phone at (804) 289-8420, or by e-mail at mbedsaul@richmond.edu.
PacRim Latin Literature Seminar, Christchurch, New Zealand, July 7-9, 2010. The topic of the seminar will be auctoritas. The deadline for abstracts is February 28, 2010. For further information, write to the organizer, Prof. Robin Bond, mailto:robin.bond@canterbury.ac.nz.
Summer Programs
University of Virginia Summer Language Institute, June 14-August 6, 2010. In the summer of 2010 the Department of Classics at the University of Virginia will again offer Latin as one of the University's Summer Language Institutes. The Latin program is an intensive course designed to cover two years of college-level Latin (12 credit hours earned) in only two months. Students who wish to acquire experience in reading Latin but do not require course credit may also choose a non-credit option. No previous knowledge of Latin is required for participation. The Summer Latin Institute is an excellent opportunity for motivated students to achieve rapid proficiency in Latin and serves a broad range of students from all over the United States. In addition to undergraduate and graduate students, enrollment is open to advanced high school students and individuals interested in learning a new language. The program is also ideally suited for recent college graduates about to begin a post-baccalaureate program in Classics, as well as graduate students in other disciplines who need to acquire rapid but sound proficiency in a secondary language.
The Institute begins with the fundamentals of Latin grammar, including elementary readings and composition. In the second half of the program, students read extensively from prose and verse authors at the intermediate level, in addition to completing more advanced exercises in prose composition and metrics. There are two three-hour blocks of formal instruction per day and supplementary review sessions in the evenings. Attendance in the morning and afternoon sessions is required of all students, regardless of whether they are enrolled for credit or non-credit. Furthermore, every student, regardless of type of enrollment, must earn a passing grade in each class of the first half of the SLI in order to participate in the second half of the program.
For additional information please visit our website (http://www.virginia.edu/classics/sli.html) or contact the Director and Lead Instructor of the 2010 Latin SLI, Tom Garvey (tgarvey@virginia.edu).
University College Cork Intensive Latin And Greek Summer School, June 28-August 19, 2010. The Department of Classics offers an intensive 8-week summer school for beginners with parallel courses in Latin and Greek. The courses are primarily aimed at postgraduate students in diverse disciplines who need to acquire a knowledge of either of the languages for further study and research, and at teachers whose schools would like to reintroduce Latin and Greek into their curriculum.
In each language 6 weeks will be spent completing the basic grammar and a further 2 weeks will be spent reading simple, original texts. For further information and an application form see our website: http://www.ucc.ie/acad/classics/summ_sch.htmlor contact Vicky Janssens, Department of Classics, University College Cork, Ireland, tel.: +353 21 4903618/2359, fax: +353 21 4903277, email: mailto:v.janssens@ucc.ie.
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, "The 'Falls of Rome': The Transformations of Rome in Late Antiquity", American Academyin Rome, June 28-July 30, 2010. This seminar will focus on a topic that is fundamental to the study of antiquity; "What does it mean to say Rome fell?" Unlike other attempts to analyze the fall in terms of the political and military end of the Roman Empire, this seminar will focus on the capital of that empire, the city of Rome, in the late third to the seventh centuries. Through intensive study of texts and new archaeological remains, we will critically examine the reasons traditionally adduced for Rome's fall - political and/or military crisis - and search for more complete definitions, and more complete explanations, of societal change.
The seminar is founded on interdisciplinary interactions, including the collaboration of the Seminar Director, Michele Renee Salzman, a historian, with the Associate Director, Kimberly Bowes, an archaeologist. All readings and seminar discussion will be in English. We welcome applicants from a wide variety of fields in the humanities. Participants are chosen from university and college faculty who teach American post-secondary students. This includes faculty teaching abroad who teach American students. Applicants of all ranks and all levels of institution are welcome. In addition, two places are reserved for qualified advanced graduate students
For detailed information about the Seminar and the application go to the American Academyin Rome website, http://www.aarome.org/other-ways-to-participate.php#program5 or contact the Director or Associate Director at the following addresses: Michele Renee Salzman, Universityof California at Riverside, Michele.Salzman@ucr.edu or 951 827 1991. Kimberly Bowes, Cornell University, kdb48@cornell.edu or kimberlybowes@yahoo.com or 917 699 0340. The deadline for application is March 2, 2010.
For a list of other NEH Summer Institutes for college and university teachers see www.neh.gov/projects/si-university.html.
Bologna University Greek and Latin Summer School, June 28-July 16, 2010. The Department of Classics (http://www.classics.unibo.it) of Bologna University welcomes applications to its Greek and Latin Summer School. The teaching will be focused both on language and on literature; further classes will touch on moments of classical history and history of art, supplemented by visits to museums and archaeological sites (in Bologna and Rome). The Greek course will be for beginners only, whereas classes of different levels (at least beginners and intermediate) are scheduled for Latin. Participants must be aged 18 or over. All tuition will be in English. For further information and to enroll, please visit: http://www.unibo.it/summerschool/latin. E-mail: diri_school.latin@unibo.it
SALVI announces two summer programs for 2010: Iter Romanum, July 1-8, 2010, Rome, Italy, and Rusticatio, July 18-24, 2010, Charlestown, West Virginia. Iter Romanum is a unique, week-long, full-immersion tour of Rome -- tantum Latine! We will tour Rome's sites -- ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern -- read excerpts from Latin literature, discuss what we see, read, and hear, and listen to our distinguished tour guides (mystagogi) as the show us around the fascinating city known as "caput mundi" -- all while spending the week living, performing all of our tasks, and holding all of our conversations in Latin only. Each day will be structured around a visit to an historical site in or around Rome. Possible destination sites (subject to change) include: Roman Forum, Palatine Hill and Circus Maximus, Domus Aurea, Colosseum, St. Peter's Basilica,Vatican necropolis and the tomb of St. Peter, Vatican Museums, Villa Borghese, and Ostia Antica. For more information about Iter Romanum, and application instructions, please visit our website at http://latin.org/rusticatio/iterromanum.php
Rusticatio is a week-long, full-immersion Latin workshop offering high-energy conversation exercises and readings from Latin literature. In an intimidation-free environment crucial for progress in a second language, participants live together for seven days while they speak, read, write, cook, and relax -- all while communicating entirely in Latin. Through a variety of exchanges, including instructional sessions, a common kitchen, daily shared tasks, down time, and excellent food and wine (which are abundant and included in the price), Rusticatio participants enjoy unparalleled camaraderie while they experience first hand various teaching methods that are directly applicable to secondary and university Latin classrooms. For more information about Rusticatio, and application instructions, please visit our website at http://www.latin.org/rusticatio/
Vergilian Society 2010 Study Tours, For over 55 years, the Vergilian Society has offered study tours to classical lands led by experienced scholars and dynamic lecturers. These study programs are designed to appeal to secondary teachers, college students and interested laypeople as well as college professors seeking firsthand knowledge of archaeology and history. Scholarship support is available for secondary school teachers and graduate students. For Itineraries, Applications and Scholarship information, see http://vergil.clarku.edu/.
Funding Opportunities/Fellowships
The University of Cincinnati Classics Department is pleased to announce the Margo Tytus Summer Residency Program. Tytus Summer Residents, in the fields of philology, history and archaeology will come to Cincinnati for a minimum of one month and a maximum of three during the summer. Applicants must have the Ph.D. in hand at the time of application. Apart from residence in Cincinnati during term, the only obligation of Tytus Summer Residents is to pursue their own research. They will receive free university housing. They will also receive office space and enjoy the use of the University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College Libraries.
The University of Cincinnati Burnam Classics Library(http://www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/classics/) is one of the world's premier collections in the field of Classical Studies. Comprising 240,000 volumes and other research materials, the library covers all aspects of the Classics: the languages and literatures, history, civilization, art, and archaeology. Of special value for scholars is both the richness of the collection and its accessibility -- almost any avenue of research in the classics can be pursued deeply and broadly under a single roof. The unusually comprehensive core collection, which is maintained by three professional classicist librarians, is augmented by several special collections such as 15,000 nineteenth century German Programmschriften, extensive holdings in Palaeography, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. At neighboring Hebrew Union College, the Klau Library (http://library.cn.huc.edu/), with holdings in excess of 450,000 volumes and other research materials, is rich in Judaica and Near Eastern Studies. The application deadline is February 15, 2010. A description of the Tytus Summer Residency Program and an application form is available online at http://classics.uc.edu/index.php/tytus. Questions can be directed to program.coordinator@classics.uc.edu.
