Publications. The major activity of the Publications Division during the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010 was a retreat of Publications Committee members and selected others held in Chicago on December 3-4, after which a summary of principles and preliminary recommendations was drafted, circulated, discussed, and revised, most recently at the annual meeting of the Committee in Anaheim on January 7, with some further revision in light of e-mail comment/discussion between that meeting and the APA Board of Directors meeting of January 9. We are very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its intellectual and financial support of these discussions.
We continue to refine the recommendations and investigate the possibility of implementation. In the interim, we offer the following principles to the membership for comment.
1. The Association should support publication of research of the highest quality and distinctive character.
2. A distinctive feature of publication from a learned society is that it can and should embody a collective sense of the focus, standards, and ambitions of the society itself: "performing the profession" as we understand it, in all its breadth and richness, for all that this performance evolves as our understanding of the profession does.
3. At the same time, it is appropriate to place emphasis on ensuring that we also publish what is unique and differentiating, what might not be published elsewhere by entities more bound to attend to commercial concerns. One goal is to encourage members but also the institutions where they are employed to pursue arduous work that might not otherwise easily be encouraged in an institutional culture whose goals are not completely aligned with what the APA imagines its ambitions to comprise.
4. Assuring preservation, that is, durable access, to work published is an important contribution of an Association that has an ambition of continuing to exist for the foreseeable future.
5. The Association should then seek the widest audience congruent with the intellectual ambitions and standards of the work published.
6. Supporting the work of younger colleagues and advancing their careers is a high priority. Inter alia, we can and should support a peer review mechanism that emphasizes evaluation that can be developmentally helpful to scholars early in their careers
Report on the Meeting of the Committee on the Web Site and Newsletter. The "website committee" has been instituted to give the Association's vice presidents an opportunity to discuss common communication and information concerns across divisional boundaries with the Web Editor and the Executive Director. This year, the conversation continued and expanded on work of the Publications and Research retreats and the first Anaheim meeting of the Board.
We confirmed that spending up to $10K for enhancements to the current website capability is necessary and justifiable. Velleities were expressed for better content management, outbound RSS feeds, and blogging capability; Prof. Mitchell-Boyask will experiment within the capabilities that we have and what is freely available. Summer 2010 will see the end of Robin's term; I will work with the President and Executive Director on the search process. [Editor's Note: We are grateful to Prof. Mitchell-Boyask for agreeing to extend his current term through January 2011 to give the Association time for a proper search and to put the term of the Web Editor on the same schedule as that of other editors.]
We discerned a first order set of concerns: making what we do and have in the organization more widely known to prospective members, members, scholars in adjacent and congruent fields, and a wider public. Our second order concerns were like unto the first, but looked to making a better communication capability work for the benefit of sibling or nepotial1 organizations and activities among students and teachers of the ancient world (from the American Society of Papyrologists to theater groups producing Aristophanic reimaginations).
These concerns point to two different kinds of desiderata:
-- a technology framework
-- a credentialing and editorial mechanism
We spoke again a bit of the possibility of a "publisher function" for the association, whether continuing or consultantly, whether unique to APA or shared with one or more other associations. The ACLS comes to mind as a vehicle for linking like-minded societies. The Committee on the Web Site and Newsletter anticipates meeting again this spring in New York in consultation with ACLS leadership to explore these issues further, before the Publications Committee returns to discussion of the specific issues of our current and prospective scholarly publications.
James J. O'Donnell
January 9, 2010
[1] Lest I be accused again of neologism, Google Books advises me that I can blame this word on Joe Russo in a 1999 essay.
Research. Since the September meeting of the Directors, I have mostly been engaged in creating the task forces charged with looking at the various areas the Committee on Research recommended as possible areas for new Association initiatives. So far, task forces on a digital Latin textual corpus (co-chairs: Helma Dik and Robert Kaster), on prosopography (chair: Richard Talbert), on the biography of classical scholars (chair: Ward Briggs), and on an archive of performances (chair: C. W. Marshall) have been appointed, and several more should be appointed within the next few weeks. I am grateful to all who have agreed to serve on these bodies. We have asked them for interim reports by the September meeting of the Directors, but their mandates are otherwise fairly open-ended at this stage.
Of the long-standing projects with which the Association is involved, it is certainly l’Année philologique that has had the most notable developments in the past year. Thanks to a grant from the Packard Humanities Institute and hard work by Lora Holland, it was possible during summer 2009 to clear up a significant part of the long-standing backlog of collective volumes that had not yet been analyzed by article; a significant number of these, however, remain and are a source of concern to the Committee. The offices of the American Office moved to Duke University this summer; the Association is profoundly grateful to the Department of Classics of the University of Cincinnati for its long and generous hosting of the American Office. Three major initiatives on the digital side of the project are also noteworthy: (1) the beginning of the publication of provisional records for recently entered items that are not yet in the permanent database, thus giving access to records much sooner than used to be possible; (2) a new website with improved search interface for APh, which will become available later this winter; and (3) a project to make possible the linking of citations of classical authors in APh to textual databanks containing those authors. This effort, developed through a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is now the subject of an implementation proposal to Mellon that the Association will submit next week.
Roger S. Bagnall
January 9, 2010
Roger Allen Hornsby, Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Iowa, died on October 20, 2009 at his home in Iowa City. He was 83. A memorial service took place in the senate chamber of the Old Capitol on the University of Iowa campus on December 6, 2009. His remains will be interred in Toronto with those of his wife Jessie.
Roger was born at Nye, Wisconsin on August 8, 1926. He received his B.A. at Adelbert College of Western Reserve University in 1949. He attended Princeton University to receive his A.M. in 1951 and PhD. in 1952. Between 1952 and 1954 he served in the U.S. Army. He taught at the University of Iowa from 1954 until his retirement in 1991. He married Jessie Lynn Gillespie, professor of French at the University of Iowa on June 8, 1960.
Roger was active throughout his life in service to the field of Classics. He served as chairman of the department of Classics at Iowa from 1966 to 1981. He was chief reader for the Latin IV advanced placement exam for the Educational Testing Service between 1965 and 1969. He was president of CAMWS in 1968-69, and on the board of directors of the APA from 1974-1977. He was particularly devoted to the American Academy in Rome, for which he was a member of the council in 1974, a resident in 1983, and a trustee in the years 1990-92. He was also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1984-2000) and served on the council of the American Numismatic Society (1973-, and 1984-2000).
Roger had wide interests in the study of the ancient world and the teaching of the languages it spoke. His publications focused on Latin poetry and included Reading Latin Poetry (1967), Patterns of Action in the Aeneid (1970) and articles and reviews in professional journals. Over the years he took his own, personal approach to Classical learning on the road, visiting at Trinity College, UCLA and Georgetown University. After his retirement in 1997-98 he was the Whichard Distinguished Professor at East Carolina University.
Roger’s friends and students—two groups that frequently overlapped—remember fondly his passionate devotion to the life of the mind and his power as a teacher. His mordant judgments held us all to high intellectual standards, and to the end he reveled in the sheer joy of conversation and debate. The Hornsby parties, given by Roger and Jessie in the grand style, enlivened the Iowa academic scene for many years. He is greatly missed.
Robert Ketterer
The University of Iowa
Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Regius Professor of Greek emeritus at Oxford University and Fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and four other national academies, died on 5 October 2009 at age 87, after routine surgery overcame a constitution weakened by several years of declining health. With his passing an era has ended and the world of classical studies has lost one of its unforgettable personalities and most dominant figures, a staunch champion of traditional scholarship who nevertheless took a keen interest in the important scholarly and intellectual developments of his time, encouraging what he found valuable and attacking what he considered unsound, and who addressed specialist and general audiences prolifically and over an exceptionally broad range of subjects, always with a forceful enthusiasm that embraced both fun and ferocity.
To his scholarship Lloyd-Jones brought a matchless command of the Greek language, mastery of philological technique, a prodigious memory, a comprehensive understanding of the history and methods of classical scholarship, and an abiding enthusiasm for Greek culture and thought in all periods ancient and modern. Although his principal focus lay in Greek poetry, drama, and thought, especially religious thought, he followed no particular program but read everything and took up whatever attracted his interest or provoked his intervention, producing articles, essays, notes, and reviews in great profusion (a sampling is gathered in three large volumes of collected papers), and rarely did a new literary papyrus or critical edition escape his jeweler’s eye. Even in well-trodden fields his work was always original and cut right to the chase: wanting above all to learn about the Greeks, he worked directly on primary evidence and pursued it wherever it led, taking no account of previous scholarship, particular methodological approaches, or conventional views unless they could help him discover something new and true; if they were derivative, false, or exemplified incompetence, he denounced them with relish. He was open to any and all new ideas however wild, requiring only that you “knew Greek,” were not boring, and were ready to defend yourself.
Among his large-scale contributions are editions of the fragments of Aeschylus (Lloyd-Jones to Mette: desinas ineptire!), the works in the monumental Supplementum Hellenisticum (with Peter Parsons), Menander’s Dyscolus, and Sophocles (the now-standard OCT with Nigel Wilson) with two volumes of critical notes; his fine translations of Aeschylus’ Oresteia and (for the Loeb) the plays and fragments of Sophocles; his books Females of the Species: Semonides on Women (1975), Myths of the Zodiac (1978),
Mythical Beasts (1980), and, perhaps best known, The Justice of Zeus (his 1969 Sather Lectures, published in 1971), which challenged the then-prevalent notion of a divine evolution in Aeschylus toward a more just relationship of god(s) to mankind (for Lloyd-Jones, who held both Christianity and most forms of social progressivism in Nietzschean contempt, the Greek gods ever and always held power in their own interest, not man’s, so that the Greek universe was “necessarily adverse to human aspirations”); and his explorations of classical scholarship and traditions (including studies of Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner, Marx, and Freud) in Blood for the Ghosts: Classical Influences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1982), Classical Survivals: The Classics in the Modern World (1982), and Greek in a Cold Climate (1991).
