Faculty annual reports
FACULTY
Robert Babcock
I spent two months in the summer of 2012 in Brussels as a fellow of the Flemish Institute for Advanced Studies, investigating medieval manuscripts in the Royal Library. The highlight of the summer’s research was discovering fragments from a lost poem by Sigebert of Gembloux, an eleventh-century chronicler whose work I have been studying for years. The new fragments are autographs in Sigebert’s own hand. I gave an invited lecture on unicorns in medieval Latin literature to the Centre d’Etudes sur le Moyen Age et la Renaissance at the Université catholique de Louvain, and enjoyed the museums, art galleries, restaurants, cafes, and bakeries of Brussels and Antwerp. I finished an edition and translation of Egbert of Liège’s Well-Laden Ship, an eleventh-century collection of proverbs, folk tales and fairy tales which includes the earliest version of the Little Red Riding Hood story. On research assignment in the spring of 2013, I am working on The Oxford Handbook of Latin Paleography and a monograph on the medieval schools of Liège.
Owen E. Goslin
Among other projects I continue to work on revising my dissertation on Euripides for publication as a monograph. In this study I show the close association between Euripides’ portrayal of pity on stage, and contemporaneous debates about the role of pity in Athenian public life. As I argue, Euripidean tragedy explores the complex ethical and psychological judgments normally implicit in acts of pity, an emotion that was of great importance in the political life of the Athenian citizen. For example, Euripides’ dramatization of pity provokes reflection on the second-order questions (e.g., “How does the suffering of others become relevant to the self?”) implied by the particular first-order judgments (e.g., “Should I pity and acquit this defendant?”) regularly encountered in the participatory democracy of ancient Athens. In the area of teaching, I have continued to teach Beginning Greek, and am currently teaching a course on Sophocles at the advanced undergraduate level. Last fall I taught Greek Prose Composition to twelve hardy souls, and am happy to report that our Greek did indeed improve, however imperfect it remains.
Donald C. Haggis
Donald Haggis is reopening excavations at Azoria in the summer 2013 (www.azoria.org) for another five-year campaign of fieldwork. The goals of the project are to excavate an early Greek temple (ca. 1100-700 B.C.) and a series of Archaic houses on the west slope of the site; as well as to complete excavation of the Communal Dining Building, which functioned as an andreion or banquet hall for the male citizenry. He will be joined by a staff of 20 archaeologists and specialists; and 50 undergraduate and graduate students from UNC, Duke, and other universities.
The Azoria Project is the excavation of an Archaic Greek city (7th-5th c. B.C.) on the island of Crete. The aims of ongoing fieldwork have been to study the form of an early Greek city, and urbanization and polis formation in the Aegean, focusing on the transition from the Early Iron Age to Archaic periods, and the material correlates for emerging social and political institutions.
This season’s work is funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the National Geographic Society; the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; the Institute for Aegean Prehistory; and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
For making a donation to the Azoria Project excavations follow the links to the Azoria Project Fund page at www.azoria.org.
Victor Martinez, Carolina Postdoctoral Scholar
This is my first year of a two-year appointment as a Carolina Postdoctoral Scholar. I hold a doctorate in art history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but my research and teaching cover classical studies and archaeology broadly.
Already, my short time at UNC has kept me busy. I completed the revisions to a lengthy chapter on architectural and figural terracotta sculpture, which will appear in the second volume of the Palatine East Excavations (PEE) Reports (De Luca Editore 2013). Currently, I am in the process of finishing the research on the western amphorae from PEE, which should appear as a separate monograph sometime in the near future. I am also happy to report that my colleague Scott De Brestian (Central Michigan University) and I will begin a new project — the Najerilla River Regional Survey — this summer in the northern Spanish province of La Rioja. Our goal is to better understand the robust pottery traditions and cultural transformations from the Late Roman to Medieval period in this understudied area.
Finally, after numerous years of gestation, the papers from the “Ancient Libraries” conference held in September 2008 at the University of St. Andrews are scheduled to appear with Cambridge University Press in May 2013 (edited by Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, and Greg Woolf). In addition to my own coauthored contribution, the book contains chapters by our own George Houston and by our Duke University colleague, William A. Johnson.