Important Dates For APA Members
(All deadlines are receiptdeadlines unless otherwise indicated.)
March 12, 2010 Panel Proposals for 2011 Annual Meeting and Applications for Charters for Organizer-Refereed Panels and Affiliated Groups for 2012 Annual Meeting
May 14, 2010 Individual Abstracts for 2010 Annual Meeting
January 6-9, 2011 142nd Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX
January 5-8, 2012 143rd Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA
Capital Campaign News
http://apaclassics.org/index.php/support_the_APA/campaign_news
June 2009
The American Philological Association Newsletter (ISSN 0569-6941) is published six times a year (February, April, June, August, October, December) by the American Philological Association. Send materials for publication; communications on Placement, membership, changes of address; and claims to: Executive Director, American Philological Association, 292 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania, 249 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304. Telephone: 215-898-4975. FAX: 215-573-7874. E-mail: apaclassics@sas.upenn.edu.
Preprints and Open Access Revisited
Scholarship is, of course, all about making the results of research available to a community of scholars. In the first 120 years after the foundation of APA (in 1869) classical scholarship was made public primarily in the form of printed books and periodicals: peer-reviewed journals, monographs, and in occasional collections of essays and Festschriften. But the situation changed with the coming of the internet. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which proudly claims the title of the second-oldest online journal in the humanities, began publishing online in 1990. Since then, the quantity of scholarship available online has exploded: e-journals; back issues of hard-copy journals on JSTOR and other archive sites; e-books from ebrary and Amazon.com; online bibliographies (notably APh and CDC); web pages (of organizations, academic departments, and individuals); blogs and more offer the potential for making research publicly available.
The “preprint” or “working papers” series seems to me to offer a promising, and still under-utilized venue for making classical scholarship public. Unlike many forms of internet publication, the preprint series is a time-tested form of scholarly communication. Working papers have long been a standard feature of how scholarly work is carried out in academic departments of social and natural sciences – indeed, some preprint series date back to before the internet era. The popularity of the form is due to several unique advantages that it offers to scholars: Preprints reduce to near-zero the time lag between the completion of an article that is “ready to circulate,” even if not yet “ready to publish,” and its appearance in public. Authors can gain feedback on a paper before it is submitted to a peer-reviewed journal. The chronological priority of a new idea is established once a paper is “datestamped” by appearing in a series. And, not least, readers (including people lacking access to research libraries) gain access to up-to-date academic scholarship.
Despite these advantages, the humanities were slow to follow the lead of the social and natural sciences. It was not until 2005 that the Classics Departments of Princeton and Stanford Universities launched their experimental preprint series, The Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (http://www.princeton.edu/~pswpc). The series is open access –anyone with an internet connection and a reasonably up-to-date browser can access all site content and download papers without charge. Copyright for each paper is held by the author(s); there is no editorial content review (once again: preprints are not peer-reviewed publications). Posting is limited to the faculty and students of the hosting institutions.
The PSWPC experiment seems to have been successful, at least if success is measured in terms of authors (currently ca. 40 faculty and graduate students), papers (ca. 150 – if one counts re-editions), and readers (or at least viewers and downloaders). Our experience in the first year of the series, along with some preliminary readership statistics, are in reported in J. Ober, W. Scheidel, B. Shaw, and D. Sanclemente, “Toward Open Access in Ancient Studies. The Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics,” Hesperia 76 (2007): 229-42 (http://dx.doi.org/10.2972/hesp.76.1.229 - open access). The series was reviewed in March 2008 by David Pritchard in Literary and Linguistic Computing (http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/fqn005v1 - ironically, only the abstract of this review-article is open access).
When we launched the PSWPC site, we hoped that other Classics Departments would set up their own parallel series. The University of Wales Lampeter has indeed done so (http://www.lamp.ac.uk/ric/working_papers.html), but there are non-trivial costs involved with setting up and maintaining a departmental preprint site.
Happily, thanks to the hard work of a team of scholars at the University of Texas (notably Lesley Dean-Jones in the Classics Department and Bernard Black in the Law School) there is now an open access and very well organized Classics preprint series available to all Classicists: the Classics Research Network (http://www.ssrn.com/crn/index.html). The CRN is part of the Humanities Research Network, which is in turn a part of the large and well established Social Science Research Network (the SSRN currently includes over 200,000 papers and gets ca. 7 million downloads per year).
The Classics Research Network is open access: papers posted on the site are uploaded by authors without charge and searched, browsed, and downloaded by readers without charge. Authors retain the copyright and retain the right to post their work on other sites.
To browse the existing papers on the Classic Research Network:
Click the square box in front of Humanities Research Network, which will bring up a list of Humanities Networks. You will find, at the top of the list, “HRN Classical Resarch Network.” Click the title to see a list of all the papers on the CRN, or the box in front of the title to browse specific CRN Subject Matter eJournals (e.g. History, Literature, Classical Tradition).
To register to submit a paper on the Classics Research Network, go to www.ssrn.com and click on “submit.” The procedure for submitting papers to the CRN is quite straight forward and works quickly as soon as you complete registration. By registering, you will set up an individual “author page,” which will include direct links to all your posted papers. For example, my own page is http://ssrn.com/author= 336081. As you become more familiar with the network you will find that its utility grows. You may choose to receive e-mail notification when other scholars post papers in research areas of interest to you. You may submit both preprints (Working Paper Series) and, if you have not given away electronic rights, previously published papers (Accepted Papers Series). After you submit a paper, you may revise it as often as you wish.
I realize that for some classicists posting preprints on an open access web site will initially seem strange, perhaps even dangerous. I believe the risks are minimal and that they are, in any event, much outweighed by the risks associated with failing to make our scholarship public in a timely way. The highly experienced SSRN administrators, who handle tens of thousands of preprints annually, report that publishers ordinarily have no objection to authors having posted their papers with a preprint series. They also report that incidents of posted papers being misappropriated are almost unknown; the few known cases of misappropriation have been addressed swiftly and to the author’s satisfaction. This relative lack of complications for authors is confirmed by my own years of experience with the Princeton-Stanford Working Papers in Classics.
I encourage APA members to submit their papers to the Classical Research Network. My sincere hope is that that the SSRN’s Classics Research Network will soon become a standard place where all those who care about classical studies can freely post their scholarly efforts, and freely obtain access to current research.
Josiah Ober
In August 2009, all APA members in good standing will receive a letter via first-class mail (airmail outside of North America) containing information on the Association's elections this year. If the member has provided a valid e-mail address, he or she will receive this information via e-mail as well. The letter sent by regular mail will contain a paper ballot that members may return to the Association office as usual. However, both versions of the letter will contain a unique URL that the member may use to vote online.
The letter will contain complete instructions for voting either by regular mail or online. See the APA web site (http://www.apaclassics.org/Administration/2009_Ballot_Materials.html) for four documents that will assist members in making their selections. These are documents that formerly appeared as an insert to this issue of the Newsletter. Members may request printed copies of any of them from my office.
Ballots cast by mail must be received in the APA Office by the close of business on Tuesday, September 29, 2009. Electronic voting will end at 3:00 a.m., on Thursday, October 1, 2009.
Message from the Executive Director
My second five-year term as Executive Director concluded at the end of June 2009, and last Summer I informed the Board of Directors that I would like to be considered for reappointment for an additional three years. I asked for a term of a different length on this occasion for two reasons. First, as our capital campaign comes to an end in 2011, I hope that the Board will conduct a strategic planning exercise to consider the Association's future directions, and a shorter term for my office will give the Board greater flexibility in making those plans. Second, as many members know, because of growth in Penn's Classical Studies Department, we will not be able to retain our current space in Claudia Cohen Hall much longer, and new space at the University of Pennsylvania is likely to be considerably more expensive to rent. I hope to remain a University employee (as I have been since becoming APA's Executive Director in 1999) until retirement, but if the financial burden of keeping the APA office here becomes too onerous, I want the Association to be able to move elsewhere.
During the Fall of 2008, the Executive Committee (which conducts my annual performance review) followed the procedure the Board established in 2003 to consider any Executive Director's request for reappointment. Then President Kurt Raaflaub assembled a dossier consisting of my current position description, my reports to the Board, my performance reviews, and letters of evaluation solicited in confidence from all the current and several of the recent vice presidents of the Association, as well as the Chairs of the Development and Capital Campaign Committees.
