Faculty News 2007

December 31, 2007

Anthony Bulloch continues to serve part-time as an Assistant Dean in the College of Letters and Science, Office of Undergraduate Advising. Two web sites he manages, GreekMyth.org and GreekReligion.org, now draw about 25,000 visitors per month from countries around the world.

Susanna Elm was the Ellen Maria Gorrissen Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in Spring 2007.

John Ferrari made a ten-day visit to Japan under the auspices of a program of the Japan Science Foundation designed to enhance the appeal of graduate education to Japanese undergraduates. He gave talks at Nagoya University and Kyoto University—two talks to general audiences on the contrasts between American and Japanese graduate programs in general and on the study of ancient philosophy in particular, as well as two talks for fellow-specialists on aspects of Plato's philosophy. In March 2008 he will return to Japan, this time to Tokyo Metropolitan University, to contribute to a multi-year program on ancient and early modern political philosophy.

Sumi Furiya is on leave this year supported by a Humanities Research Fellowship and a grant for the Loeb Classical Library Foundation.

Crawford Greenewalt, jr., continues to direct the Sardis Expedition for Harvard and Cornell and had among his colleagues in summer 2007 Berkeley graduate student Filipe Rojas, undergraduate Brianna Bricker of History, and a Classics alumnus, Patrick Crowley, now in graduate school at Bryn Mawr.

Mark Griffith, moving on from his studies of satyr-plays and mules, has recently been talking and writing (more fancifully and passionately than authoritatively) about the types of music performed in Greek drama, both in the original productions and in modern adaptations.  Thus his almost life-long devotion to rhythm and blues (or nowadays, to mbalax and Arabica), vocal microtones, and the saxophone is being combined with fresh attention to the famous Theban pipe-player Pronomos, the Anatolian (Hittite/Phrygian/Lydian) origins of "Greek" music, and the continuities between ancient Middle Eastern and modern Afro-American musical forms (popularly known as the "Muslim origins of the Blues", but surely much older—perhaps even Mesopotamian).   He has presented bits and pieces of these ideas (and these sounds) at conferences during the last year in Oxford (on the Pronomos Vase), Stanford (on Plato's Laws), Berkeley (Greek and Latin Workshops, on the choral lyrics of Euripides' Hecuba) and Stanford again (on staging Euripides' Bacchae).  His visits during that same period to Istanbul, Trabzon, Ephesus, Cairo and Alexandria (with his daughter Zoe as guide) have further fueled his interest in Middle Eastern music and culture, and he hopes to return to those parts of the (somewhat, or formerly Greek) world in the years to come. He has also given invited lectures at the University of Oregon (on performances of Euripides' Trojan Women), and the University of Reading (on the topic of tragedy, democracy, and the polis:  "Why Athens?"); and he is hoping to complete his book on Aristophanes' Frogs during the next few months.  As announced a few months ago, Mark has been honored with the title of Distinguished Klio Professor of Classical Languages and Literature, effective July 2007.

Erich Gruen brought his official faculty service to a close in June 2007, and his transition from a phased retirement to a full one was celebrated by award of the Berkeley Citation (announced in the previous newsletter) as well as by a very successful “Erichfest,” a conference organized by his friends and former students which also included some elements of a roast, enjoyable even to the victim. As expected, Erich’s retirement doesn’t involve any cutback in his scholarly effort. He gave papers at conferences in Liverpool and Jerusalem during the summer. In September he took up a one year post as "Villa Professor" at the Getty Villa in Malibu. Among his achievements in recent years are the edited volume Cultural Borrowings and Ethnic Appropriations in Antiquity, contributions to the Cambridge Companion to the Hellenistic World, the Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, and the Blackwell's Companion to the Roman Republic, and the delivery of the 2006 Martin Lectures at Oberlin College, and designation as an Honorary Member of the Roman Society in England. Erich notes: “The work of which I am most proud, however, is the posthumous publication of Representing Agrippina by Judith Ginsburg, a former student, which I helped to prepare for publication and for which I wrote an introduction.

Chris Hallett spent his Spring Break in March 2006 in Italy giving a lecture at the University of Pisa at a mini-symposium organized by Paul Zanker. During that stay Professor Zanker gave a guided tour of the Campesanto in Pisa, with its extraordinary collection of Roman sarcophagi, and in addition arranged a visit to Florence to see the collection of ancient sculpture in the Galleria degli Uffizi, as a guest of the curator, Antonella Romualdi. Dottoressa Romualdi also led the group on a visit to the Villa Corsini, situated some distance outside Florence—an ornate 17th century building that will eventually serve as a separate branch of the Florence Archaeological Museum.  The villa is currently being converted to house the Museum’s substantial collection of Greek and Roman statues—most of which have not been on show to the public before.
Chris also spoke in April 2006 at a conference at the newly opened Getty Villa in Malibu. He describes the event as follows. “The topic under discussion was a magnificent over life-size marble bust of the emperor Commodus acquired from Castle Howard in England for the Getty Collection.  The Museum purchased it as a 16th century copy of an ancient bust, but a long list of ancient portrait experts—drawn from all over Europe and the United States, and including Klaus Fittschen, Cécile Evers, and Barbara Borg (among others)—all lined up to argue that the bust is actually ancient.  Not just authentically ancient—but one of the very finest works of Roman sculpture to have been preserved from the ancient world.  Perhaps never before have so many historians of ancient art been witnessed emphatically agreeing with one another in a public setting.  It was an emotional moment for all involved.  Especially when the Getty curators, unmoved by this unprecedented unanimity, announced that the bust will remain inventoried as a 16th century copy.  As far as I know it continues to be displayed as part of the Getty’s collection of early modern ‘decorative sculpture’.”