Lloyd-Jones was educated at the French Lycée in London, the Westminster School, and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1940, as soon as he turned 18, he interrupted his undergraduate studies to volunteer for the war effort. Assigned to the Intelligence Corps, he quickly learned Japanese and, declining the relative safety of Bletchley Park, secured a post at the front in India and Burma, where he saw action, held an independent command, and attained the rank of Captain. Upon graduating with a First in Greats in 1948, he was appointed Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, then moved to Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1955 to became the inaugural E. P. Warren Praelector in Classics. Warren, the American benefactor, had stipulated that the Praelector not teach women or lecture in their presence, but Lloyd-Jones, ever impatient of whatever academic rituals and protocols he considered impediments to learning, did what he could to evade the restriction, removed after his incumbency, by arranging to teach joint courses listed under a colleague’s name.
In 1960, at the unusually young age of 38, Lloyd-Jones was elected to succeed E. R. Dodds as the Regius Professor of Greek, a position he held with distinction until his retirement and knighthood in 1989. Fluent in French and German, alert to sound and interesting scholarship wherever it was to be found, and thinking that Oxford classics was still too parochial (“slowly awakening from the clerical slumbers of the previous century”), he cultivated many contacts abroad and fostered an international exchange of ideas and approaches, and by adopting from Eduard Fraenkel the practice of offering regular seminars, mainly on text-critical subjects, he drew scholars from far and wide. Not a few of the graduates he supervised went on to become leading scholars themselves. From 1989 his main residence was in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where he enjoyed a happy retirement with his second wife (since 1982), the distinguished classicist Mary Lefkowitz, and his beloved cats (Siamese preferred). There he pursued his scholarly interests and participated energetically in his new classics community, giving and hearing talks and regularly attending professional meetings, engaging whomever sought his conversation and enriching paper sessions with his pungent questions and often provocative comments.
As a personality Hugh radiated the same enthusiasm that animates his writing, but even more intensely: for him, classical scholarship was “great fun” to be enjoyed with gusto and at fever pitch every waking hour, and he wanted everyone in his company to share the fun regardless of the ambient social temperature. Restlessly energetic, arresting in gaze, thrust forward in a slight crouch, with his index finger tracing patterns up and down, around and back, his speech histrionically contoured to its subject, by turns soft and vehement and seasoned with a mad guttural laugh, he enjoyed discussing his or your current work, exchanging the latest news about colleagues whether positive or scandalous, entertaining you with anecdotes from his extensive and vivid recollections, and provoking you with indiscreet or outrageous remarks, at which only the squeamish could take real offense; my own scholarly shortcomings he was always thoughtful enough to attribute to the poor training I received from Professors X, Y, and Z. He was incapable of making small talk truly small; he forever endeared himself to my children when, years ago, he asked them about our cat (shy of most people but interested in Hugh) and pronounced him “a magnificent beast.”
Of my own fondest memories of Hugh the one that stands out happened on a sidewalk in San Francisco during a lunch break at a conference on tragedy. I was telling him something about the meter of the horsemen’s ode to Poseidon in Aristophanes’ Knights when he suddenly lit up and, entrancing me and stopping passersby in their tracks, he performed the whole ode in perfect rollicking Greek, complete with choreography.
He is survived by his wife Mary and by two sons and a daughter from his first marriage. A memorial event took place in Christ Church, Oxford on Saturday 13 February, 2010. Addresses delivered on that occasion are online at http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/2010/tributes-sir-hugh-lloyd-jones-1
Jeffrey Henderson
Boston University
Prof. Bryan Peter Reardon died after a long illness on November 16, 2009 at his home in Lion-sur-Mer in Normandy. Janette his wife of nearly fifty years was with him at the end. There was no funeral; he donated his body to science. In the past year or so many colleagues and friends came to Normandy to visit Bryan, most memorably on his eightieth birthday in December 2008 when John Morgan from Wales and Kathryn Chew from California arrived with the typescript of a Festschrift in his honor. This benevolent conspiracy took Bryan totally by surprise. He was much moved. The completed volume will be forthcoming as a special supplement to the Groningen journal Ancient Narrative. It is a fitting tribute to an original and hugely influential scholar who almost single-handedly revived the international study of ancient fiction.
Reardon was born in Manchester on December 30, 1928, and had his primary education and grammar school education in Derby; he then transferred to secondary school in Glasgow when his family moved there in 1941. In Glasgow he found himself ahead of the locals because he had started Latin and Greek before the move. He won a scholarship to the University of Glasgow, where he studied for five years in both English and Humanity (the term in Scottish universities for the study of Latin language and literature), receiving his M.A. with Honours in Classics in 1951. One of his most important teachers and mentors was the Greek historian and commentator on Thucydides and Menander, A. W. Gomme. He was awarded a University of Glasgow scholarship to St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he completed his B.A. in Classics in 1953. To his amusement, many colleagues later wondered how he had managed to earn an M.A. before a B.A., not realizing that in Scotland the M.A. is by long tradition the first university degree awarded. By the time he was at Cambridge he had also acquired two other passions as well as Classics, for theater and for cricket. In the 1953 production of the Cambridge Greek Play he played a memorable Agamemnon opposite Frances Lloyd-Jones’ Clytemnestra. The demands of professional life eventually put an end to cricket and acting (except in lecturing and conversation) but he remained a keen and informed critic of both.
After Cambridge Reardon was required to perform two years of military service, which he did in the R.A.F., from 1953 to 1955. Following a two-year stint of teaching in schools in Edinburgh and Glasgow he accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Classics at Memorial University in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where he taught from 1958 to 1967. There, by “pure tyche,” as he put it, he also met Janette Hamard, a Lecturer in French; they were married in 1960. Together with Janette he embarked on a life that made him an authoritative figure in France, as he was in turn a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure, and the University of Caen. As his fame as a scholar grew and his work became more widely known, some who met him for the first time were actually surprised to learn he was not French himself. When he opened an international conference with a lecture on Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe entitled “Mythos ou Logos,” an eminent German Classicist wittily inquired whether Prof. Reardon was going to speak to his audience in ancient Greek (ou, “not”) or French (ou, “or”).
Bryan’s first book was a translation of selected works of Lucian, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1965. He went on research leave from 1964 to 1966 to the University of Nantes, where he wrote his doctorate under the supervision of Jacques Bompaire, Courants littéraires Grecs des IIe et IIIe Siècles après J. –C. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971). Only the final part ofCourants littéraires was devoted to the novel, but in retrospect this wide-ranging study of Imperial Greek literature now reads like a prolegomenon to what would become the defining focus of Reardon’s work for the rest of his life, the Greek novel. To this day CLG remains the only study to tackle its range of authors in depth.
In 1967 Bryan was invited to Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, to chair a fledgling Classics department, where he taught until 1974. The department flourished under his leadership and he remains well regarded there to the present day. While supervising the publication of Courants littéraires and performing all his other duties he published a general introduction to the subject, “The Greek Novel,” in 1969 in Phoenix. This single article marked the beginning of the field of ancient fiction for many Classicists and students of Comparative Literature, and remains required reading for the topic. In due course Glen Bowersock invited him to participate in a panel at the APA in 1973, “Approaches to the Second Sophistic,” with George Kennedy and other leading scholars, and from that point onwards his engagement with ancient fiction accelerated all the more. In 1974 he was appointed Chair of the combined Greek and Latin departments at the University College of North Wales in Bangor. Not unlike the peripatetic heroes and heroines he studied, Bryan set up a major event in what APA members used to North American confines seemed to lie in Ultima Thule: not only Wales, but North Wales at that. In fact Reardon put Bangor into the center of many a scholar’s map, as the founding site of what would eventually become a proliferating series of international conferences on the ancient novel, all known by the acronym he devised: ICAN, the International Conference on the Ancient Novel. None of the organizers of the successor conferences at Dartmouth (1989), Groningen (2000), or Lisbon (2008) ever thought of changing Reardon’s acronym; what they mainly accomplished was a series of successive adaptations and expansions of the original ICAN program of 1976. Although the conference came in July, in the middle of all the hoopla over the bicentennial of the American Revolution, ICAN was designed to commemorate the centennial of the publication of Erwin Rohde’s Der Griechische Roman und seine Vorläufer. It is characteristic of Reardon’s generous spirit that he also honored a scholar with whom he disagreed more often than not, Ben Edwin Perry (1892-1968), whose revised Sather Lectures (The Ancient Romances, 1967), along with Reinhold Merkelbach’s Roman und Mysterium in der Antike (1962), provided virtually the only substantial critical discussion of ancient Greek fiction until Reardon’s ICAN and all the work that flowed from it.
In 1978 Prof. Reardon was invited to chair the Department of Classics at the University of California at Irvine, and he spent the rest of his teaching career with the University. He found a way to supplement the resources of the Irvine department by working with his former St. John’s College contemporary J. P. Sullivan at Santa Barbara to establish a Resource Sharing Consortium whereby faculty could be exchanged on a regular basis between the Irvine, Los Angeles, Riverside, and Santa Barbara campuses. An obvious move in hindsight, the Consortium enriched the graduate curriculum of Irvine and other campuses in the UC system by introducing students to distinguished visiting faculty with a wide range of research specialties.
His generosity in supporting his students—and, more impressively, those who were never his students—was seemingly limitless. He was much loved as well as respected by those who were fortunate enough to work with him. He was a sharp critic, but when he saw something he valued, he pushed it enthusiastically; at the same time he never failed to let his charges know exactly what he valued and what he didn't. In his years at Irvine he guided the studies of three graduate students who would themselves contribute much to scholarship on ancient fiction: Bracht Branham, Kathryn Chew and Brigitte Egger. The consortium program remains active to the present day. He served his final two years with California as the Director of the entire UC system’s Education Abroad Program in Lyon and Grenoble. In 1995 he and Janette retired to their new house in Lion-sur-Mer, there to enjoy together Bryan’s still vigorous scholarly activity, roguish wit and discerning gastronomy.