The Executive Committee reviewed this dossier during the Fall and recommended that the Board approve my reappointment. In January 2009 the Board accepted that recommendation and authorized the President, with the guidance of the Executive Committee, to develop a letter of agreement to extend my appointment. I am grateful to the Board for this expression of support for me, and I am also grateful that my colleagues, Renie Plonski, Heather Gasda, and Julie Carew will continue in their positions. I hope that, with the experience gained during the last five years, we can serve the Association even more effectively during the next three.
I am also pleased to report that Penn's School of Arts and Sciences is permitting us to remain in Claudia Cohen Hall for one additional year. We are very grateful to Rebecca Bushnell, Dean of the School, and Joe Farrell, Chair of Classical Studies for this extension.
Adam D. Blistein
Meeting of the Board of Directors of the
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 8, 2009. Those present were Prof. Kurt A. Raaflaub, President, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Ruby Blondell, Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ward W. Briggs, Cynthia Damon, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Jeffrey Henderson, Robert A. Kaster, David Konstan, Donald Mastronarde, S. Georgia Nugent, Josiah Ober, and James J. O’Donnell, Dr. Lee T. Pearcy, and Profs. Ruth Scodel and James Tatum. Also present by invitation were incoming Board members who would take office on January 11: Profs. Dee L. Clayman, Roger S. Bagnall, James M. May, John Marincola, and Carole E. Newlands.
Prof. Raaflaub called the meeting at 3:35 p.m. He thanked those Directors (Profs. Blondell, Henderson, Konstan, Scodel, and Tatum) who were concluding terms of service with this meeting and welcomed the incoming Directors attending the meeting. In advance of the meeting, the Directors had received an agenda for the meeting and minutes of their previous meeting on September 26-27, 2008.
Action: After one modification and addition, the Board approved the agenda for the meeting
Action: The Board approved the minutes of its meeting of September 26-27, 2008.
Report of the President
Prof. Raaflaub summarized the results of the review of APA programs and services that the Board had conducted during the year and stated that he would soon write to about two hundred Classicists, most of whom had been APA members at one time, urging them to rejoin the Association. He noted that the capital campaign had been making good progress although it was not clear how it would be affected by the recent declines in financial markets. The Association had begun to take appropriate steps in response to these declines; improving membership retention would be one of those steps. He thanked volunteers and staff for their hard work during his Presidency.
Distinguished Service Award
Action: The Board approved the presentation of a Distinguished Service Award at the 2010 Annual Meeting.
Reappointment of Executive Director
Dr. Blistein’s current term as Executive Director would expire in June 2009, and he had requested reappointment for three more years, i.e., through June 2012. Dr. Blistein absented himself from the meeting while the Board discussed this request. In accordance with the Regulations, Prof. Raaflaub had solicited comments on Dr. Blistein’s performance from all current and recent vice presidents and, at Dr. Blistein’s request, from Profs. David Porter and Michael Putnam, the Chairs of the Development and Capital Campaign Committees, respectively. Prof. Raaflaub had shared these comments with the members of the Executive Committee, and the Committee had unanimously recommended that the Board reappoint Dr. Blistein for a three-year term.
Action: After discussion, the Board approved the reappointment of Dr. Blistein as Executive Director from July 1, 2009 through June 30, 2012.
Dr. Blistein returned to the meeting. As part of its consideration of the reappointment, the Executive Committee had also discussed the criteria to be used for the Executive Director’s annual performance evaluation. Prof. Raaflaub had circulated a draft of these criteria for consideration by the Board. In a section listing three primary responsibilities several Directors suggested the addition of language concerning communication of the mission and activities of the Association. After discussion, Prof. Ober stated that he would solicit additional comments on this document from Directors before preparing a letter of reappointment for Dr. Blistein.
Reports of Outgoing Vice Presidents
Professional Matters. Prof. Konstan reported that since September all issues submitted to the Subcommittee on Professional Ethics had been resolved privately with the exception of one letter to an institution about its treatment of a member hired for a tenure-track position. Reports on both the departmental census and the survey of journal editors had recently been published, and census data had been used to respond to some specific queries from departments. The Classics Advisory Service had assisted staff of one department threatened with the loss of its Greek program, and the Professional Matters Committee was considering the development of a general strategy to respond to what it expected to be a larger number of such problems in a difficult economy.
Research. Prof. Henderson stated that since his last report the Association had received a grant in support of the American Office from the Packard Humanities Institute. The Office's Advisory Board and the Finance Committee would discuss the use of these funds during the annual meeting. With funds from the Mellon Foundation, Eric Rebillard, Editor of APh Online, was exploring ways to improve the user interface of the electronic bibliography and to install links from it to both modern literature and ancient texts.
At its annual meeting in November SIBC had decided to close all its self-submission web sites but to host sites in which the individual offices could post citations they had prepared before final acceptance by the Editor-in-Chief. A proposal to have offices sign abstracts of articles had been abandoned. Prof. Clayman stated that she was continuing to seek an appropriate archive for the Database of Classical Bibliography material.
The TLL Fellowship was operating on a sound financial basis, and Kathleen Coleman had agreed to accept another term as Committee Chair. At its upcoming meeting the Research Committee would discuss its priorities for the future. Prof. Henderson thanked the members who had served on Research Division committees during his term for their assistance.
Teagle Foundation Assessment Project
The Directors had received a letter from Prof. Barbara Gold asking for comments on a project funded by the Teagle Foundation to study the impact of studying Classics on students' thinking and reasoning skills.
Action: Directors made a number of comments on the study and asked Dr. Blistein to convey them to Prof. Gold.
Annual Meetings
2009 (Philadelphia). Dr. Blistein reported that as of the previous day, the Associations had received registration fees from 2,180 individuals. The majority of registrants submitted their payments online, and this made it possible to extend the advance registration deadline, which in turn, would likely reduce the number who would register at the meeting. He expected a total registration of about 2,300. [The final figure was 2,460.]
As a cost-saving measure, the Board had decided to mail the annual meeting Program to members only on request, and production of the book had been held up to allow for the insertion of a DVD prepared by Prof. Briggs demonstrating the digital portal. Dr. Blistein stated that few members had asked that the Program be mailed to them.
The Office had also experimented with having authors of accepted abstracts submit them online to the printer of the Abstract Book. Some difficulties had been encountered, but the book had appeared on schedule and the same submissions had been posted to the APA web site. At the suggestion of Prof. Ober, Dr. Blistein would discuss online abstract submission with the Social Science Research Network. The call for abstracts for 2010 had already been issued, but it might still be possible to have online submission of individual abstracts in May as a test.
This year AIA had changed its abstract submission deadline from Spring to late Summer in order to capture reports of the current year's excavations. This change had caused the late development of its program, but there had been little difficulty in dividing space among the two associations and affiliated groups.
Future Meetings. Dr. Blistein hoped to continue to retain a third-party planning firm for subsequent annual meetings. The current firm had been reasonably successful in negotiating contracts and had provided excellent assistance to the APA's limited staff in the months before and especially at the meeting. He would propose this course of action to AIA's Executive Director and ask the firm to start negotiating with hotels for the 2013 through 2015 meetings during the current good market for obtaining meeting space.
The 2010 meeting would be in Orange County (Anaheim), California from January 6-9. These dates were a Wednesday through a Saturday (instead of the usual Thursday through Sunday) to permit registrants to return to the East Coast for Monday classes. This meeting would be the venue for the first joint panel with the Classical Association (CA). Prof. Raaflaub and CA Chair, David Scourfield would sign an agreement concerning these panels at the upcoming Plenary Session. The 2011 meeting would take place in San Antonio from January 6-9, and the 2012 meeting would return to Philadelphia on January 5-8. The Directors discussed briefly whether the Associations should consider the Wednesday-Saturday pattern for meetings not on the West Coast. There was no support for this change.
Financial Matters
Finance Committee. Before the meeting, Prof. Briggs had distributed to the Board a memorandum discussing the impact of the current problems in financial markets on the Association's investments and outlining the steps that the Association could take in the next fiscal year (beginning July 1, 2009) to offset what were expected to be decreases in revenue caused by the declines in the value of its endowment and possibly reduced membership, registration, and placement income as well. He stated that the Finance Committee would discuss this memo at its meeting on January 10, and present choices to the Board for consideration on January 11.
Preliminary Financial Statement for 2008 Fiscal Year. Dr. Blistein had prepared an interim financial statement for the 2008 fiscal year. Although an audited statement was not yet ready, the Association's auditors had been in his office during December, and this statement reflected both some of their work and adjustments staff had made in preparation for their arrival. Dr. Blistein said that the current statement had few changes from the one reviewed by the Board in September. He anticipated that the auditor's report would show a decrease in all but permanently restricted assets because of losses in financial markets but that permanently restricted assets would still increase because of an additional $600,000 in pledges to the capital campaign during the year.