Robert Knapp has been enjoying his first grandchild on frequent trips to Irvine. His article “The Poor, Latin Inscriptions, and Social History” has recently appeared in the publication of the papers of the XII International Epigraphic Congress held in Barcelona in 2002.

Leslie Kurke is taking a well-earned respite from her term as Chair (but will be back in 2008-2009). This fall she has been in residence at Wellesley College as Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities. In addition to giving public lectures, she taught both a comparative literature course on “Detective Fiction and Psychoanalysis” and a faculty seminar on “Elvis Presley and Myths of America.” As announced earlier, she has been named the Richard and Rhoda P. Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts & Humanities for the term 2007-2012.

In May 2007 Tony Long made two trips to southern California. On the first of these, under the auspices of the Campus Development Office, he gave talks to the Cal Alumni Associations of Costa Mesa and Los Angeles on the theme "How to be good when times are bad", treating the theme from an ancient Stoic perspective. On both occasions, which were very well attended, he shared the podium with Prof. Duncan Williams of the Dept. of East Asian Languages and Culture, who addressed the same theme from a Buddhist perspective.
Over the next few months Tony gave talks and conference presentations at UCSB (Plotinus), the University of Hamburg (Heraclitus on rationality), the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign (Cosmic craftsmanship in Plato and Stoicism), and Indiana University (The idea of catastrophe in ancient thought). His conference agenda for spring 2008 will include the annual Arizona Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy, lectures on Socrates at Pomona College, and a colloquium on ancient slavery at UCI.
In September at Berkeley, David Sedley and Andrea Nightingale, two of Tony's most illustrious graduate students, presented him with a magnificent three-day colloquium on the theme "Models of Mind," in celebration of his 25 years of service on the Berkeley Faculty and his 70th birthday.  Speakers and respondents who were Tony's former Berkeley students included Allan Silverman, Ruby Blondell, Sara Ahbel-Rappe, Kathryn Morgan, Chris Bobonich, Luca Castagnoli, Richard Bett, Stephen White, Gretchen Reydams-Schils,  James Ker and Ken Wolfe.  Other speakers who have been closely associated with Tony included from  UCB John Ferrari and Alan Code, and from elsewhere Myles Burnyeat (Robinson College, Cambridge, Richard McKirahan (Pomona College), Mary-Louise-Gill (Brown University), Henry Mendell (CalState LA) Jean-Baptiste Gourinat (University of Paris), Keimpe Algra (University of Utrecht).
Directly after this conference Tony took up a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he has completed an article on Philo of Alexandria’s treatment of Stoic physics.  Finding himself missing Berkeley and its students, he has decided to return to teaching in Spring 2008 with courses on Aristotle's Politics and Seneca's philosophy.

Donald Mastronarde is very glad that he is serving only one year as Acting Chair. In 2007 he continued to inch toward the completion of his Euripides book and made some preliminary efforts toward his next major project, a edition of the scholia to Euripides. For the latter he is participating in a seminar at the Chicago APA on Critical Editions in the 21st Century with a paper “Towards a New Edition of the Scholia to Euripides” reporting on experimentation with a specimen XML edition using the Text Encoding Initiative’s latest standard. During 2006-2007 he chaired a joint APA/AIA Task Force on Electronic Publication and was the principal author of most of the group’s report in March 2007. As an offshoot of that group’s activity, he organized for the Chicago APA a panel entitled “The Future is Now? Digital Library Projects and Scholarship and Teaching in Classics.”
Donald has also been working (with some degree of loathing and trepidation) on extending the APA’S GreekKeys keyboard software to Windows. The Mac and Windows product GreekKeys 2008 should be released in February 2008.

Kathy McCarthy is serving as Acting Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature this academic year.

Steve Miller and Effie now divide their time between homes in Nemea and San Mateo. Steve has just received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support his project “Into  Darkness,” a study of the literary, archaeological, and scientific evidence for an extraordinary climatic crisis (drought, famine, lengthy “disappearance” of the sun) starting in 536 CE, possibly a cause of the Dark Ages. Drafts of four chapters were presented as lectures to California Alumni on a trip from Venice to Istanbul, and Steve has also made presentations to the Society for the Study of Ancient Greek Technology, and at the University of Dijon. His book The Berkeley Plato, which presents a portrait long forgotten in the basement of the Hearst Women's Gym, will be published by UC Press in 2008. He has also neared completion of Plato at Olympia, a children's book about the ancient Olympics commissioned by the Greek Ministry of Culture. This book is to be translated into Chinese and available at the Olympics this coming summer.
Steve reported in November: “The summer crops (beans, corn, tomatoes, etc.) are in and the winter crops (cabbage, spinach, beets, etc.) just beginning to appear on the dinner table. The way the dollar is going, I may have to start selling them as well as eating them.” Most recently he participated in the planting of a tree at the International Olympic Academy at Olympia in support of the recovery efforts after this summer's fires.

Nelly Oliensis continues to work hard as Graduate Adviser and responds to an incredible number of emails. Her essay entitled “Erotics and Gender” appeared in the Cambridge Companion to Horace in 2007. 

Dylan Sailor’s first book, on Tacitus, is now in production at Cambridge University Press while he works on his next projects during a year at the American Academy in Rome where he holds a Rome Prize Fellowship.