Faculty News and Notes, 2013-2014
Faculty
Robert Babcock
I spent the summer of 2013 correcting proofs of The Well-Laden Ship, which appeared in the fall, and working on a monograph on the medieval schools of Liège. In September, I read a paper on “The Eleventh-Century Scriptorium at Gembloux” at the biannual meeting of the Comité International de Paléographie Latine, in St. Gall, Switzerland; I am currently preparing that presentation for publication. The Gembloux scriptorium was also the focus of my graduate seminar in paleography in the fall of 2013, and some of the students’ papers from that class will be presented at the “Texts and Contexts” conference next fall at Ohio State University. Supervising the post-bacc program and the first-year Latin program continues to be rewarding and challenging; and this spring I am enjoying teaching two medieval Latin courses.
Emily Baragwanath
Still in Heidelberg, this past year I’ve spent a great deal of time sitting in my office in the Seminar für Klassische Philologie with its pastoral view out on the Heiligenberg, grappling with Xenophon’s intriguing notions about gender (as well as various other things). Some of the rest of my time has been spent exchanging ideas in academic globetrotting. Determined to make the most of this European perch, I’ve given papers in Thessaloniki (at a fascinating conference on Knowing Future Time in Greek Historiography), Crete, Cyprus and St Andrews, with more in the offing in Basel, Heidelberg, Newcastle, Manchester, Glasgow, Gießen, and Hamburg. Further afield, I’ve presented my work at the annual classical studies conferences of America (Chicago) and Australasia (Palmerston North, NZ). Most recently I have been talking about the importance of ‘Heroes and Homemakers’ in Xenophon at a conference at Yale on Home and Away: the Epic Journey. But with our stint in Germany coming to its close in the summer, Sean, Julia and I are now looking forward to returning soon to our old Chapel Hill haunts!
Owen Goslin
Among other projects I continue to work on my monograph on Euripides. In this study I show how Euripidean tragedy explores the complex ethical and psychological judgments normally implicit in acts of pity, an emotion that was of central importance in the political life of the Athenian citizen. I also traveled to this year’s APA convention in Chicago, where I delivered a paper on the role of athletic imagery in Trojan Women. In the area of teaching, I have continued to teach Beginning Greek, and am currently teaching a course on the Electra plays of Euripides and Sophocles for a group of advanced undergraduate Greek students.”
Sharon L. James
In the last year I’ve taught classes on Roman comedy (graduate and undergraduate), a lecture class on women in ancient Rome, and a graduate class on Menander. I’ve been busy producing articles and working to finish my book on women in New Comedy (which gets longer all the time, but is near completion at last). An article on rape in Menander appeared in December 2013, and more are forthcoming, on a range of subjects: war trauma in Menander’s Aspis, the speech of citizen mothers in Roman comedy, two co-authored articles about the design and results of the NEH Summer 2012 Institute on Performance of Roman Comedy, two articles on pedagogy (one about graduate teaching and one on undergraduate teaching), and a book review. More articles are in the works. The NEH Summer Institute has now had nearly 11,000 views (as of early April) in 101 countries, and seems to be seeing much use in classrooms. The Blackwell Companion to Women in the Ancient World, co-edited with Sheila Dillon, has won two awards and gone into a second printing; later this year it will probably appear in paperback. Another co-edited volume, Women in Roman Republican Drama (co-edited with David Konstan and Dorota Dutsch) will be coming out from the University of Wisconsin Press over the summer, and it will contain the article on the speech of mothers. I will be working over the next few years to get my rough translations of eight Roman comedies (used in teaching) polished up for publication.
James J. O’Hara
I am still Director of Graduate Studies and Placement Director, continue work on my book, Teaching, Pretending to Teach, and the Authority of the Speaker in Roman Didactic and Satire, and am scheduled to teach a graduate seminar on that topic in SP 2015. Work continues also on the Focus Commentary project, in which I am doing Aeneid 8 and also co-editing, with Randall Ganiban of Middlebury, Books 7-12; in my Aeneid 7-12 class in SP 2014, students worked with drafts of portions of the commentaries. As part of my Aeneid 8 work I delivered a paper at New York University entitled “Triumphati magis quam victi? Possible Responses to Lying and Exaggeration in Aeneid 8.” I have a number of entries in the just-published Virgil Encyclopedia, including “Aeneas” and “Turnus.” I have joined the executive committee of CAMWS, the editorial board of Vergilius, and the McKay Book Prize prize committee of the Vergilian Society. Late last academic year I received a teaching award from UNC’s Student Undergraduate Teaching and Staff Awards (SUTASA) Committee, and at the award ceremony reception was unofficially proclaimed to be wearing the “best tie” there by fashion designer (and UNC alum) Alexander Julian. My “propemptic remarks” on the value of Classics at the May 2103 Department Commencement, “Classics and the Big Rock,” are available at the website of a local radio station.