James J. O’Hara
Jim O’Hara has been director of graduate studies and placement director this year. He continues to work on his book Teaching, Pretending to Teach, and the Authority of the Speaker in Roman Didactic and Satire; he gave talks on the project as the initial lecture in September for the Classics department at UNC, then also at Cornell University, Temple University, and University of Alabama, Huntsville. At Temple and Huntsville he also spoke about “Evander’s Stories of Blood and Gore: New Ways to Read Vergil’s Aeneid 8,” which will appear soon in a Festschrift volume. He continues to work on the Aeneid commentary project for Focus Press. A version of his commentary on Aeneid 4 (Focus 2011) has appeared in the combined volume Vergil Aeneid Books 1-6 (Focus 2012). The combined volume has slightly fewer grammatical notes and no vocabulary and is aimed at upper-level undergraduate classes, while the standalone volumes are aimed at Intermediate Latin classes, like UNC’s LATN 221. For Books 7-12, Jim is co-editor with Randall Ganiban (who was the editor of Books 1-6), and has completed a draft of his commentary on Aeneid 8, which will appear both as a standalone volume and in the joint volume on 7-12. Jim just completed a term on the Board of Trustees of the Vergilian Society.
William H. Race
This year has seen the appearance of a revised, second edition of my two Loeb volumes of Pindar. In addition, I have two forthcoming articles: one entitled “Achilles’ κῦδος in Iliad 24” in Mnemosyne, and the other “Phaeacian Therapy” in an edited volume entitled Combat Trauma in Ancient Greece. For the future, I am preparing several articles and a literary commentary on Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica to accompany my Loeb edition (2008).
G. Kenneth Sams
This past season was my last as director of the Gordion Archaeological Project in central Turkey, a post that I have held on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for 24 years. I plan to continue spending the better part of my summers there, concentrating on continuing study of Phrygian architecture and finds associated with the architecture, all dating from the 10th through the 4th centuries BCE. I also continue to try and unravel the site’s complicated stratigraphy, with an eye toward increased understanding of the progression and chronology of Phrygian material culture.
EMERITI
Kenneth Reckford
Charlotte and I are mostly well and mostly here in Tallahassee. I have begun work on a new book, Aristophanes’ Ever-Flowing Clouds (or, Old Comedy Meets Cultural Change). I’ll be glad of moral support, but please don’t ask when I’ll finish!
Peter Smith
I’ve enjoyed the chance to come back and help the department by teaching two courses this term — especially Greek 508 where I have several excellent students whom I taught in the first year of Greek: now I get to see them enjoying Sappho and Alcaeus and Simonides. My review of Sommerstein’s new Loeb Aeschylus appeared in a recent Classical Review, and another review, of Richard Seaford’s new book on Aeschylus, will appear there in an upcoming issue.
Philip Stadter
Philip Stadter is currently enjoying a three month Fowler Hamilton Visiting Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford, with a project of pulling together a book on Plutarch and his Roman readers and enjoying the English countryside. He will also deliver a paper at a conference, ‘Plutarch’s Cities,’ at Delphi in April. Recent publications include papers on Plutarch, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon, as well as a piece suggesting that Plutarch knew Latin well enough to read an epistle of Horace.
William C. West
I wrote 80 entries for the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History, published in November, 2012.
I presented a paper, “Practical and Informal Writing in Graffiti from Azoria, Crete,” at the XIVth International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, in Berlin, Germany in August, 2012. The paper will be published in the Acta of the Congress and a revised and expanded version will be published as a chapter of Inscriptions in the Private Sphere (forthcoming, Leiden, E. J. Brill).
Cecil W. Wooten
This was one of those momentous years when I passed on to a new stage of my life, like 1961 when I got my driver’s license: I retired on June 30. Actually the move was not as significant as it might seem, since the next day I was rehired as an adjunct to teach a graduate course in Cicero in the fall. I could be rehired, however, only after undergoing a criminal background check, as though on midnight of the day when I retired I had committed some heinous crime. Having been exonerated, I went off to Peru to celebrate my nominal retirement. It was one of the best trips that I have ever had. The landscape is magnificent and extremely varied. The people were as friendly and welcoming as they could have been. The food was excellent. And the sites such as Machu Picchu were among the most astounding that I have ever seen.