In the years at Irvine and afterwards Bryan advanced the reading and interpretation of Greek fiction with work distinguished by great learning and critical acumen, always written with a characteristic elegance. His decade-long editorial work with seven other scholars culminated in the University of California Press’s publication in 1989 of Collected Ancient Greek Novels, which appeared just as the second ICAN began at Dartmouth. A second paperback edition appeared in 2008, with a new introduction by John Morgan, and coincided with the fourth International Conference at Lisbon. In 1991 he published (with Princeton University Press) an introductory book for general readers and students of ancient fiction, The Form of Greek Romance. In 1987-1988 he was a Visiting Mellon Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he began the final years of work on a new edition of Chariton for Teubner. Chariton De Callirhoe Narrationes Amatoriae was published in 2004. He regarded this as the culmination of a lifetime’s work, and he brought to it not only his unmatched knowledge of Chariton’s Greek but also a discerning literary sensibility. It is a testimony to his industry and his devotion to his favorite author that in his last years, even as his health was declining, he spent much time reconsidering issues raised in reviews and gathering corrections for a possible editio altera.
B. P. Reardon moved back and forth across the whole range of humane learning, from translation to literary criticism to textual criticism, with great contributions as a teacher and an administrator, and he did so in a career of almost unparalleled diversity. As he jokingly observed at one point, he had somehow managed to acquire retirement accounts in four different countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and the United States. He was a loyal and generous member of the APA, and the enduring relevance of his many contributions to classics as an international discipline is sure to last as long as any great scholar’s. When the news of his death reached Trent University, the Canadian flag atop the University Library was lowered to half-mast in his honor. It was a remarkable tribute, expressing the enduring gratitude of a University Bryan Reardon had left over thirty years before.
A memorial service will be held on Wednesday, April 28th at the University of California at Irvine.
Ewen Bowie, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Kathryn Chew, California State University, Long Beach
John Morgan, University of Wales, Swansea
Ian Storey, Trent University, Peterborough
Dana Sutton, University of California at Irvine
James Tatum, Dartmouth College
Stephen Trzaskoma, University of New Hampshire
Colin M. Wells died on 11 March, at Bangor in North Wales, with his family around him, after a short illness. He was born on 15 November 1933. After Nottingham High School, where he was very well taught, he went up to Oriel College, Oxford, to read Lit. Hum. After taking Honour Moderations, he interrupted his studies in order to do his military service, during which he was stationed in Egypt and enjoyed early-morning riding in the desert. Returning to Oxford, he completed his Greats work. At this stage, he was especially interested in philosophy. But he nearly opted for a military career. Instead he began his teaching at Beaumont, an appropriate choice as he had become a Roman Catholic at 21. In 1960 he married Kate Hughes, daughter of the novelist Richard Hughes. He was asked by Fr. Etienne Gareau O. M. I. to accept an appointment at the University of Ottawa. After two years’ teaching and the birth of a son, Christopher, Kate and Colin returned to England so that he could start a doctorate in Roman Archaeology under the supervision of Ian Richmond. The seed for his work on the frontiers under Augustus was in an essay he had written as an undergraduate for P. A. Brunt, his tutor, who was a major influence. Another son, Dominic, was born during their two-year stay in England.
Colin served the University of Ottawa with energy, enthusiasm and vision. He was one of the pioneers of an interdisciplinary Classical Civilisation course. He served as chairman of the Department of Classical Studies / Département des Etudes anciennes (overseeing a period of growth) and as Vice-Dean and was secretary to an important committee which reviewed the structures of the university. Concurrently he was editing Echos du monde classique / Classical News & Views. At the same time, he was active in research and participation in learned societies. The Wells house in New Edinburgh was a centre of hospitality for classicists and other guests from all over the world. After over a quarter of a century, he regretfully left Ottawa in 1987 to take up a new and exciting post in Texas as Distinguished Professor at Trinity University, San Antonio. Here, with a new culture to explore, an office big enough for most of his books on Roman history and archaeology and a strikingly elegant house designed for entertaining, he and Kate entered upon a new period of their lives, making new friends while maintaining old contacts. Teaching continued to fascinate and pre-occupy him until he was seventy. At that point, they came back to their house in Oxford, before moving definitively to a house in Normandy, which offered a barn which could become a library. He had always loved France.
An able administrator, Colin served many organisations in the course of his career: the AAH, AIA, APA, CAC, Rei Cretariae Romanae Fautores, the Limes Congresses (he only missed one congress) and others. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and Visiting Professor at Berkeley. He was Visiting Fellow at Brasenose (1973-4) and ever after, as a member of Common Room, enjoyed the hospitality and communal life of the college.
The German Policy of Augustus, the fruit of his work on frontiers, came out in 1972. It was followed by the exceptional introduction, The Roman Empire (1984), which has delighted and stimulated undergraduates ever since. An impressive production of articles in history and archaeology went on all the time, the rhythm accelerated recently, as the history and archaeology of northern France seized his attention. From 1976, initially with the late Edith Wightman, Colin was directing the Canadian team excavating in Carthage, an involvement which continued for over twenty years. His lectures on the dig, delivered in his inimitable style, will be long remembered. He was happily engaged in writing a short history of the Roman army and had just finished the first chapter. A book on the hellenistic period was in view.
A man of manifold interests and warm sympathies, Colin Wells made the most of his exceptionally full life up to the end. He will leave a big gap in the many circles to which he belonged.
All of us offer our sympathy to his wife, sons, grandsons and the whole family. The funeral was held on 18 March and there will be a memorial service in July.
Susan Treggiari
Highlights of the 141st Annual Meeting
The APA held its 141st Annual Meeting in conjunction with the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) in Anaheim, California, from January 6-9, 2010. About 2,300 members, guests, and volunteers from both societies registered. Maria Pantelia chaired the APA's Local Arrangements Committee, and with her colleagues provided extremely valuable support to the staff and made it possible to carry out the many tasks associated with the meeting.
The APA Program consisted of 51 paper sessions. Seventeen of these were developed by the Program Committee from submitted abstracts. Panels proposed by APA committees, affiliated groups, and individual APA members were also presented. APA once again collaborated with AIA in presenting Roundtable Discussion Sessions.
Josiah Ober's Presidential Panel was entitled, "Classical Antiquity and Social Science". The following day at the Plenary Session President Ober gave a Presidential Address entitled "Wealthy Hellas".
Instead of the usual staged reading, the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance organized a screening of silent films with Classical themes. Andrew Simpson provided improvised piano accompaniment. Four members won prizes consisting of books donated by exhibitors at the Minority Scholarship Committee's annual raffle.
Once again, the Executive Director's report, normally presented at the annual business meeting, was published in advance of the annual meeting and can be found on the web site and in the October-December 2009 Newsletter (pages 26-33). The briefer business meeting was devoted to a short report from President Ober, the announcement of election results (see page 2 of the August 2009 Newsletter), and a brief report by Executive Director Adam D. Blistein (see next itme) acknowledging the contributions of both members and nonmembers to the success of the annual meeting and to the operations of the Association during the past year. The business meeting concluded with the transition of the Presidency from Prof. Ober to Prof. Dee L. Clayman.
As has become traditional, the list of APA members whose deaths were reported to the Association during the past year was read at the Plenary Session. That list was published on page 37 of the October-December 2009 Newsletter.
Acknowledgment of Service to the Association
Many people contributed to a very successful 141st meeting of the Association here in Anaheim, and, in addition, a number of people conclude significant terms of service to the Association at this meeting. We need to thank each one.
Maria Pantelia (UC-Irvine) served as Local Arrangements Chair and recruited the volunteers that we need to run the meeting. She also found for us a valuable online scheduling tool that we will use again and that will make life easier for her successors at future meetings.
The Anaheim Marriott provided sleeping and meeting rooms and an enthusiastic staff that made us very welcome. The staff of Experient, Inc., Linda Walter and Molly Witges, helped us and the AIA to negotiate contracts for this meeting, and they provided extremely valuable assistance in both making arrangements in advance of the meeting and in handling events here.
This year's Program Committee consisted of Robert Kaster, Chair, Elizabeth Asmis, Sharon James, Steven Oberhelman, and Jeffrey Rusten. Sharon completes a 3 year term on the Committee at this meeting, and we appreciate her hard work on the last 3 programs. Our new agreement to exchange panels with the Classical Association began at this meeting. We thank Tim Whitmarsh for organizing an outstanding session and regret that bad weather in England kept him from presiding at the session itself.
Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke organized the showing of silent movies on a classical themes with piano accompaniment by Andrew Simpson. We are also grateful to Boston University for its sponsorship of the special showing of Werner Herzog's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.
The Presidential Panel was entitled "Classical Antiquity and Social Science" Josh invited Ryan Balot, Emily Mackil, and Ian Morris to give provocative talks on this topic. Josh's Presidential Address, "Wealthy Hellas", gave us an original and persuasive view of economic conditions in 5th and 4th Century BCE Greece.
A number of officers conclude terms of service on the Board of Directors as this meeting. They are are
* Kurt A. Raaflaub, President (2008)
* Ward W. Briggs, Financial Trustee (2004-2010)
* Lee T. Pearcy, Vice President for Education (2006-2010)
* Cynthia Damon, Director (2007-2010)
* Donald J. Mastronarde, Director (2007-2010)
In addition, Allen Miller concluded a four-year term as Editor of TAPA this Fall. We appreciate his efforts to produce eight outstanding issues of the journal.