William H. Race
I much enjoyed serving as interim chair fall semester, thanks to the careful planning by James Rives and the wonderful support of Cinnamon, Kim, and Karna. This year I have three publications forthcoming: an essay on translations of Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica to appear in the Cambridge Companion to Apollonius; an article on “Achilles’ kudos in Iliad 24” to appear in Mnemosyne; and an article on “Phaeacian Therapy” to appear in a volume entitled Combat Trauma and the Ancient Greeks, published by Palgrave. In addition, Routledge will be republishing in paperback my 1988 book Classical Genres and English Poetry. I continue to work on a literary commentary on Apollonius’ Argonautica.
James Rives
I spent my fall semester on leave, working on my slowly progressing project on the social and cultural significance of animal sacrifice in the Roman empire. My partner and I spent November and December in Paris, where I was a visiting professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and presented a series of four seminars on my project. I was asked to present my papers in French, which was a challenge for me, but they seemed to go well enough in the end. It was an excellent opportunity to discuss my work with French colleagues, and I received some very useful feedback. And it was a treat to be able to live in Paris for two months! Before arriving in Paris, we did some traveling in England, where I presented papers at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham and met with colleagues in Oxford and London. Earlier in the fall I had the pleasure of lecturing at my undergraduate alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, where UNC PhD Tim Moore is now chair of the Classics department. Administrative responsibilities mean that outside of my leave I make little progress with my research, but it’s fun to have something simmering away on the back burner.
Emeriti
Jerzy Linderski
What I have been doing? Not much. Two pieces await publication, several are in various stages of a snail advance, and two were published in 2013:
“Lily Ross Taylor and the Roman Tribes”, in L. R. Taylor, The Voting Districts of the Roman Republic (Ann Arbor 2013 [reprint with updated material by J. Linderski], VII + 355-403.
“Ink and Blood: Ernst Badian, Rome, and the Art of History”, in C. T. Thomas (ed.), The Legacy of Ernst Badian (2013) 59-78.
Philip Stadter
My wife Lucia and I were fortunate to spend the months of April through June 2013 in Oxford on a Fowler Hamilton Fellowship from Christ Church, during which I prepared a collection of articles for a book, Plutarch and his Roman Readers, to be published by Oxford University Press. Chris Pelling and I conducted a seminar on Plutarch in Context. I attended a conference in honor of Tasos Nikolaides in Delphi and delivered a paper entitled ‘Plutarch and Delphi.’ Most recently, I have just returned from the first independent conference of the North American section of the International Plutarch Society, held March 13-16, 2014 in Banff, Alberta, where I spoke on ‘Barbarian Parallels.’
William C. West
During the past year (2013) I have published my dissertation, Greek Public Monuments of the Persian Wars as an online publication of the Center of Hellenic Studies. Also I contributed about 80 entries in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History, on sites in Greece and the Aegean, Asia Minor, the East Mediterranean, and elsewhere. I presented a paper at the AIA-APA annual meeting, at a session of the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, entitled “Practical Uses of Writing in Graffiti from Azoria, Crete”.
Also, I volunteer one day a week at Scroggs Elementary, Fifth Grade, for help in Reading, and in the fall, I taught a course in “Plutarch’s Shakespearean Heroes” at the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute at Duke.
Cecil Wooten
The highlight of the last year was spending two months in Lille with John Johnston. We rented an apartment and took twenty hours of classes a week at the L’Université Catholique in grammar, literature, cinema, and civilization. It was lots of fun. In the fall I taught Latin composition for James Rives and then went to Paris at Christmas to visit John [Johnston] and James who were spending two months there. In the fall I wrote a chapter on rhetorical technique for the Oxford Companion to Demosthenes, and in December I had an article come out in Rhetorica: “Questions in Greek Rhetorical Theory and Demosthenes’ Philippics,” Rhetorica XXXI (2013), 349-371. I continue to enjoy retirement.