Updated Budget for 2009 Fiscal Year. The Directors had received a budget updated to show activity or changed circumstances during the first six months of the fiscal year. These included the grant of $14,000 from the Packard Humanities Institute and additional expenses to reflect the possibility that some or all of these funds would be used to pay additional staff to write citations on a backlog of collected volumes. The budget also contained a more pessimistic number for membership dues because of a lack of growth to date. He hoped that Prof. Raaflaub's willingness to write recruitment letters to a number of senior scholars might reverse this trend. On the other hand, the number budgeted for registration fees now appeared to be too low, and sales of GreekKeys software continued to be stronger than anticipated since Prof. Mastronarde had produced a version compatible with the Windows operating system. The budget also included the costs of producing the campaign's demonstration DVD and of printing new annual meeting signboards to replace ten-year-old boards. Funds set aside for printing a Directory of Members had been used for the latter purpose. Salary costs would be below budget but temporary help costs would be higher because of the impact of staff medical leaves.
Investments. From July to December 2008, the General, Pearson, and Coffin Funds had lost about 20% of their value. The impact of overall financial market declines had been mitigated by the Association's fixed income holdings and some conservative action by the Association's advisors in early 2008. The Research and Teaching Fund's aggressive investment guideline had resulted in a larger (27%) loss. Because it had been established only a few years ago, the value of the Coffin Fund was now about $7,000 below the total of its original contributions. The APA's attorney was preparing an opinion concerning the use of the Fund while it was in this condition.
Dr. Blistein reported that he had spoken to the Association's advisor earlier in the day and the Finance Committee would review that discussion on January 10. The advisor had been maintaining substantial cash positions and wanted to start moving some of those holdings back into equities, slowly at first and more rapidly once she could assess the impact of new administration's policies.
New Board Policies
In September the Board had approved a confidentiality and conflict of interest policy for itself to be distributed annually to all Directors. Dr. Blistein asked for comments on drafts of whistleblower and document retention policies which he had circulated in advance of the meeting. The Association's auditors had recommended that the APA adopt policies covering these three areas because of a pending change in the forms it submitted each year to the Internal Revenue Service. Directors suggested several additions to the document retention policy, and Dr. Blistein stated that, after making these additions, he would ask the Association's attorney to review both documents in preparation for final approval by the Board.
Executive Director's Report
The Directors had received Dr. Blistein's annual report to the membership which he had posted on the Association's web site earlier in the week in lieu of presenting it at the annual meeting. To date 273 donors had pledged $1,386,000 to the capital campaign. The Association had received no major gifts since the Mellon Foundation's major grant in September although several possibilities were being pursued. He noted that the annual giving campaigns were suffering from competition with the capital campaign and that some members were still not aware of the necessity of conducting both. The Development Committee would need to address these challenges.
Changes to Regulations
Prof. Briggs had distributed to the Directors several proposed changes to the Regulations affecting the Finance, Nominating, and Program Committees as well as to the Regulation concerning reimbursement of travel expenses.
Action: The Board amended Regulation 16 to make the Senior Financial Trustee the Chair of the Finance Committee and to modify its language concerning Committee meetings.
Action: The Board amended Regulation 17 to bring its language concerning Nominating Committee meetings in line with current practice.
Action: The Board amended Regulation 41 to describe the current pattern of Program Committee meetings. At Dr. Blistein's request, the Board also modified the Regulation to make the Coordinator of Meetings, Program, and Administration an ex officio member of the Committee with voice but without vote.
Action: The Board amended Regulation 69 to clarify the Association's policy of reimbursing travel expenses of committee members only for meetings taking place apart from the annual meeting, except that members needing to arrive at the annual meeting a day early or stay an extra day would receive reimbursement of the cost of staying in a hotel for one night.
Prof. Scodel noted that when the Nominating Committee met in January, it needed to know which members had been appointed to committees for the following year. She also urged the Board to recommend candidates for office, and she asked that the descriptions of each officer's duties be improved.
Action: The Board approved Prof. Scodel's suggestion that current and former office holders be asked to write descriptions of their duties for collation by Dr. Blistein.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 6:15 p.m.
Meeting of the Board of Directors of the
The Board of Directors of the American Philological Association met at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown Hotel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 11, 2009. Those present were Profs. Josiah Ober, President, and Roger S. Bagnall, Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Profs. Barbara Weiden Boyd, Ward W. Briggs, Dee L. Clayman, Cynthia Damon, Alain M. Gowing, Judith P. Hallett, Robert A. Kaster, Donald Mastronarde, James M. May, Carole E. Newlands, S. Georgia Nugent, and James J. O’Donnell, Dr. Lee T. Pearcy, and Prof. Kurt A. Raaflaub. Prof. John Marincola was absent.
Prof. Ober called the meeting at 12:00 noon. The Directors had previously received an agenda for the meeting.
Action: The agenda for the meeting was approved.
Action: In accordance with By-Law #14, Profs. May and Newlands were chosen by lot to serve on the Executive Committee for the year.
President's Report
Prof. Ober stated that he planned no major new initiatives for the year but hoped that the Association would use the time for a careful exploration of new media for scholarly communication. Such deliberations would further the Gateway concept of the capital campaign while the Association continued to certify high quality scholarship and the use of electronic publications.
Report of the Development and Campaign Committees
The Development and Capital Campaign Committees had held a joint meeting on January 9. Dr. Blistein reported for the Chairs of the two committees, Profs. David Porter and Michael Putnam. By February 15, a capital campaign appeal would again be sent to the entire membership except for those who had pledges outstanding or who had already made large contributions. Committee members would follow up individually with a number of potential donors who had not yet made pledges. This group included members who regularly contributed to annual giving (but not yet the campaign), members who had recently obtained positions through the Placement Service, and members who responded to a similar mailing last year with a one-time payment.
During the next few months, the Capital Campaign Committee would develop a strategic plan for the second half of the campaign. An ad hoc subcommittee had been formed to develop different approaches to foundations interested in Greek heritage. The Committees also discussed campaign-related events at the next annual meeting and the addition of junior members to the Committee. Finally, the Committees discussed the contents of the Campaign mailing and the Spring annual giving mailing to be sent in April.
Report of the Finance Committee
Prof. Briggs reported on the Committee's meeting of January 10. In order to conserve endowment funds when their market values were depressed, the Committee hoped to limit withdrawals from the funds to 4% of the trailing three-year average instead of the usual 5%. Putting this change into effect would reduce the amount available from the General Fund by $40,000 to $50,000, and the Committee had devoted the greater part of its meeting to identifying those costs incurred in the 2009 fiscal year that it felt should be cut back in 2010 to meet this goal. Although the budget would not be drafted until the Spring, the Committee asked the Board to discuss these recommendations now so that it could know whether the Directors considered these cuts acceptable when the time came.
Action: The Board authorized the Finance Committee to develop a budget for the 2010 fiscal year that would include the following cost savings should the Committee consider them necessary:
· up to $12,000 from a reduced press run of Amphora
Reports of Vice Presidents
Publications. Prof. O’Donnell reported that TAPA was being produced on schedule, and that a search for a new Editor was in progress. He cited Justina Gregory’s five years of service as Textbooks Editor and stated that it would soon be necessary to find a replacement for Kathryn Gutzwiller as Monographs Editor. If funding could be secured, the Publications Division would hold a retreat during the Fall to discuss the Association’s current arrangements for its book and journal publishing and to consider its appropriate role in the current environment for scholarly publishing. The Publications Committee had agreed to permit departments holding site licenses for GreekKeys to pay a modest additional fee that would include their current students in the license. The Committee had also reviewed progress to date on the Servius project.
Program. Prof. Kaster reported that the current annual meeting program was well received with good attendance at sessions. The Program Committee had met on the previous day and had developed a list of scholars to be invited to organize seminars. The Board discussed the willingness of the Social Science Research Network to maintain an archive of APA conference papers and the scheduling of affiliated group sessions at the time of the Plenary Session.
Action: The Directors instructed Dr. Blistein to ask AIA if it would be willing to prohibit affiliated group meetings taking place at the time of the APA Plenary Session (which was also the time of the AIA Council Meeting).
Research. Prof. Bagnall reported on meetings of the Advisory Boards to the Database of Classical Bibliography and the American Office of l’Année philologique that had taken place during the annual meeting.
Action: The Directors authorized disbanding the Advisory Board to the DCB on June 30, 2009, when the final NEH grant to the project was concluded.