Andri Cauldwell, AIA meeting coordinator, successfully managed the book exhibit and organized the opening reception at the Bowers Museum.
Heather Gasda, as usual, successfully attended to all the details of the meeting.
Renie Plonski made the Placement Service as welcoming as possible in a bad job market and was again able to notify all candidates in advance of the meeting whether any institutions had requested interviews with them.
Julie Carew, our Development Director, was an extra pair of eyes and ears for me here at the meeting and has been essential to the progress we have made in annual giving and the Gateway campaigns. Most notably this year, she made it possible for members to make contributions to the Association online.
Thank you all for attending this meeting, particularly, if, like me, you braved the increased difficulty of air travel to get here. Please join me in thanking the people I have listed for their contributions to this meeting and to the Association.
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
Call for Volunteers for 2011 Annual Meeting
Members are invited to serve as volunteers at the 142nd Annual Meeting of the Association in San Antonio, TX this coming January. Assignments include assistance in the Registration Area, monitoring session rooms, and supporting the Placement Service. Interested members should contact Heather Gasda in the Association Office by July 9, 2010. The Chair of the Local Arrangements Committee will develop a schedule of volunteer activity in late Fall.
In exchange for eight hours of service (either in one continuous or in two 4-hour assignments), volunteers receive a waiver of their annual meeting registration fees. It is not necessary to be an APA member to volunteer.
The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia will present a special exhibition entitled Ancient Rome and America from February 18-August 1, 2010. The exhibition showcases the cultural, political, and social connections between ancient Rome and modern America. It features more than 300 artifacts from Italy and the United States, bringing together a never-before-seen collection from Italy’s leading archaeological institutions in Florence, Naples, and Rome, paired with objects from over 40 lending institutions in the United States. For more information visit the Center's web site: http://constitutioncenter.org/Rome/.
The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc. (CAAS) in 2002 established a Lectureship Fund named in honor of Jerry Clack. Professor Clack was one of the foremost leaders of the Association, editing Classical World from 1978-1993 and serving as the first Executive Director of CAAS from 1993-2000. Contributions to this fund are designed to build up principal, the income of which will be used to bring a distinguished lecturer each year from outside the CAAS region – the rest of North America, Europe, or beyond – to speak to the membership about work on the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome. We are now more than 80% of the way toward completing the original fundraising goal of $10,000. Contributions are earnestly solicited. Checks made out to CAAS, with “Jerry Clack Lectureship Fund” written in the memo line, may be sent to the CAAS Treasurer, Professor Donald H. Mills, 203 Radcliffe Road, Dewitt, New York 13214
Philip Freeman, Luther College, has received a fellowship from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation to study the Latin letters of St. Patrick and early Patrician literature.
Homer in the 21st Century: Orality, Neoanalysis, Intepretation, 4th Trends in Classics International Conference, 28-30 May 2010, Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece. The aim of this conference is to offer a critical reassessment of the progress made in recent years with respect to the main trends in Homeric research. The three terms (Orality, Neoanalysis, Interpretation) in the second part of the conference's title represent three large areas we intend to explore. Starting from the end, we may say that interpreting Homer in the 21st century asks for a holistic approach that allows us to reconsider some of our methodological tools and preconceptions concerning what we call Homeric poetry. The neoanalytical and oral 'booms', which have to a large extent influenced the way we see Homer today, may be re-evaluated provided that we are willing to endorse a more flexible approach to certain scholarly taboos pertaining to these two schools of interpretation. Song-traditions, formula, performance, multiformity on the one hand, and Motivforschung, Epic Cycle, on the other may not be so incompatible as we often tend to think.
For more information, see the conference web site: http://www.lit.auth.gr/sites/default/files/newsattach/Program%202010(Final).pdf or contact Christos Tsagalis by e-mail: christos.tsagalis@gmail.com
Conventiculum Latinum Vasintoniense, Washington Spoken-Latin Seminar 2010, Wenatchee Valley College, June 30-July 8, 2010. This Conventiculum Vasintoniense will be an excellent opportunity for practicing speaking Latin. Most days we will take an excursion during which the participants, with the help of moderators, will not only chat among themselves in Latin but also describe in Latin everything they do and see. In the countryside and in parks we will discuss trees and plants, mountains and glaciers, rivers, animals, birds, insects, weather, and many other things. In town, our topics will be all things urban: the arts and entertainment, buildings and transportation, the harbor and ships, business, shopping, books, clothing, sports, etc. This seminar will be of special interest to those who enjoy the outdoors, sightseeing, etc. and who would like to improve their Latin skills "kinesthetically" in friendly conversation while engaging in a variety of activities in a multitude of contexts and settings.
All Latin teachers at the elementary and secondary levels are invited, as well as college and university professors. We especially recommend this seminar to graduate students in Classics and related fields since, just as with any language, the ability to speak Latin immensely strengthens one’s ability to read and write Latin well. Also, in order for spoken Latin to flourish, which is our common goal, it is especially necessary for future Latin instructors to see that our language is fully capable of serving as an instrument for daily life and for expressing all human concerns, even the most modern. We encourage those who already know the fundamentals of Latin grammar and can already read Latin quite well but who have never spoken Latin to attend the Conventiculum and have their first Latin conversations with us. Those who do not yet speak Latin should in no way feel intimidated at our seminars, since almost all of us have begun to speak Latin relatively recently and thus we all understand perfectly well the difficulty of getting started. All those who would like to practice the general elements of conversational Latin are invited to arrive on June 30th and July 1st before the formal beginning of the seminar.
For further information and registration materials see the Conventiculum web site: http://commons.wvc.edu/sberard/boreoccidentales/latin/Conventiculum%20Vasintoniense/Home.aspx
Fellowships/Funding Opportunities
The Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studiesis an independent private institution founded in 1930 to create a community of scholars focused on intellectual inquiry, free from teaching and other university obligations. Scholars from around the world come to the Institute to pursue their own research. Candidates of any nationality may apply for a single term or a full academic year. Scholars may apply for a stipend, but those with sabbatical funding, other grants, retirement funding or other means are also invited to apply for a non-stipendiary membership. Some short-term visitorships (for less than a full term, and without stipend) are also available on an ad-hoc basis. Open to all fields of historical research, the School of Historical Studies' principal interests are the history of western, near eastern and Asian civilizations, with particular emphasis upon Greek and Roman civilization, the history of Europe (medieval, early modern, and modern), the Islamic world, East Asian studies, the history of art, the history of science, philosophy, modern international relations, and music studies. Residence in Princeton during term time is required. The only other obligation of Members is to pursue their own research. The Ph.D. (or equivalent) and substantial publications are required. Information and application forms may be found on the School's web site, www.hs.ias.edu, or contact the School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Dr., Princeton, N.J. 08540 (E-mail address: mzelazny@ias.edu). Deadline: November 1 2010.
The American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT) is a non-profit educational institution dedicated to promoting North American and Turkish research and exchanges related to Turkey in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. ARIT provides support for these scholarly endeavors by maintaining research centers in Istanbul and Ankara, and by administering programs of fellowships to support research in Turkey at doctoral and advanced research levels. Also, since 1982, ARIT has administered a program of intensive advanced Turkish language study in cooperation with Bogaziçi University, now complemented by the U.S. Department of State's Critical Language Institutes.
See the Institute's web site for information about its fellowship programs (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ARIT/FellowshipPrograms.html) and the Summer language institute (http://www.clscholarship.org/index.html).
Editorial Policies for APA Newsletter
1. The editor of the Newsletter has the right to edit all submissions to conform to proper style and appearance.
2. The editor of the Newsletter will accept announcements by affiliated organizations and Association members, under the following conditions:
a. The editor will accept submissions up to 250 words. Submissions exceeding this word limit may be edited at the discretion of the editor.
b. No affiliated group or member can expect to have more than one submission published in a calendar year. Additional submissions will be published, space permitting, and at the discretion of the editor. No submission from a member or affiliated group with financial indebtedness to the APA will be printed unless any debts to the Association are fully paid.
c. The editor may defer publication of a submission for reasons of space or layout.
d. The editor may reject any submission which he/she does not deem to be of interest to the members of the Association, or which is more properly a paid advertisement.
e. The editor has final decision in the layout of all submissions.
3. Submissions sent to the editor via e-mail as an attached word processing file are preferred. Submissions may be returned if they are not in a form suitable for publication. Heavily formatted electronic files, e.g., of posters, will not be accepted. To the extent possible, please follow the style regularly used in the Newsletter for announcements of meetings and of funding opportunities.
4. Submissions should be received by the 15th of February, May, August, or November for publication in that season's issue.
5. Persons wishing to ensure prompt publication of their announcements on the APA's Web Site (as well as in the Newsletter) should submit information separately to the Editor of the Web Site. See the link, "Guidelines for Submissions" at www.classicalstudies.org.
