December, 2018

Below is a list of the most recent NEH grantees and their Classically-themed projects. The NEH helps fund a number of SCS initiatives, and their support affects the field of Classics at a national and local level.

Grantees

• Suzanne Obdrzalek (Claremont McKenna College) - "Plato's Philosophy of Mind: Soul, Body and Forms in Plato's Oeuvre"
• William Seales (University of Kentucky Research Foundation) - "Reading the Invisible Library: Rescuing the Hidden Texts of Herculaneum
  Project Description: The continued development of computerized techniques to recover writings from the Herculaneum library, the entire collections of which were destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 BCE
• Thomas Keeline (Washington University in St. Louis) - "Latin Textual Scholarship in the Digital Age: An Open-Access Critical Edition of Ovid's Ibis and its Scholia"
• Rachana Kamtekar (Cornell University) - "Human Agency and Cause from Aristotle to Alexander"
• Katharina Volk (Columbia University) - "The Politics of Knowledge in Late Republican Rome"
• Paul Iverson (Case Western Reserve University) - "The 2,000-Year-Old Calculator Known as the Antikythera Mechanism and Ancient Greek Calendars"

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BRITAIN'S EARLY PHILOSOPHERS (Durham, April 1-2, 2019)

The Durham Centre for Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (http://dcamp.uk) is hosting a two-day workshop on Britain's Early Philosophers and is seeking abstracts for contributed talks on any aspect of philosophy and philosophers born in or living in Britain before 1000.

Xenoi: Hospitality and Xenophobia in the Graeco Roman World

Keynote Speaker: Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Denison University

The PhD/MA Program in Classics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York invites graduate students in Classics or related fields to submit abstracts for papers that explore the topics of hospitality and xenophobia in the Graeco-Roman world.

Hospitality is commonly recognized as an important value in the ancient Greek world. Xenia - or guest friendship - was a political and religious institution as well as an instrument of diplomatic relations. Through practices of supplications, strangers and foreigners demanded to be received in aristocratic houses or in whole cities. On the other hand, there is an emerging debate about the existence of xenophobia and ethnocentrism in the ancient world, from the distinction between Greeks and barbarians to the Roman treatment of enemies and slaves.

TEACHING ROME AT HOME

May 2-4, 2019, College Park, Maryland

The Department of Classics at the University of Maryland, College Park, invites proposals from university and K-12 teachers and graduate students for papers and workshops on the ways in which Latin and ancient Roman civilization are now being taught to and connected with a contemporary American audience, with special emphasis on issues of contemporary urgency such as the legacies of gender and social inequality and of slavery. 

The "Classics" were etymologically and institutionally synonymous with attending "class" in the United States from the colonial period up until the end of the nineteenth century.  Americans studied Roman history and literature in school and thus Rome seemed already to be their “home,” especially since the Romans deposed kings who once ruled them just as revolutionary Americans set out to do with the British King. Over its second century, however, America gradually confronted its idealization of a Roman past and began to explore, in discussions of women's rights, of sexual identity, of multiculturalism, and of the fall of Rome, the ways in which the realities of antiquity might speak to us.