Action: The Directors approved the addition of the Editor of l’Année philologique on the Internet as an ex officio member of the Advisory Board to the American Office.
Prof. Bagnall stated that the Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication was interested in collaborating with the Research Committee on its survey of classicists' research practices. During its meeting on the previous day the Committee had discussed its future activities in light of the fact that the Association had completed the major projects it had been working on for several decades. The Committee felt that its role would appropriately be the vetting and dissemination of digital projects rather than their creation. The Division was also considering a retreat for further discussion of these issues.
Education. Dr. Pearcy reported on the committee meetings in his Division that had taken place during the annual meeting. The Education Committee considered a proposal that it collaborate with the Professional Matters Division to collect statistical information on doctoral programs in Classics and also discussed ways to encourage more applications for the award for precollegiate teaching. The Committee on Ancient History would propose a revision to its current charge. The Committee on Minority Scholarships proposed to modify its call for nominations to make it clear that the awards were limited to U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
Action: The Board agreed to limit the minority scholarships to citizens and permanent residents of the U.S. and Canada.
Dr. Pearcy described progress to date on the Association’s joint effort with the American Classical League to develop standards for Latin teachers and laid out a schedule for action during 2009. This schedule called for publication of a final version of these standards at the end of the year, and Dr. Pearcy explained the importance of having a professionally printed document that could be distributed to educational associations and state accreditation agencies.
Action: The Directors authorized the expenditure of $2,000 on printing the final versions of the APA/ACL standards for Latin teachers.
Dr. Pearcy then described APA efforts to convince the College Board to delay or moderate its decision to reduce the number of AP Latin exams from two to one. While the College Board had not yet issued its final decision, it did not seem interested in creating a two-year sequence of alternating subjects for the exam. The APA Education Committee was beginning to consider how it might develop a curriculum that schools could use to supplement an AP course on a single topic.
Outreach. Prof. Hallett reported that the Committee on Outreach had reviewed a proposed text for a President’s Award to a lay supporter of Classics and would circulate that language to the Board. The Committee would participate in a proposal to the Kress Foundation to fund research among audiences outside of the Association’s membership about the kinds of outreach activities that would interest them. She directed the Board’s attention to the report of the Amphora Editorial Board and noted that its Editors were prepared to accommodate a reduced press run that would be part of the Association’s overall cost-savings measures.
The Committee on Outreach continued to provide Classics experts to the Aquila Theater Company for its Page and Stage program; Aquila was likely to develop a new version of this program. The Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance was considering a film rather than a play for its event at the 2010 annual meeting, and the Committee on the Classical Tradition was seeking to collaborate with scholars working on early American history.
Professional Matters. Prof. May reported on the status of the various surveys conducted by the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups. The Placement Committee would develop a panel on alternative career paths for the 2010 annual meeting. The Placement Service had – for the first time – been able to issue e-mails to registered candidates in advance of the meeting telling them whether they had interviews scheduled at the meeting. The Committee on Professional Matters was concerned about the efforts of some departments to persuade candidates to accept positions before the annual meeting took place. It wanted to work with staff to modify the Statement of Professional Ethics and the Placement Guidelines to handle such situations. It also wanted to consider offering a reduced rate for listing teaching openings in secondary schools in Positions for Classicists and Archaeologists.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 3:20 p.m.
American Philological Association/Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
The American Philological Association invites applications for a one-year Fellowship, tenable from July 2010 through June 2011, which will enable an American scholar to participate in the work of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Institute in Munich. Fellows at the TLL develop a broadened perspective of the range and complexity of the Latin language and culture from the classical period through the early Middle Ages, contribute signed articles to the Thesaurus, have the opportunity to participate in a collaborative international research project in a collegial environment, and work with senior scholars in the field of Latin lexicography. The Fellowship carries a stipend in the amount of $50,400 and is made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The incumbent Fellow may re-apply for a second year, but all applications will be judged on an equal footing.
Applicants must (i) be United States citizens or permanent residents and (ii) already have the Ph.D. or anticipate the award of the degree by July 1, 2010. The opportunity to be trained in lexicography and contribute articles to be published in the lexicon may be of special interest to scholars who are already established in tenure-track positions, as well as those who are just entering the profession. The Fellowship offers valuable experience for scholars in a variety of specialties (e.g., Latin language and literature, Roman law, Roman history, the literature of early Christianity); although it is not limited to individuals working in Latin philology, applicants should possess a thorough familiarity with and a special interest in the Latin language, as well as advanced competence in Greek. It is anticipated that applicants will already have a reading knowledge of German and will be willing to work toward proficiency in spoken German. Women and members of minority groups underrepresented in Classics are particularly encouraged to apply.
Applications should include a curriculum vitae, a statement of what benefits the applicant expects to derive from the Fellowship for his/her research and teaching, and the names of three referees, whom the applicant should ask to send supporting letters to the Executive Director without further notice. It will be in the candidate’s interest if at least one letter can specifically address the candidate’s suitability for the Fellowship. Candidates will be considered by the APA’s TLL Fellowship Committee, which serves as the selection committee. The committee will choose a short-list of candidates to be invited for interview at the Annual Meeting in January 2010 in Orange County (Anaheim), California, and the name of the successful candidate will be announced shortly thereafter. Applications must be received by the deadline of Monday, November 16, 2009. Applications must be submitted via regular mail or courier. Materials sent via FAX or e-mail will not be accepted.
Applications should be sent to: Dr. Adam D. Blistein, Executive Director, American Philological Association, 292 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania, 249 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304. For additional information about the Fellowship, contact the Chairperson of the APA’s TLL Fellowship Committee, Professor Kathleen Coleman, Department of the Classics, Harvard University, 204 Boylston Hall, Cambridge, MA 02138. Telephone: 617-495-2024. E-mail: kcoleman@fas.harvard.edu.
LIONEL PEARSON FELLOWSHIP 2010-2011
The Pearson Fellowship Committee invites nominations for the 2010-2011 Lionel Pearson Fellowship, which seeks to contribute to the training of American and Canadian classicists by providing for a period of study at an English or Scottish university. The competition is open to outstanding students majoring in Greek, Latin, Classics, or closely related fields at any American or Canadian college or university.
Fellows must undertake a course of study that broadens and develops their knowledge of Greek and Latin literature in the original languages; candidates should therefore have a strong background in the classical languages. They should expect to obtain the B.A. by September 2010, in order to begin an academic year of postgraduate work at that time. Normally, the recipient will hold the Fellowship in the academic year immediately after graduating with a bachelor’s degree. The term of the Fellowship is one year. The recipient may use the Fellowship for part of a longer program of study, but under no circumstances will support from the Fellowship extend beyond one year. Fellows are responsible for seeking and obtaining admission to the English or Scottish university where they intend to study. The maximum amount of the Fellowship will be $25,000 which may be used to offset academic fees, travel expenses, housing and subsistence costs, and book purchases.
Candidates for the Fellowship require nomination by a faculty member who is familiar with their work. Faculty members who wish to nominate a student for the Fellowship must send the student's name to the current chair, Professor Walter Englert, who will send the nominator an application form and other relevant materials. The committee discourages programs from nominating more than one student, and those desiring to make multiple nominations should contact the chair in advance. Nominations and inquiries may be made only by e-mail to Walter Englert (walter.englert@reed.edu). The deadline for receiving nominations is Friday, October 2, 2009.
The second step in the nomination process is the submission of a completed application. Application materials will be sent to nominators by October 5th and the completed application must arrive at the offices of the American Philological Association by Friday, October 30, 2009.
2010 Annual Meeting: Deadline for Proposals for Roundtable Discussion Sessions Extended
This 90-minute joint session with the AIA consists of a number of tables devoted to discussions of a variety of topics, with at least one discussion leader for each topic. Members are invited to propose themselves as roundtable discussion leaders. Topics may be the leader’s area of scholarly interest or an issue important to the profession. Since certain topics lend themselves to presentation by more than one leader, proposals for multiple leaders are welcome. The Program Committee believes that these sessions can provide an excellent opportunity for younger registrants (both graduate students and recent Ph.D.'s) to interact with established scholars in a less formal environment than a session or a job interview. Leadership of a roundtable discussion does not count as an “appearance” on the annual meeting program; i.e., roundtable leaders may present a paper or serve as a respondent in an APA paper session.
The Program Committee invites members to submit brief (50-100 word) descriptions of a suitable topic for a roundtable. These submissions for the annual meeting in Orange County (Anaheim), CA should be sent to the Executive Director's Office by September 4, 2009.