Adam D. Blistein
Newsletter Editor
Important Dates For APA Members
(All deadlines are receipt deadlines unless otherwise indicated.)
| April 15, 2010 | Petitions to Nominate Alternate Candidates for Association Offices |
| May 10, 2010 | Nominations for Collegiate Teaching Awards |
| May 14, 2010 | Individual Abstracts for 2011 Annual Meeting |
| June 1, 2010 | Nominations for APA President's Award |
| June 4, 2010 | Nominations for Goodwin Award |
| July 12, 2010 | Nominations for Outreach Prize |
| July 30, 2010 | Responses to Officer/Committee Survey |
| September 13, 2010 | Nominations for Precollegiate Teaching Awards |
| January 6-9, 2011 | 142nd Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX |
| January 5-8, 2012 | 143rd Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA |
Winter 2010
Volume 33, Number 1
Table of Contents
- Letter from the President
- APA News Blog
- Nominating Committee Report
- Distinguished Service Award
- APA President's Award
-
C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit
- 2009 Recipient
- Call for Nominations for 2010
- Previous Winners
-
Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics
- 2009 Recipients
- Call for Nominations for 2010
- Previous Winners
-
Awards for Excellence in Precollegiate Teaching
- 2009 Recipient
- Call for Nominations for 2010
- Previous Winners
-
Outreach Prize
- 2009 Recipient
- Call for Nominations for 2010
- Previous Winners
- Reports of Vice Presidents
- 2010 Coffin Award
- In Memoriam
- 141st Annual Meeting Report
- Acknowledgments of Service to the APA
- Volunteers for 2011 Annual Meeting
- Announcements
- Awards to Members
- Meetings
- Summer Programs
- Funding Opportunities
- APA Office Publications Order Form
- Officers, Directors, and Committee Members for 2010
- Newsletter Editorial Policies
- Officer/Committee Survey
- Important Dates for APA Members
- Capital Campaign News
- Ad for Cambridge University Press
- Ad for Bolchazy-Carducci
- Ad for Harper Collins
By now you have all heard about the APA’s Capital Campaign, and many of you have already made generous contributions. The campaign has a number of worthy goals, but I want to use this opportunity to talk about the one that is closest to my heart – an endowment to support the American Office of the Année philologique. As you all know, The APh is the bibliography of record in our field, the place where all of our publications are documented, indexed and assigned to headings in a standard format so other scholars can learn about them, now and in the future, and we can find out about the books and articles we need for our own work.
While it is true that much research these days begins with Google, professional, scholarly research never ends there. The titles of books appear, sometimes with their entire contents, through the good offices of Google Books, and a search on JStor can lead the way to relevant articles in English language journals (for the most part), but none of these services, useful as they are, can produce a complete, reliable account of all the work a real scholar needs to see. The APh is the sole source of comprehensive information about European publications of all types, and simply put, we cannot do without it.
Beyond bibliography the APh is now poised become a much more widely-ranging and versatile research tool. With support from the NEH for the DCB project, the APh has been online since 2002, and links to JStor directly from citations in the APh can now be installed through OpenURL. Beyond this, the APA has funding from the Mellon Foundation for software and database development that will facilitate linking between citations of Greek and Latin texts in the APh with full texts online, and it has recently received funding from the Kress Foundation to test the possibility of links to images. A new, up-to-date user-interface is also on the way.
The APh has grown and changed over the years, yet it retains its original spirit. It was founded in Paris in 1926 by J. Marouzeau, as a challenge to the Bibliotheca philologica classica, and it has been published annually since 1927. Juliette Ernst, who worked with Marouzeau from the earliest years, and shared his view of classics as an interdisciplinary area study, succeeded him as director in 1965. Her heroic efforts kept the bibliography alive during the Second World War when she made clandestine border crossings from Switzerland into occupied France to bring her manuscripts to the printer and correct proof. She retired in 1992, at age ninety-two, twenty-two years after the mandatory retirement age, when her eyesight began to fail, and died in 2001.
In 1965, when the quantity of publications became too great for the Paris office to handle, Mlle Ernst convinced T. Robert Broughton to create an American Office at Chapel Hill which took over the collecting and editing of all of the English language publications. It is that office, which documents your work and mine, that needs our support. It has been funded, since its founding, by successive grants from the NEH, which is now redirecting its resources away from projects that have no definable end-point. A cumulative bibliography, like the APh, is updated every year, and falls outside the NEH’s current guidelines. The Endowment has not abandoned us entirely, however. Far from it! It has given the APA a Challenge Grant of up to $650,000 to help the Association raise the funding it needs to ensure that the American Office can continue its work.
The NEH will give us one dollar for every four we contribute, so we need a total of 2.6 million dollars to achieve our goals. We have already made great progress toward our goal, but we still need $600,000 by July 31, 2010, and then $500,000 more by July 31, 2011 to fully fund the American Office and support classics in other crucial ways. Please help by clicking here: https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/AmericanPhilologicalAssociat/OnlineDonation.html, and giving what you can.
Dee L. Clayman
As announced in the October-December 2009 Newsletter, the APA will publish only four newsletters each year but will issue more frequent updates in electronic form. These updates will appear on the APA web site and in e-mails to members as we have done for a number of years. In addition, we will take advantage of a news blog created by Web Editor Robin Mitchell-Boyask (http://apaclassics.blogspot.com/). APA Officers (as well as Robin and myself) will post information on this blog as it becomes available. The advantage of this vehicle is that it permits members to subscribe to various services that will alert them when something new has been posted to the blog (see under "Subscribe to APA News"). We hope to add this capability to the APA web site itself as soon as possible; in the interim, a subscription to the blog will alert you to new information
Adam D. Blistein
Executive Director
Report of the 2009-2010 Nominating Committee
The 2009-2010 Nominating Committee met for two full days, first on November 7, 2009 in Philadelphia, and then on January 6, 2010 in Anaheim. The committee’s deliberations and subsequent conversations of the co-chairs with nominees produced a slate of twenty-five candidates for twelve vacancies in nine offices to run in the 2010 elections. The slate, which has already been announced, precedes this report.
As in the past years, the Committee sought to identify qualified candidates who would reflect the diversity of the Association in terms of geography, type of institution, scholarly field, relative seniority, and gender. We were also attentive of course to the need for maintaining an appropriate balance with the members of committees who are already serving. We have made an effort to identify “fresh” nominees for some of the committees, i.e., individuals whose qualifications were very strong but who for one reason or another might not yet have performed much APA service.
We have also, as has been customary over the past several years, sent a list of recommended committee members to the President for use in filling appointed slots in the various APA committees. We hope in this way to give members with limited APA experience an opportunity to serve in and learn about the organization, especially younger members of the profession who may not yet be ready for an elective office, or whose names might not yet be well enough known to give a strong chance of winning.
In its deliberations, the Committee followed the established procedures of previous years. As we conferred to develop lists of possible candidates for each office, all self-nominated individuals and all individuals suggested by the committee members were considered. After thorough, sometimes lengthy, discussion, each committee member ranked the names on agreed lists of possible nominees, which ranged in number from 16 names to 24. The final rankings were determined by the cumulative scores assigned by the entire Committee. After the voting, we discussed possible conflicts and imbalances in the voting results, e.g., contests for any office between two members of the same department, or between members who have a recognized conflict of interest. We also kept in mind problems of balance in disciplinary interests, types of institutions, etc. where relevant to particular committees. To the extent that it was possible to do so, we sought to avoid slates with a significant imbalance in name recognition.
After each meeting the Co-Chairs contacted proposed candidates in the order of the Committee’s ranking. We had notable success this year, winning agreement from our first choices for every single office, and filling the slate in all but four instances with candidates who were among our top five choices. We feel, therefore, that the slate is a strong one and reflects reasonably well the Committee’s efforts to balance the roster of candidates for the individual offices. Inevitably, a certain number of the candidates declined nomination, almost all with regrets and because of other obligations rather than lack of interest in the position. The most common reasons for declining were the demands of administrative responsibilities at their own institutions and/or of current research projects, and several candidates indicated that they would be interested in running at a later time. (We have passed this information on to our successors.)
All self-nominated members received careful consideration, and we continue to urge members to nominate themselves or others for offices for which they feel qualified. This expands our pool of interested and willing candidates and increases the members’ input into the nominating process. We also remind members that, in addition to the elected Committees, there are numerous committees of the APA that are appointed by the President and Board of Directors. Service on one of these can be a good means of achieving increased visibility in the Association and is good experience for preparing to stand for an elected office. We therefore encourage self-nomination for any of these appointed committees.
The Co-Chairs and the Committee members – Joy Connolly, Laura McClure, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Kurt Raaflaub, and Peter Rose -- owe a special debt of thanks, as always, to Adam Blistein and the staff at the APA office for their work on the logistics of transportation, housing and food, for the documentation provided on the offices and candidates (present and past) of the Association, and for prompt and helpful replies to queries about the responsibilities and functions of APA offices.
Finally, we take this occasion to offer two suggestions. The first involves the business of the Nominating Committee itself. The committee works with a thick binder full of information collected by APA staff, including a list of all current and past officeholders and a list of all unsuccessful candidates for office. If these two lists could be combined it would save the committee a good deal of time now spent in flipping back and forth to do cross-checking for availability and appropriateness of potential candidates. At some future point, if technology and staffing allows, it would also be good to offer Committee members a choice of hard-copy or digital copies of these files, and we imagine that eventually all of this information should be provided in digital formats.
Secondly, we have spent some time considering how to make participation in the APA more attractive to high school teachers of classics, whose students are ultimately the future of the field and of our organization. We suggest that, in addition to outreach efforts, the Directors consider adding a dedicated seat on the Board for a high school teacher. One possible way to do this might be to ask the American Classical League to provide names and resumes of teachers able and willing to serve. The Nominating Committee would then proceed to prepare a slate of two candidates in the usual way. We think the input of an experienced and well-connected secondary school teacher could benefit the Association, and hope that person would then act as a liaison with teachers, their schools, and their organizations.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Burian and James O’Hara, Co-Chairs
Joy Connolly, Laura McClure, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Peter Rose, Kurt Raaflaub (ex officio)
Awards
Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics
Awards for Excellence in Precollegiate Teaching
Education (Outgoing). Gratitude will be a theme of this final report of my term as Vice-President for Education. I begin by thanking the members of the APA who elected me, all past and present officers and members of the Board with whom I have had the pleasure to serve, and Executive Director Adam Blistein and his staff, who help the Education Division and our Association in more ways than I can count. I am also grateful to the dozens of APA members who served on the Education Committee, the Joint Committee (with ACL) on Classics in American Education, the Joint Committee (with AIA) on Minority Student Scholarships, and the divisional committees: the Committee on Ancient History, the Coffin Traveling Fellowship Committee, the Committee on Awards for Excellence in Teaching, and the Subcommittee on Pre-Collegiate Teaching Awards. Our Association, which is neither very rich nor very large, depends on the volunteer service of its members, and all who serve our profession in this way deserve its gratitude.
Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation: On October 16 and 17, the APA/ACL Joint Task Force on Teacher Training and Preparation met at Bryn Mawr College to review responses to the initial draft of Standards for Latin Teacher Training and Certification, to make final revisions of the document (among which was a change of title to Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation), and to develop plans for publication and dissemination of the finished document.
The final version of Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation accompanies this report. The Joint Task Force recommends primary publication as a web-based document housed on the ACL’s server, with a link from the APA web site. A small press run of about 500 printed copies, primarily for distribution to state education officials and other decision-makers, will supplement the web-based edition. ACL will hold copyright to both web-based and printed versions, as it does with the Standards for Classical Language Learning of 1997.
I ask the Board to approve this document and to authorize its publication. I hope also that the Board will join me in expressing its thanks to the members of the Joint Task Force who worked to create this effective, eloquent description of what a Latin teacher should know and be able to do. [Editor's Note: The Board voted to accept both of Prof. Ancona's recommendations. The Standards document can be found at http://www.aclclassics.org/pdf/LatTeachPrep2010Stand.pdf, and printed copies are available from the ACL, http://www.aclclassics.org/pdf/standards_order.pdf.]
Advanced Placement Latin: At this writing (December 24, 2009) the College Board has not settled on a syllabus for the new Advanced Placement Latin program that will replace the existing Vergil and the former Latin Literature programs and examinations. It seems likely that the final version of the new syllabus will not be in place for some time.
In November, 2009, the College Board invited the APA to nominate a representative to its AP Latin Curriculum Review Committee. According to Mr. James Monk, the CB’s Associate Director for World Languages and Cultures, this committee will develop a “curriculum framework” for AP Latin including “learning objectives, expectations of student performance, reading list/syllabus, grammatical terms and figures of speech, overarching themes and essential questions. The curriculum framework will also inform changes to the AP Latin exam by providing details of how the various components of the curriculum will be accounted for in the assessment.” I am grateful to Prof. Ann Vasaly for agreeing to serve as the APA representative to this Committee.
Mr. Monk and Prof. Christopher Francese have organized a workshop at our meeting in Anaheim on “New Developments in Advanced Placement (AP) Latin.” The workshop will be held on Friday, January 8, from 11:15 until 1:15 in Platinum Ballroom 3 of the Anaheim Marriott.
My term as Vice-President for Education has taught me a great deal about the state of our profession of Classics in the nation and world. It has also confirmed my belief in the importance of the work done by the APA through its officers, directors, committees, and staff. Gratias vobis omnibus maximas ago.
Respectfully submitted,
Lee T. Pearcy
January 6, 2010
Education (Incoming). I would like to begin this report by thanking my predecessor, Lee Pearcy, for his outstanding service as Vice President over the last four years. His ability to listen, respond, and lead were especially apparent in two major tasks undertaken during his term of office: the development of the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation and the APA’s response to the elimination of the Latin Literature Exam of the Advanced Placement Program. As a result of his own efforts and his collegial work with Sherwin Little, ACL President, Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation will be published shortly. In addition, despite the College Board’s unfortunate change in its Latin program, Lee’s determined efforts ultimately gave the APA a voice in College Board deliberations at the Fall 2008 Chicago AP Latin Faculty Colloquium and led to the invitation to have an APA representative on the College Board committee that is currently working on a “curriculum framework” for Advanced Placement Latin. I very much appreciate the contribution Lee has made to the profession and his help in making my transition into this office a smooth one.
Program Panel: The Division sponsored one panel at the 2010 Annual Meeting in Anaheim. The Committee on Ancient History presented a successful panel on “Material Culture in the History Classroom: Techniques and Methods,” organized by Serena Connolly. It was particularly useful to graduate students and to all with an interest in pedagogy and ancient history.
Education Committee and The Joint Committee on Classics in American Education. The JCCAE, which consists of the APA Education Committee plus representatives from ACL, met jointly this year with the Education Committee:
The Committee revisited some issues that had been discussed in previous years, including a possible meeting at APA of departments engaged in teacher training, gathering of statistics on Classics as part of liberal education, and encouragement of more nominations for the award for Excellence in Pre-Collegiate Teaching. It was thought that one factor discouraging candidates for this award might be the high cost of attending APA or ACL in order to receive the award in person and the relatively small amount of the award itself. It was hoped that added publicity by both APA and ACL, including timely e-blasts, might help to get the word out about this important award.
The Committee was updated on the changes to the Latin Advanced Placement program and members were encouraged to attend the APA 2010 workshop on New Developments in AP Latin. The Latin Literature AP Exam has now been eliminated and the current Vergil Exam will change to become a Vergil-Caesar Exam, with first administration planned for 2013 (with new course offered in 2012-13). The syllabus for the new Exam is expected to be announced in September 2010. There was discussion of possibly doing a panel on Caesar at a future APA Annual Meeting. It was suggested that reprinting some old, but good, Caesar texts might also be useful for teachers planning to teach the new AP Latin syllabus.
There was a report on the Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation, which will be published this spring. The Committee decided to develop a panel for APA 2011 to address why the Standards should be of interest to APA members. The panel will be organized by Lee Pearcy, outgoing APA Vice President and Sherwin Little, ACL President, who jointly chaired the task force that developed the Standards. Additional plans for publicizing the Standards include a press release, a panel at the 2010 ACL Institute, and possible sessions at regional meetings.
Plans were announced to update and expand the material on the Education section of the APA website dealing with individual state requirements for Latin teacher certification and licensure. This work will be done with the help of a Student-Faculty Research Initiative Grant to the incoming Vice President from the Office of the President of Hunter College. A brief description of careers in Classics at different levels (secondary, four-year college/university, and community college [if sufficient information is available]) and the pathways to them will be posted as well. This new material will complement the APA’s Guide to Graduate Programs in the Classics.
The APA Board supported the idea of the incoming Vice President appointing a Task Force to develop some preliminary materials on Caesar that would benefit Latin teachers planning for the Caesar portion of the new AP Latin Exam. The incoming Vice President appointed APA Board members John Marincola and Ann Vasaly. These materials will appear on the Education page of the APA website.
Thank you to Rachel Sternberg for her service on the Education Committee and welcome to new member, Eric Dugdale.
Committee on Ancient History. The Committee’s primary activity this year was organizing the 2010 APA panel it sponsored. It plans to publish the papers from the panel on the APA website in order to reach an expanded audience. Its proposed panel for 2011, to be co-sponsored by the Women’s Classical Caucus, will address the underrepresentation of women in the teaching of ancient history.
Thank you to Sara Forsdyke and Nathan Rosenstein (Chair) for their service. Welcome to new members, Emily Mackil and Georgia Tsouvala. The new Chair will be Carlin Barton.
Joint Committee (with AIA) on Minority Student Scholarships. In keeping with the APA’s need to economize, the Committee did not hold its annual fundraising breakfast this year and instead focused all of its attention on selling raffle tickets. Those sales happily generated enough income to support two scholarships (although not fully funded ones). The Committee reconfirmed its commitment to choosing recipients for the scholarships for whom the funded summer experience would be transformative. Some concern was expressed that the number of applicants was down to six from the previous year’s fourteen. There was some speculation that the economy might be playing a role. Potential candidates may not think their actual expenses will be met by the amount of the scholarship and therefore may not apply. Informing applicants about possible supplemental sources of support might be useful. Tulane University is to be applauded for donating the Scholarship brochures for this year.
Thank you to Benjamin Acosta-Hughes (Co-Chair) for his service and welcome to new member, Mira Seo. The new APA Co-Chair will be Sanjaya Thakur.
Other Committees: The freestanding committees of the Education Division also have new and retiring members. Thank you to Antonios Augoustakis for his service on the Coffin Traveling Fellowship Committee. Welcome to new member, Greta Ham. Henry Bender is the new Chair. Thank you to Frances Titchener for her service on the Committee on the Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics. Welcome to new member, Mary English. Kathryn Morgan is the new Chair.
Finally, the incoming and outgoing Vice Presidents attended the meeting at APA of the National Committee for Latin and Greek, a subcommittee of the American Classical League, of which APA is a sponsoring organization. The VPs encouraged NCLG to keep APA members informed of its activities by sending reports to the APA for inclusion in its Newsletter or in other kinds of posting (e-blast, blog etc.). The commercially produced video promoting Latin, now posted on its website and YouTube, is just one example of material that could be publicized appropriately to the APA membership.
Respectfully submitted,
Ronnie Ancona
January 8, 2010
Outreach. Since I submitted my last report in September 2009, the Division of Outreach has continued its efforts to expand the intellectual scope of classical antiquity and its legacy, and to share this knowledge more widely, both within and beyond the North American professional classics community. The major focus of our activity was the annual APA meeting, held in Anaheim, California from January 6-9, 2010. Official Outreach events included three panels: ”Classics and the Great Books” sponsored by the Outreach Committee itself, “Visualizing Ancient Narrative” sponsored by the Committee on the Classical Tradition, and “Contexts for Ancient Greek and Roman Drama,” sponsored by the Committee on Classical and Modern Performance. Each of these panels featured excellent papers, drew strong audiences, and was enthusiastically received.
