October-December 2009 Newsletter

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 14^th 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

In Memoriam

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 65^th 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 60^th 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*

APA 50-Year Club

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.

Annual Giving and Campaign Acknowledgments

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.

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.

Awards to Members

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.

Meetings/Calls for Abstracts

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

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