University and College Appointments
The following are the names of the candidates who have obtained new positions through the 2008-09 Placement Service. Additional names will be printed in a future issue of the Newsletter, and we are still accepting submissions. Candidates whose names appear in bold and italics represent individuals who filled a new position at that institution. Also listed are institutions who contacted the Placement Service and stated that no one was hired as a result of their candidate search.
Brown University
Bryn Mawr College
Bucknell University
University of California - Berkeley
University of California - Irvine
University of California - Santa Barbara
Calvin College
University of Chicago
Christendom College
University of Cincinnati
Colgate University
University of Colorado
Columbia University
Cornell College
Duke University
Emory University
Georgia State University
Gettysburg College
Hamilton College
Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Johns Hopkins University
Loyola University Chicago
McMaster University
University of Miami
Middlebury College
New York University
Oberlin College
University of Oklahoma
University of Pittsburgh
University of Queensland
University of Rochester
St. Olaf College
Swarthmore College
Sweet Briar College
University of Sydney
Temple University
University of Texas at Austin
Texas Tech University
University of Toronto
Trinity University
Union College
Washington and Lee University
Wesleyan University
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Publication of Dissertation Listings
Information on dissertation titles for 2008-2009 will be published in the August 2009 issue of the Newsletter.
Reminder for Organizers of Panels at 2011 APA Annual Meeting
The Program Guide for the January 2011 Annual Meeting will appear in October. Organizers of affiliated group and organizer-refereed sessions that have been approved for presentation at the 2011 meeting are reminded that calls for abstracts for their sessions should be sent to the Association Office no later than September 18, 2009. See last year's Program Guide (October 2008 Newsletter) for samples of previously published calls for abstracts.
Michael C. J. Putnam, Brown University, has received the Centennial Medal from the American Academy in Rome, the highest honor the Academy bestows. Prof. Putnam was recognized for devoted and distinguished service to the arts and humanities, for promotion of understanding between nations of their common cultural heritage, and for exceptional contributions as a scholar, professor and mentor.
Announcements
Classics in the Modern World – a Democratic Turn? An International Research Collaboration. The Reception of Classical Texts Research Project at the Open University, UK is developing an international collaborative research initiative to investigate the notion of a ‘Democratic Turn’ in Classical receptions practice and research. A research conference will be held on 18-20th June 2010 at the Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. The aims will be to map and evaluate the conceptual parameters of a ‘Democratic Turn’, to analyse the critical practices of classical reception scholarship, to explore classical receptions in creative work (film, literature, theatre) and to assess the relationship between theory, practice and the wider world. We hope the discussions will lead to a more informed evaluation of the role of classics and classical receptions in the wider field of cultural change.
Since our international collaborators are from many continents we have approached the project in three stages. First of all we have invited expressions of interest and contribution of ideas from individual and group research projects. There has been a very strong response and a number of seminar and colloquia organisers have already contacted us to discuss how their work might feed into the conference (further enquiries are welcome; please e mail C.A.Gillespie@open.ac.uk to get on the mailing list).
Second, there will be an e mail seminar from October-December 2009 to take the discussion to the next stage. Those who are interested in participating in Panels at the 2010 conference, acting as discussants and helping to prepare the intellectual ground in general are asked to send brief proposals to Carol Gillespie by 10 September 2009. These proposals (maximum 1,000 words) should state the specific theme for your Panel, identify specific case studies and/or research questions that it will address and comment on their implications for the theme of the conference. These will be circulated on our e mail list and responses, suggestions and constructive criticisms will be invited and circulated. We hope that this will help participants to think through the implications of their own work and its relationship to the themes of the conference and also to identify possible Panel participants and other useful contacts outside their own institutions/national groups. We will then ask for formal proposals for Panels (closing date 31 December 2009). The organising committee will then finalise the conference programme and circulate it by the end of January 2010. This will allow plenty of time for Panel participants and discussants to liaise before presenting their papers.
Our aim is to ensure that the conference is more than the sum of its parts. We would like it to support the role of individual and group research as providers of a rigorous basis for promoting the discussion of over-arching questions. All sessions will be plenary and plenty of time for discussion will be built into the programme. The working language will be English. We expect that the conference itself will lead to a substantial publication and also hope that it will stimulate future collaborations. Researchers will be welcome to bring their graduate students and there will be a workshop for these students before the full conference begins, plus a work in progress session for them to make poster presentations on the final day.
Background to the idea of a ‘Democratic Turn’:
Classical texts, material culture and ideas seem in the last thirty or forty years to have become more widely and radically used and re-used among many groups and communities, irrespective of whether or not they have had a classical education of any kind. Furthermore, such rewritings and re-imaginings of classical material have frequently been used as part of the advocacy of liberation and emancipation or in social and political critique. Discussions about the relationship between classical languages and the vernacular or the demotic continue, as do debates about whether ancient historiography and philosophy provide a usable basis for decision making today. Such contested appropriations are not new and there is a long history of examples in which classical referents have been used by all sides in struggles for power and in aesthetic debate.
The word ‘Turn’ (which has also been applied to cultural studies, translation studies or performance) usually signals a redressing of balances, a pendulum swinging away from perspectives that were thought to be too dominant. So a ‘Democratic Turn’ might be seen as turning the focus away from the association of classical texts and the study of antiquity with elite groups with the necessary education, wealth and leisure. However, the concept of ‘Turn’ can also indicate more persistent changes in perceptions of how texts are constituted and how meaning might be ascribed and transmitted. A ‘Turn’ might even imply lasting transformations of various kinds.
Then there are some important caveats. The word ‘Democratic’ carries contested meanings and resonances. Pluralism and diversity are not necessarily accompanied by democracy. Liberation movements are not necessarily ‘democratic’ either in intention or effect. ‘Popular’ or ‘mass’ cultural forms may be manipulative rather than enabling. There may be aspects of classical texts, material culture and ideas (and the accretions that they attract on the way) that transmit ideas that are far from democratic (even in some cases repulsive). What is being transplanted covertly, or being received unknowingly? Above all, how and by whom can such processes be explained? What is involved in becoming a reflective reader, viewer, spectator or practitioner. Does a ‘Democratic Turn’ emphasise becoming a member of a deliberative community rather than a consumer or an adherent of a particular ideology?
The 2010 conference will provide a forum for vigorous review and debate of these and other knotty questions.
Lorna Hardwick
NEH Grants for Undergraduate Teaching. The National Endowment for the Humanities supports undergraduate course development through Enduring Questions Course Grants (for new courses) and Teaching Development Fellowships (for existing courses).
Enduring Questions Course Grants (up to $25,000). What is the good life? What is beauty? What is friendship? What is the relationship between humans and the natural world? Enduring questions such as these have long held interest to college students and allow for a special, intense dialogue across generations. The National Endowment for the Humanities will award Enduring Questions course grants, which support a college faculty member from any discipline with up to $25,000 to develop a new humanities course at the undergraduate level on a question of enduring significance, to be taught at the sponsoring institution at least twice during the grant period. The application deadline is September 15, 2009. For more information and instructions, please see the grant guidelines at http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/EnduringQuestions.html
Teaching Development Fellowships (up to $21,000). The National Endowment for the Humanities will award Teaching Development Fellowships to support college and university teachers pursuing research aimed specifically at improving an existing undergraduate course that the applicant has taught already in three different terms and will continue to teach. The research undertaken as a part of the project may involve engaging with fundamental texts or sources, exploring related subjects or academic disciplines, or cultivating neglected areas of learning. Research in any area of the humanities is welcome. Teaching Development Fellowships cover periods from three to five months and carry stipends of $4,200 per month. Thus, the maximum stipend is $21,000 for a five-month award period. The application deadline is October 1, 2009. For more information and instructions, please see the grant guidelines at
ACLS Fellowships. The American Council of Learned Societies offers fellowships and grants in more than a dozen programs for research in the humanities and related social sciences at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels. The specifics of the competitions vary. Program descriptions, eligibility requirements, and application procedures for each program can be found on the Competitions and Deadlines web page: http://www.acls.org/programs/comps/.
Fellows and grantees in all programs are selected by committees of scholars appointed for this purpose. An individual may apply to as many fellowship and grant programs as are suitable. However, not more than one ACLS or ACLS-joint award may normally be accepted in any one competition year.
The Princeton University Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts invites applications for three-year postdoctoral fellowships 2010-2013 for recent PhDs (January 2007 – June 2010) in humanities or allied social sciences. The Society will offer three appointments to pursue research and teach half-time. The stipend is approximately $72,000, and the application deadline is October 1, 2009. For details, see the Society's web site: www.princeton.edu/~sf.