CAMP was offered an unusual opportunity this year to sponsor a screening of silent films treating classical topics, and decided to hold the screening in place of a live performance. The screening took place on Friday, January 8 and attracted a large audience of over 200. We are grateful to Andrew Simpson of the Catholic University of America for providing superlative, improvised piano accompaniment to these films, and to Jon Solomon, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, for his generosity of time and treasure in helping to digitize them. Special thanks also go to Heather Hartz Gasda of the APA office, who undertook the complicated logistical arrangements for the screening of the silent cinematic clips, The organizers of this screening, Pantelis Michelakis of Bristol University, and Maria Wyke of University College, London, also organized a paper session the following day which situated these films—from France and Italy as well as the US— in their historical and cultural contexts. In addition to Michelakis and Wyke, Margaret Malamud of New Mexico State University and Ruth Scodel of the University of Michigan presented papers.
Another special opportunity was afforded CAMP and Outreach: Stephen Scully and Herbert Golder, with support provided by the Boston University Department of Classical Studies, offered to show My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? as an extra added attraction that same evening. A new Hollywood film directed by Werner Herzog and co-written by Herzog and Golder, it is based on a true story about an actor who murdered his own mother after performing the role of the mythic matricide Orestes in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Despite the late hour, the audience enjoyed this screening. CAMP is eager to give film a more prominent place in future APA sessions and programs that it sponsors at other venues.
All three committees held meetings in Anaheim, as did the editorial board of Amphora, the APA’s Outreach publication. Both the Amphora editor, Davina McClain, Louisiana Scholars’ College of Northwestern State University, and the assistant editor, Diane Johnson, Western Washington University, have been reappointed to second terms. We are greatly in their debt for their heroic work in transforming Amphora to an annual, mostly on-line, publication with no sacrifice in range or quality. At its board meeting, McClain welcomed two new members: Antony Augoustakis, Baylor University and the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and Matthew Dillon, Loyola-Marymount University. The forthcoming 2010 issue includes articles on such varied topics as the Catullus translator Carl Sesar and the classically-inspired artist Anita Huffington, classical magic in the Harry Potter novels and films, living history and classical archaeology in Gallo-Roman France, and the Herodotus digital “earth” project.
The Committee on the Classical Tradition thanked its outgoing chair, Judith Fletcher, Wilfrid Laurier University, and outgoing member Michele Valerie Ronnick, Wayne State University, for their extraordinary contributions to the committee. Fletcher, who oversaw the planning for the 2010 panel, also organized two sessions—on the topic of “Borders: geographical, social, political, temporal or conceptual”—sponsored by Outreach at the 2009 meeting of the Classical Association of Canada. Ronnick organized two sessions, each on the topic of “Black Classics”, sponsored by Outreach at the 2009 meeting of the College Language Association. Dirk Held, Connecticut College, the new committee chair, welcomed two new members: Paul Kimball, Bilkent University, and Barbara McManus, College of New Rochelle. The committee is planning a panel on children’s literature about classical antiquity for the 2011 APA meeting, and to sponsor sessions at several other meetings, among them that of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States. The committee also discussed the possibility of changing its name, so as to acknowledge the increasing currency of the more inclusive term “classical receptions” in identifying its purview.
I am delighted that Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz has agreed to serve as the chair of the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance for a second year. I would also like to thank outgoing committee members Hallie Rebecca Marshall, University of British Columbia, and Elizabeth Scharffenberger, Columbia University, for their outstanding service to the committee. Marshall, who coordinates “The Dionysiac”–the committee’s e-mail list announcing performances and other events of interest to classicists—organized the 2010 CAMP panel; Scharffenberger, who has starred in several of the annual CAMP productions, spoke on the importance of comedy in undergraduate “great books” programs at the 2010 Outreach panel. At its meeting, the committee welcomed Alison Futrell, University of Arizona, and George Kovacs, Trent University, as new members. And it extended its warmest congratulations to Mary-Kay Gamel, University of California, Santa Cruz, former chair of CAMP, who was honored with the APA scholarly Outreach prize this year.
CAMP is planning to return to the tradition of “live” APA dramatic performances at the 2011 meeting with a production of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, translated and directed by Bella Vivante, University of Arizona. Its 2011 panel will explore the relationship between democratic ideology and classical tradition in modern performance, coordinating its theme with that of the year-long conference on “Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn” sponsored by the Classical Reception Studies Network at the Open University in the UK. CAMP will investigate the possibilities of linking the APA Outreach Committee, which is an overseas affiliate of the CRSN, and the US institutional members of the CRSN (the classics departments at University of Michigan, New York University, and Northwestern University) through a website, following the model of the CRS network in Australia. It is also working with the Outreach Committee to assemble a roster of classicists with musical interests and expertise.
At its meeting, the Committee on Outreach thanked outgoing members Alison Futrell and David Porter, Skidmore College, for their contributions, among them helping to organize the 2010 panel on Classics and the Great Books. It welcomed as its new members Ward Briggs, University of South Carolina, and Clara Shaw Hardy, Carleton College. The topic of the 2011 panel, organized by Robert Ketterer, University of Iowa, and Andrew Simpson, is the classical reception of musical texts. I would like to express my appreciation to committee member Judith Sebesta, University of South Dakota, for her contributions to this panel.
The Outreach Committee and CAMP organized an informal gathering of “musical classicists” on January 9, which attracted a substantial attendance and great interest among many unable to attend. As noted earlier, efforts at assembling a roster of “musical classicists” are already underway, organized by myself and Ted Gellar-Goad, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with the assistance of Nancy Rabinowitz, chair of CAMP, and Outreach committee member Keely Lake, Wayland Academy. We are especially interested in identifying classicists 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.
Keely Lake is collaborating with APA president-elect Kathleen Coleman, Harvard University, to propose a session sponsored by APA Outreach at the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages meeting, to be held in Boston this coming November. My thanks again to committee member Benjamin Stevens, Bard College, for his leadership in revising the description of the Outreach Committee and its activities on the APA website, and to several committee members for their excellent ideas about refocusing the APA speakers’ bureau. I have implemented these ideas about the speakers’ bureau, among them according greater emphasis to recently published research and including Canadian as well as US classicists on the speakers’ bureau roster, in a mailing sent in mid-January to those already on the roster, as well as individuals recommended by committee members. Please contact me at jeph@umd.edu if you would like to be among our speakers.
Other committee members are working to promote the new APA President’s Award, which honors an individual, group or organization outside of the classics profession that has made significant contributions to advancing public appreciation and awareness of classical antiquity; to expand the involvement of classicists with programs in libraries, bookstores and prisons; to present a lecture series at the Embassy of Greece in Washington, DC; to consider how to forge close connections with outreach projects by classicists abroad, such as EuGeStA, the new European Gender Studies network launched by classicists in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the UK; and to facilitate discussion of issues and events of concern to classicists through the use of blogs.
It is a pleasure and privilege to work with the talented, energetic, and above all generous colleagues on the many facets of APA Outreach, above all our Executive Director Adam Blistein. Maximas gratias vobis omnibus ago.
Respectfully submitted,
Judith P. Hallett
February 2010
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 Classics Advisory Service.
At its general meeting at the APA convention in Anaheim, the Professional Matters Committee heard reports from the individual standing committees (see individual reports appended below); discussed a proposal concerning making available information on attrition, time to degree, and placement in classics graduate programs (further development of this proposal continues); and strategized concerning more effective and timely methods for data collection. The departmental census form has been converted to an electronic format, which should increase participation and aid greatly in tabulating results in the future. Special thanks were given to Carin Green, Kristina Milnor, and Stephen Nimis, outgoing chairs of our committees.
Subcommittee on Professional Ethics. Various questions were presented for consideration by the committee; as always, our deliberations are strictly confidential. Two on-going complaints continue to be adjudicated by the committee; we are confident that resolutions in these cases will be forthcoming in the near future.
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, in others the individuals concerned needed guidance as to how to rectify the situation.
The new early registration process is a resounding success. In accordance with the advice of Renie Plonski, the deadline for early registration will be moved up to Nov. 1. In 2009 there were increased concerns about institutions pushing the limits on the ways in which they did their hiring. One institution made an offer, then withdrew it when immigration issues arose. The Subcommittee on Professional Ethics helped them to resolve the issue appropriately. Other institutions have begun interviewing by phone and making offers before the convention. After discussion we decided that it was unfortunate, but acceptable. New discussions about “going electronic” have been raised in committee, and the on-going members will be doing research on this in the coming year and reporting at next year's meeting. The committee's panel for graduate students was again well attended, and plans for next year's have been made. The focus will be on high school positions for Ph.D.'s.
Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (Submitted by Stephen Trzaskoma and Kristina Milnor). Because of the (continued) lack of data from previous years, CSWMG once again did not produce any reports this year. The annual meeting of the committee and further discussions with the Professional Matters Committee in Anaheim led to 1) renewed commitments to get these data and 2) a new approach that would in the future have members of CSWMG partnering with members of other relevant committees to produce reports that are of relevance to the entire profession while continuing to address in particular the areas that CSWMG is charged with investigating. Thus, the placement report would be produced by the Placement Committee and CSWMG, and so forth. Once the data are obtained, work will begin in the upcoming year in establishing an effectivemodus operandi for these partnerships.
The members of CSWMG have continued discussions around ways in which it can perform its advocacy role. One example of success here was the panel discussion on “Recruiting and Retaining Minorities and Women in Classics: From Undergraduate to Tenured Faculty” at the meeting in Anaheim. Organized by CSWMG under the leadership of Kristina Milnor, the panel consisted of members of the committee and other members of the profession, as well as one administrative outsider, and attracted an audience of about 20. This audience was demographically diverse and notably included two students of color who shared their experiences. The committee will look for other opportunities to further the professional discussion of the status of women and minority groups in the professions and ways to create synergies with the Women's Classical Caucus and other groups.
Classics Advisory Service (Submitted by Stephen Nimis). The past year has seen the usual array of requests for program reviews of Classics programs. However, there has been an unusual number of threats to classics programs and departments, a trend that shows no sign of abating, and it is to this issue I would like to address my report this year.
