The Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) has released a report, It Takes More Than a Major: Employer Priorities for College Learning and Student Success, summarizing the findings of a national survey of business and nonprofit leaders. Among other things, the survey reveals that 74 percent of business and nonprofit leaders say they would recommend a twenty-first century liberal education to a young person they know in order to prepare for long-term professional success in today’s global economy.

“While policy leaders have been focused intensely on what college students are choosing as their majors and what salaries they are being paid shortly after they graduate, business leaders who actually hire college graduates are urging us to prioritize the cross-cutting capacities a college education should develop in every student, in every major,” said Mildred García, president of California State University, Fullerton and chair of AAC&U’s board of directors. “No matter what careers students seek, their college education must equip them with intercultural skills, ethical judgment, and a sophisticated understanding of the diversity of our society and of any successful business or organization.”

We are very pleased to announce the creation of the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing (DC3), a new Digital Classics R&D unit embedded in the Duke University Libraries, whose start-up has been generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Duke University’s Dean of Arts & Sciences and Office of the Provost.

The DC3 goes live 1 July 2013, continuing a long tradition of collaboration between the Duke University Libraries and papyrologists in Duke’s Department of Classical Studies. The late Professors William H. Willis and John F. Oates began the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP) more than 30 years ago, and in 1996 Duke was among the founding members of the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS). In recent years, Duke led the Mellon-funded Integrating Digital Papyrology effort, which brought together the DDbDP, Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis der Griechischen Papyrusurkunden Ägyptens (HGV), and APIS in a common search and collaborative curation environment (papyri.info), and which collaborates with other partners, including Trismegistos, Bibliographie Papyrologique, Brussels Coptic Database, and the Arabic Papyrology Database.

The DC3 team will see to the maintenance and enhancement of papyri.info data and tooling, cultivate new partnerships in the papyrological domain, experiment in the development of new complementary resources, and engage in teaching and outreach at Duke and beyond.

The International Federation of the Societies of Classical Studies (FIEC) has posted a second announcement with more details about its 14th International Congress to be held in Bordeaux (France) from Monday 25th August to Saturday 30th August 2014. This meeting in Bordeaux will give classicists from around the world and at all stages of their careers the opportunity to gather and provide an overview of the most recent research in classical studies.

University of South Carolina
16th Annual Comparative Literature Conference
February 26-March 2, 2014

• What is translation? Is it a signifying process? A transfer of knowledge? Or the dissemination of tradition itself?
• What are the grounds of comparison between noncognate traditions?
• How are classics received within their own traditions and within other traditions?
• How does translation relate to local commentarial traditions?
• How do the translation of the classics relate to project of cosmopolitanism?
• How do new media affect the transmission of the classics?
• Are Plato and Aristotle to the postwar West as Confucius and Lao Tzu are to postrevolutionary China?

Classical texts routinely engage the poetic, the political, the social, historical, the religious, and the philosophical without drawing clear boundaries between them. Seeking papers from these and other disciplines, this conference asks how the reception of the classics in both China and the West informs and serves to transform the modern world. When and why do cultures access traditions beyond their bounds and how does that cross fertilization work? We seek papers and participants engaging in dialogues ranging across disciplines and cultures.