Contact Information for APA Member Services
American Philological Association Membership Services
Important Dates For APA Members
September 4, 2009 Extended Deadline for Roundtable Discussion Session Proposals
September 14, 2009 Nominations for Precollegiate Teaching Awards (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/awards_and_fellowships/individual_awards/call_for_nominations_for_2010_collegiate_teaching_awards)
September 29, 2009 Deadline for Paper Election Ballots
October 1, 2009 Deadline for Online Election Ballots
October 2, 2009 Nominations for Pearson Fellowship (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/awards_and_fellowships/individual_awards/pearson)
November 16, 2009 Applications for APA/NEH TLL Fellowship (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/awards_and_fellowships/individual_awards/tll)
January 6-9, 2010 141st Annual Meeting, Orange County (Anaheim), CA (Note: Meeting will run from Wednesday through Saturday)
January 6-9, 2011 142nd Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX
January 5-8, 2012 143rd Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA
The APA's Gatekeeper to Gateway Campaign will establish an Endowment for Classics Research and Teaching and obtain the gifts necessary to receive $650,000 offered in an NEH Challenge Grant. The Association is undertaking this Campaign to ensure that its members will have the scholarly and pedagogical resources they need to do their work for decades to come. The Campaign also shares with a wider public the excitement and commitment that APA members have for their subjects.
· The Association has received over $1.4 million in pledges from over 375 donors and has claimed $460,000 of the $650,000 available from the NEH Challenge Grant.
· It is now possible to make a pledge online. Visit the secure web site listed below to make a new pledge and partial payment or make payment on an existing pledge using your credit card.: https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/AmericanPhilologicalAssociat/OnlineDonation.html.
· See the main Campaign page on the APA web site (http://apaclassics.org/index.php/support_the_APA/campaign_for_classics) for links to the revised, professionally produced version of the demonstration of the digital portal that this Campaign will make possible in both Windows Media and Quicktime formats.
University of Maryland, College Park
September 2011
Vice President for Professional Matters
Roger Bagnall
January 2012
Report of the APA Delegate to the ACLS
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APA Executive Director
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January 6, 2011
San Antonio, TX
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January 9, 2011: San Antonio, TX
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2012 Annual Meeting: Deadline for Proposals for Roundtable Discussion Sessions Extended
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Supported by a Generous Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
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Classics Department
University of Leiden
P.O.Box 9515
2300 RA Leiden
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 (71) 527 2673
Department of Classical Studies
University of Pennsylvania
201 Cohen Hall
Philadelphia PA 19104-6304
USA
Dr. Sonia Klinger,
Department of Art History,
University of Haifa,
31905 Mt. Carmel, Haifa
ISRAEL
Funding Opportunities/Fellowships
Contact Information for APA Member Services
Journals Division, Johns Hopkins University Press
P. O. Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211-0966
Important Dates For APA Members
September 6, 2011
Extended Deadline for Roundtable Discussion Proposals
September 16, 2011
Nominations for Precollegiate Teaching Awards
September 16, 2011
Calls for Abstracts for Organizer-Refereed and Affiliated Group Panels for 2012 Annual Meeting
September 30, 2011
Nominations for Pearson Fellowship
November 15, 2011
Nominations for APA/NEH Fellowship to TLL
January 5-8, 2012
143rd Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA
January 3-6, 2013
144th Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA
January 2-5, 2014
145th Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL
January 8-11, 2015
146th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA
January 7-10, 2016
147th Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA
January 5-8, 2017
148th Annual Meeting, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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2010 Report of the VP for Publications
2010 Report of the VP for Research
The Research Committee shared these concerns, but at the same time took a more optimistic view of the utility of a list if it was accompanied by information like the target audience of web resources and the kinds of uses to which they could be put. It did not feel that any fine-grained ranking would be a good idea, but it did think that some process for deciding what to include was unavoidable. The Executive Director has received a fair number of offers of volunteer services in identifying and describing sites, but the question is who would make the final decisions and on what basis, and what legitimacy such decisions would have.
The Committee suggested for Board discussion a model in which the six elected non-officer directors would serve as a selection panel, the legitimacy and authority of which derives from their election and seems secure. It would be charged with establishing criteria for inclusion. The larger group of volunteers would be asked to identify sites and provide descriptions of them to allow this panel to make decisions. This and other possibilities will be discussed further at the Board’s next meeting.
Highlights of the 142nd Annual Meeting
Acknowledgments of Service to the APA
Executive Director’s Report for 2010
Call for Volunteers for 2012 Annual Meeting
Individual Subscriptions to ACLS Humanities E-Books
Winter 2010 Announcements
Literature and Culture in the Ancient Mediterranean: Greece, Rome, and the Near East, November 2011 and October 2012
Institute For Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Opportunities for Scholars 2012-2013
2010 Winter Announcements of Meetings
Nonnus of Panopolis in Context. Poetry and Cultural Milieu in Late Antiquity Rethymno, Crete, 13-15 May 2011
Music in Aristotle Politics Book VIII, Corfu, 4-10 July 2011
Anatolian Society Joint Conference, July 11-12, 2011, Ioannou School, Oxford
Texts and Contexts, The Ohio State University, October 7-8, 2011
Alexander the Great and Egypt: History, Art, Tradition, University of Wroclaw, Poland, 18-19 November 2011
The Reception of Rome and the Construction of Western Homosexual Identities, Durham University, 17th-18th April 2012
2010 Winter Announcements of Funding Opportunities
Cultural Programs Specialist
A variety of positions in different bureaus are available
Officers, Directors, and Committee Members for 2011
President:
Kathleen M. Coleman
Immediate Past President:
Dee L. Clayman
President-Elect:
Jeffrey Henderson
Financial Trustees:
Executive Director:
Adam D. Blistein (1999-2012)
DIVISION VICE PRESIDENTS
Education:
Ronnie Ancona (2010-2014)
Outreach:
Judith P. Hallett (2008-2012)
Professional Matters:
James M. May (2009-2013)
Program:
Joseph Farrell (2011-2015)
Publications:
James J. O'Donnell (2008-2012)
Research:
Roger S. Bagnall (2009-2013)
DIRECTORS
COMMITTEES ON GOVERNANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
CAPITAL CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE
Honorary Advisory Committee
DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
FINANCE COMMITTEE
C.J. GOODWIN AWARD OF MERIT COMMITTEE
NOMINATING COMMITTEE
OUTREACH PRIZE COMMITTEE
PEARSON FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE
AD HOC COMMITTEE ON ARCHIVES
EDUCATION DIVISION
EDUCATION COMMITTEE
ANCIENT HISTORY COMMITTEE
COFFIN TRAVELING FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE
JOINT COMMITTEE (WITH ACL) ON THE CLASSICS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION
COMMITTEE ON MINORITY STUDENT SCHOLARSHIPS
TEACHING EXCELLENCE AWARDS COMMITTEE
OUTREACH DIVISION
OUTREACH COMMITTEE
ANCIENT AND MODERN PERFORMANCE COMMITTEE
CLASSICAL TRADITION AND RECEPTION COMMITTEE
PROFESSIONAL MATTERS DIVISION
PROFESSIONAL MATTERS COMMITTEE
JOINT COMMITTEE (WITH AIA) ON PLACEMENT
COMMITTEE ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN AND MINORITY GROUPS
DIRECTOR OF THE CLASSICS ADVISORY SERVICE
PROGRAM DIVISION
PROGRAM COMMITTEE
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS COMMITTEE
PUBLICATIONS DIVISION
PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE
COMMITTEE ON TRANSLATIONS OF CLASSICAL AUTHORS
EDITOR OF TAPA
EDITOR OF THE APA MONOGRAPHS SERIES
EDITOR OF THE APA TEXTBOOK SERIES
INFORMATION ARCHITECT
RESEARCH DIVISION
RESEARCH COMMITTEE
ADVISORY BOARD TO AMERICAN OFFICE OF L'ANNÉE PHILOLOGIQUE
TLL FELLOWSHIP COMMITTEE
REPRESENTATIVES AND DELEGATES
REPRESENTATIVES
TO THE AMERICAN CLASSICAL LEAGUE
TO THE ANCIENT WORLD MAPPING CENTER
TO THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
TO THE TLL
TO THE ADVISORY BOARD OF THE TLG
DELEGATES
TO ACLS
TO FIEC
Editorial Policies for APA Newsletter
Newsletter Editor
blistein@sas.upenn.edu
Important Dates For APA Members
(All deadlines are receipt deadlines unless otherwise indicated.)