Because of recent difficulties in the American economy, institutions of higher learning have suffered serious financial difficulties that have affected Classics programs in various ways. The easiest way for colleges to deal with budget cuts is not to replace faculty who retire or who leave for some other reason, or to replace tenure lines with visiting appointments or adjuncts, aggravating at many institutions what James O'Donnell has aptly called “adjunctivitis.” In the long run, this means a greater gap between those who have the security of tenure, along with access to research leaves, travel support, etc., and the swelling number of classicists who do not. Classics is a key fault line in the battle for the soul of academia, which often shapes up in times of financial troubles as a battle between the ideals of a liberal education versus the vocational benefits of college education. Often Classics will be viewed as “non-essential” or old fashioned. The current renewed emphasis on foreign language study, for example, has often been articulated with a strong presentist bias, privileging “critical” languages like Arabic and Chinese, which are viewed as crucial for preparing students to participate in the world economy, at the expense of well-established language programs that focus on literature and culture (Classics, but also German, Russian, and many others). Colleges and universities anxious to cut administrative costs increasingly seek to combine departments and programs to save money on chair stipends, support staff, office equipment, etc., often without much sensitivity to the curricular and professional consequences of such changes.
What is the best response? Righteous indignation can only get us so far. It is annoying to find it suddenly necessary to defend, once again, the role of Classics in a liberal education and the role of a liberal education in the modern university. However, it is also important to respond in a way that is meaningful to those who are responsible for making difficult decisions about the future of the university. Here are some thoughts on these issues from my own experiences and from the tales of woe I have heard lately. I offer them as a way of starting a conversation about these issues with the intent of girding ourselves for future battles.
1. Viability
Classics will rarely win the numbers game. It has been estimated that there is one tenured professor of Classics for every six Classics majors in the country [N.B. this is an unverified statistic from Frank Donahue's The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities]. Most Classics departments have a similar profile: a respectable number of majors per faculty member, a respectable number of Latin language students, a smaller number of Greek language students, in both cases thinning to smaller numbers (less than 10) in advanced courses in either language. At the same time, most departments field larger classical humanities courses (where all reading is in English) that cover both literature and material culture. These popular “bread and butter” courses usually are what make our departments viable. From the standpoint of bean-counters, it is easy to view our curriculum as something that is superfluous: there are other languages that students can take, whether they are more useful or not; and they can study literature and culture in translation in English and History departments. Classics is nice, in this scenario, but hardly essential. While it is always important to assert that Classics is relatively cheap (and we are, generally), it is more persuasive to argue our case on the basis of two other key criteria: quality and centrality.
2. Quality
Classics as a field and as a department has been around a long time at most universities; often, Classics is the oldest department at the institution. Although this is sometimes considered an aspersion, it is not difficult to argue that a field like Classics, with its well-established professional organizations, journals, conferences, scholarships and endowments, has what newer programs aspire to, but may never achieve: long-standing criteria of disciplinary authority that have evolved and stood the test of time, well-tested educational materials in the form of textbooks, long-standing graduate programs with proven excellence and track records. The classics section of most academic libraries is large; but that is only part of the story. Classics has been a leader in the implementation of technology in scholarship and teaching, as witnessed by innovative projects like the TLG, Perseus, and many others.
A defense based on quality is especially relevant when administrators suggest that newer interdisciplinary programs are more hip and room must be made for them in the curriculum at the expense of these older outdated programs. It is important to point out that a balance between disciplinary and interdisciplinary work is essential for the good health of both kinds of endeavor. The Achilles heel of interdisciplinary programs is lack of disciplinary depth, whereas disciplines tend to become excessively narrow. Students and scholars suffer in both cases: in the former, they can end up never engaging any subject deeply, with a superficial acquaintance of numerous fields; in the latter, they can end up unable to relate narrow disciplinary work to any other context. Aside from its very solid traditions of teaching and research, Classics has also been an interdisciplinary field for a long time, combining many specialties and always increasing the number of ways that classical antiquity can be studied or included in emerging fields (gender studies and identity studies are salient examples).
Emerging fields like Arabic and Chinese language instruction often lack the resources and personnel in cognate areas (history, religion, philosophy, etc.) with the result that language becomes taught and learned in a vacuum. Classics has the kind of broad representation in the curriculum outside of our departments that is required for the study of literature and language to be meaningful. The expansion of the curriculum into underrepresented areas is certainly a valid goal, but it is risky to replace tried and tested programs like Classics with emerging or evolving programs that may take years to implement properly. This is particularly true if those new programs rely heavily on individual faculty members whose expertise is not easy to reproduce when that faculty goes on leave or departs the institution completely. A better approach is to make room for these new programs within existing curricular and administrative structures, and classicists should be making strategic alliances that can move such an approach forward (Mediterranean Studies, for example).
High-achieving high school students frequently select Latin as their foreign language because of its reputation as a prestigious choice. High school Latin programs are often excellent in part because of the self-selection of these high-achieving students. College programs that wish to attract the best students will see Classics as a key resource. It is a good idea to get some data about these trends from relevant schools to help make this point. Contacting high school Latin teachers and guidance counselors can help build a case centered around recruitment.
A defense based on quality will inevitably make reference to the prestige that a classics curriculum adds to a liberal arts curriculum. It is easy to point to peer and aspirational institutions that have classics programs and argue that this should be part of the “arms race” in which all colleges seem to be embroiled.
3. Centrality
The centrality of Classics is a direct result of the institutional history of American universities. The centrality of Classics in the modern university will be evidenced in the way classicists participate in other kinds of programs, contributing a perspective and a set of tools that are distinctive and interesting. Again, gender studies and identity studies are good instances of the way Classics can occupy an important position in emerging fields of study. One way of putting ourselves in a stronger position in difficult times is to make ourselves useful and relevant to other programs around the university: history, art, religion, literature, etc. This can range from curricular support to collaborative research to just being a good citizen of the university. The role that Greek science and philosophy played in the development of Islam makes that now suddenly important field of study a source of new collaborative and curricular opportunities for classicists. Perhaps more to the point is the versatility that the skills involved in the study of Classics brings to our students. Studying the Classics provides students with the central components of a liberal education, as opposed to an education more narrowly focused on a specific occupation; and that is a preparation for a life of learning new skills and of transferring skills to other goals and arenas of activity.
Respectfully submitted,
James M. May
Program. I have several items to present at this time for the information of the Board and the membership. Only the last requires Board action.
The program of our current meetings has been well run and well received, and though (or perhaps rather, because) it has included somewhat fewer sessions than usual, attendance at individual sessions has been robust. I received word of a few technical glitches in the course of the weekend; a more systematic overview will be available once the annual survey of session-presiders has been completed. It remains only to thank, on the Committee’s behalf, all members who participated, whether as presenters, presiders, or discussants, with particular thanks to Barbara Weiden Boyd, who stepped in to serve as a presider when a family emergency prevented an originally scheduled presider from participating. As always, greatest thanks are due to Heather Hartz Gasda, the APA’s coordinator of meetings, programs, and administration, for the ceaseless energy and efficiency she brings to making the program work.
The first of the joint Classical Association / APA panels was presented on Friday, January 8: organized by Tim Whitmarsh on the theme of “Religious Controversies”, with papers by Mary Beard and Robin Lane Fox (CA) and Sarah Iles Johnston and James Porter (APA), it was a great success and good omen for the future, even though Tim Whitmarsh himself was very unfortunately prevented from attending by abysmal winter weather in the UK. The next panel, organized by Elizabeth Asmis of the Program Committee on a Ciceronian theme, with papers by Erich Gruen and Joy Connolly (APA) and Peter Wiseman and Ingo Gildenhard (CA), will be presented at the meetings of the Classical Association in spring 2011.
The workshop on the art and craft of abstract-writing that the Program Committee organized for Thursday, January 7, was reasonably well attended, and each of the Committee members who participated—Sharon James, Jeff Rusten, and myself—was subsequently stopped by someone who had been present and thanked for the effort. In connection with the workshop, the Committee has assembled a set of bullet-points on abstracts and abstract-writing that will be posted at some appropriate spot on the APA website.
As members of the Board and the Association more generally probably know, each author of an individual abstract is asked to assign the abstract to a category—for example, “Greek Epic” or “Latin Epic”—for administrative purposes in preparation for the Committee’s deliberations each June. (I note in passing that these categories exist only to allow the APA staff to marshal the 300-400 abstracts received in some orderly fashion: the Committee deliberates without thought of quota for any given category and without comparing abstracts within a category, and it assembles the final paper sessions without reference to the original abstract categories.) In response to a proposal from the WCC, the Committee has agreed to add a category on “Gender and Sexuality.”
Finally, on the subject of laptop computers used for PowerPoint presentations at paper sessions: though it has been the APA practice to bear the cost of computer rentals for members who are unwilling or unable to bring their own machines to the sessions, the cost of doing so is not really supportable in the current budgetary climate, and the members have not responded as well as they might to Heather Gasda’s gentle suasion. Heather therefore suggests—and I strongly endorse the suggestion—that the APA adopt the same policy as the AIA in this regard:
Presenters are responsible for supplying their own laptops, as they are not provided in the session rooms. In order to ensure proper display of your presentation while using a Mac, please have the appropriate connection cable available or a copy of your presentation on an external hard drive or CD for use on a PC. Please provide this copy to your session organizer.
Heather further suggests that any presenter who nonetheless still wishes to rent a computer for the occasion be required to deal directly with the local AV provider, eliminating the need for her to act as go-between; and again I strongly endorse the suggestion. [Editor's Note: The Board approved Prof. Kaster's proposals concerning computer rental.]
Respectfully submitted,
Bob Kaster
9 January 2010