Capital Campaign News
Advertisements
Summer-Fall 2010 Newsletter
The Newsletter of the American Philological Association
Summer-Fall 2010
Volume 33, Numbers 3-4
Table of Contents
Newsletter Publication Schedule
Appointment of Information Architect
Dues Rates, Publications, and Member Communications in 2011
Report of the 2008-2009 TLL Fellow
Report of the 2009-2010 Pearson Fellow
David D. and Rosemary H. Coffin Fellowship for Travel in Classical Lands
Board of Directors’ Minutes
Report of the Finance Committee
Development
Executive Director's Report
Reports of Vice Presidents (Fall 2010)
Education
Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation
The recently published document, Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation, is a joint effort by APA and the American Classical League to describe the skills and knowledge that beginning Latin teachers should have. The Standards are intended to inform colleges and universities, state accrediting agencies, and individuals who plan to teach or are currently teaching Latin. The Standards should be of interest to all those involved in teaching Latin since they incorporate valuable pedagogical aims and practices. In addition, knowing what is expected of a beginning Latin teacher can help us all to support the development of the next generation of Latin teachers.
Ronnie Ancona
APA Vice President for Education
This is the link to an electronic version of the Standards:
http://www.aclclassics.org/pdf/LatTeachPrep2010Stand.pdf
This is the link for ordering a hard copy:
http://www.aclclassics.org/pdf/standards_order.pdf
Outreach
NEH Grant of $800,000 for Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives
Classical Reception Studies Network at the Open University
Classics in the media, and on listservs and websites
Speakers’ Bureau; Musical and Performance Classicists Rosters
Amphora
Outreach Committee (Chair, Judith P. Hallett).
Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (Chair, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz).
Committee on the Classical Tradition (Chair, Dirk Held, Connecticut College).
Professional Matters
Subcommittee on Professional Ethics
Committee on Placement (Submitted by Erich Gruen)
Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (Submitted by Stephen Trzaskoma)
Classics Advisory Service (Submitted by John F. Miller)
Program
Program Committee Proposal on Plenary Session Adopted by Board of Directors on October 2, 2010
Publications
Research
Task Force on Summer Programs (John Bodel)
Organization and location
Frequency and duration
Staffing and costs
Other thoughts
Task Force on Performance Archives (C. W. Marshall). (K. Bosher, Northwestern University, M.-K. Gamel, University of California (Santa Cruz)
Case for an Archive
Location and Resources
Staff, Space, Bandwidth
Opportunities
Recommendations.
Task force on Prosopography (Richard Talbert and Charlotte Roueché)
I. Graeco Roman
II. Byzantine
Possible future projects
Task Force on a Database of Classical Scholars (Ward Briggs)
Born: 27 Mar. 1860, Redding, CT,
Task Force on Translations (Susanna Braund)
In Memoriam
Deceased Members
APA 50-Year Club
Announcements
Awards to Members
Meetings/Calls for Abstracts
Summer Programs
Funding Opportunities
Capital Campaign News
Spring 2010 Newsletter
The Newsletter of the American Philological Association
Contact Information for APA Member Services
Winter 2010 Newsletter
April 15, 2010
Petitions to Nominate Alternate Candidates for Association Offices
May 10, 2010
Nominations for Collegiate Teaching Awards
May 14, 2010
Individual Abstracts for 2011 Annual Meeting
June 1, 2010
Nominations for APA President's Award
June 4, 2010
Nominations for Goodwin Award
July 12, 2010
Nominations for Outreach Prize
July 30, 2010
Responses to Officer/Committee Survey
September 13, 2010
Nominations for Precollegiate Teaching Awards
January 6-9, 2011
142nd Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX
January 5-8, 2012
143rd Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA
October-December 2009 Newsletter
Volume 32, Numbers 5-6
If you would be willing to lend your expertise to this project, particularly by responding to queries from denizens of the musical world, please send a brief (200-300 word) biography describing your "credentials" and interests in both classics and music to Judith P. Hallett jeph@umd.edu. The deadline for inclusion in the initial list is February 28, but it will be updated regularly.
August 2009 Newsletter
June 2009 Newsletter
Volume 32, Number 3
Table of Contents
This is a revised reprint (rather than a preprint!) of my February 2009 President’s Letter. Many in the APA membership seem to have missed the February Newsletter, due to the change-over to electronic distribution. Since I regard the issue of preprints and open access to be of great importance to the future of the organization, I offer it again. My apologies to those who read this Letter last winter. To those missed it the first time around, I hereby reiterate my previous invitation to the members of the APA to make their scholarly work-in-progress public as preprints on the newly formed Classical Research Network (CRN). Instructions about how to find and submit papers on the CRN will be found below. But first I will try to answer the obvious question: “Why should classicists bother with preprints?” Preprints are not peer-reviewed publications. But they can be an important stage on the way to peer-reviewed publication and there is considerable value in making one’s scholarship public in advance of final publication.
Enter into your browser: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/displayjournalbrowse.cfm, which will bring up a list of Networks. Find, at the bottom of the list, “Humanities Research Network.”
Executive Director
American Philological Association
January 8, 2009
Philadelphia, PA
American Philological Association
January 11, 2009
Philadelphia, PA
· $10,000 from reduced distribution of the Newsletter for a full year
· $23,000 from reduced food service at the annual meeting (including the President’s Reception)
· elimination of the $5,000 reserve for book subventions
· elimination of the $2,000 budget item for marketing
Supported by a Generous Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
Assistant Professor: Lisa Mignone
Postdoctoral Fellow: Rebecca Handler-Spitz
Lecturer: Francisco Barrenechea
Assistant Professor: Kristine Trego
Visiting Assistant Professor: Matthew Adams
Professor: J. Theodore Peña
Lecturer: Kimberly Cassibry
Assistant Professor: Glenn T. Patten
Assistant Professor: Umit S. Dhuga
Professor: Michèle Lowrie
Search canceled for budgetary reasons.
Assistant Professor: Daniel Markovich
Visiting Assistant Professor: Angelo Mercado
Visiting Assistant Professor: Erin Moodie
Professor: Carole Newlands
Assistant Professor: Marcus Folch
Assistant Professor: Philip Venticinque
Associate Professor: William Johnson
Assistant Professor: Jed Atkins
Position not filled for budgetary reasons.
Search canceled for budgetary reasons.
Assistant Professor: Jonathan David
Visiting Assistant Professor: Sean O’Neill
Visiting Assistant Professor: James Bradley Wells
Assistant Professor: James Capreedy
Postdoctoral Fellow: Sana Aiyar
Postdoctoral Fellow: Olabode Ibironke
Postdoctoral Fellow: Michael Quintero
Instructor: Benjamin Wolkow
Assistant Professor: Kathryn Mattison
Visiting Assistant Professor: Jeffrey Becker
Postdoctoral Fellow: Accepted candidate withdrew
Assistant Professor: Jennifer Ferriss-Hill
Visiting Assistant Professor: Laura Samponaro
Two searches failed.
Assistant Professor: Hilary Becker
Assistant Professor: Rachel Ahern
Search canceled for budgetary reasons.
Search canceled due to department structure change.
Lecturer: Nicholas Gresens
Assistant Professor: Michael Sampson
Assistnat Professor: Jeremy Lefkowitz
Assistant Professor: Bryce Walker
Senior Lecturer: Richard Miles
Lecturer: Anne Rogerson
Assistant Professor: Alex Gottesman
Assistant Professor: Deborah Beck
Assistant Professor: Ayelet Haimson Lushkov
Assistant Professor: Jason Banta
Assistant Professor: Christopher Witmore
Assistant Professor: Jarrett Welsh
Associate Professor: Corinne O. Pache
Visiting Assistant Professor: Randall Childree
Visiting Assistant Professor: Kristen Gentile
Visiting Assistant Professor: Arum Park
Assistant Professor: Eirene Visvardi
Visiting Assistant Professor: Alex Dressler
Visiting Assistant Professor: Grant Nelsestuen
Director: Reception of Classical Texts Research Project (www2.open.ac.uk/classicalreceptions)
Department of Classical Studies
The Open University, UK.
L.P.Hardwick@open.ac.uk
http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/TD_Fellowships.html
Journals Division, Johns Hopkins University Press
P. O. Box 19966, Baltimore, MD 21211-0966
Telephone (U.S. and Canada only): 800-548-1784; (other countries): 410-516-6987
FAX: 410-516-6968; E-mail: jlorder@jhupress.jhu.edu
(All deadlines are receipt deadlines unless otherwise indicated.)
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