Faculty News 2009 and 2010

January 11, 2011

(story in progress)

Anthony Bulloch continues to serve part-time as Assistant Dean in the Office of Undergraduate Advising of the College of Letters and Science. He is close to completing a textbook on Greek Myth  commissioned by Thames and Hudson. He has been invited by the Open University of Cyprus to be keynote speaker at a conference, held in Delphi, on Greek Mythology and its legacy.

Susanna Elm was visiting professor in Munich in the fall 2009, and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study there; she taught an intensive workshop on Flaubert’s reception of Antiquity, especially late antiquity (with H. U. Gumbrecht of Stanford and Barbara Vinken of Munich). If Fall 2010 she hosted the City-Empire-Christendom Conference.

John Ferrari took over as Department Chair in Fall 2009. In August 2010, he was a plenary session speaker (one of eight such for the week) at the ninth triennial international Symposium Platonicum held in Tokyo, Japan (Keio University).  The topic of the symposium was Plato’s Republic, and his paper was on “Plato’s Writerly Utopianism.”

Mark Griffith delivered lectures and seminars at Trinity University (Texas), Reed College, UCLA, Stanford, St John’s College (New Mexico), and L’ École des Hautes Études (Paris), on such topics as “Where does our religion come from?,” Greek music, “The geopolitics of Dionysian performance style in Athenian satyr-drama,” “Performance phrygienne et poésie à Athènes: sur l’interpretation de l’Oreste d’Euripide,” and various textual problems in Aeschylus.  He has published articles on the Pronomos Vase and on Greek Lyric, and is currently in the middle of revising (with co-editor Glenn Most) The Complete Greek Tragedies, originally edited by D. Grene and R. Lattimore, for the University of Chicago Press. For this he has completed a new translation of Euripides’ The Children of Heracles.  He spent Fall 2010 on sabbatical leave, finishing a short book on Aristophanes’ Frogs for Oxford University Press and beginning to explore topics in ancient Greek music, biomusicology, and ethnomusicology. Meanwhile he continues to enjoy greatly his responsibilities as Chief Editor of the (Berkeley-based) journal Classical Antiquity, which attracts submissions from all over the world and on all kinds of topics.

Chris Hallett took on as of Fall 2009 the challenge of serving as Chair of the History of Art Department, but managed to continue his scholarly activities. His long review addressing a recent study on Roman colossal portraits, titled: ‘The Great Ones of this World,’ appeared in Journal of Roman Archaeology 20 (2009) 569-77. Together with his Art History colleague  T. J. Clark, he organized a two-day conference on Roman sarcophagi, entitled Flesh-Eaters.  It was held at the Berkeley Art Museum in September 2009 and featured (among others) Paul Zanker, R. R. R. Smith, Alan Cameron, and Mary Beard.  The following month, Chris and Tim Clark both traveled to New York to serve as a General Respondents at the conference ‘The Sarcophagus East and West,’ held at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), New York University, at which a series of scholars of Roman and of Chinese art presented parallel papers on various aspects of sarcophagus-monuments. He also spoke on ‘The Study of Roman Art: Current Developments and Future Prospects’ at the AIA Gold Medal Colloquium: ‘The State and Future of Roman Art, Archaeology, and History: Papers in Honor of John Humphrey’ (at Anaheim in January 2010), and delivered papers at Indiana University and Stanford.

Leslie Kurke finished her term as Department Chair in Spring 2009, and since then has been enjoying her (relative) freedom to focus on teaching and research.  In spring 2010, she delivered the Faculty Research Lecture at UC Berkeley, the Carl M. Deppe Memorial Lecture at UC Santa Cruz, and the Gaisford Lecture at Oxford.  In April 2010, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society, and in November 2010, her book Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose appeared from Princeton University Press.  She is just embarking on a calendar-year leave in 2011, during which she hopes to make progress on a new project on Greek choral poetry, dance, and ritualization.

Tony Long was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society and gave overseas conference presentations at Delphi, University of Uppsala, and Cambridge University, and was keynote speaker at conferences in University of Munich on paratextuality and in University of Würzburg on Epicurean hedonism. The book based on the conference in honor of his 70th birthday appeared in Fall 2010 (see story). Tony edited the 1997 Sather lectures given by the late Michael Frede for publication under the title  A Free Will: Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (appearing early 2011 from UC Press). Having just completed the first semester of a three-year stint on the Budget Committee of the Academic Senate, he is on sabbatical leave for spring 2011, working on, among other things, a project about early Greek selfhood and rationality and (with Margaret Graver) a translation with annotation of Seneca’s  Moral Letters to Lucilius for Chicago University Press.

Donald Mastronarde spent his sabbatical leave during 2009-10 working on the first phase of a new edition of the scholia on the plays of Euripides and designing a format for an open-access digital edition (EuripidesScholia.org), a sample of which was made public in April 2010. He delivered papers on this project at the Ted Brunner Memorial Conference of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae at UC Irvine in October 2009 and in Oxford and Cambridge in spring 2010. He was in Oxford for the Oxford-Berkeley Papyrological Seminar, participating along with three Berkeley graduate students in two weeks of Dirk Obbink’s papyrology seminar. His book The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context was published by Cambridge in spring 2010. With Departmental sponsorship, he is preparing to launch a new open-access monograph series in cooperation with University of California Press and the California Digital Library's eScholarship repository.

Maria Mavroudi has joined the editorial board of the periodical Palaeoslavica (Cambridge, MA). In summer 2010 she gave a paper entitled “Translators from Greek into Arabic at the Court of Mehmet the Conqueror” in Istanbul (to be published in 2011). She has recently been studying Arabic documents held by the monastery of Vatopedi on Mount Athos: these were drawn up for the use of Christians in the early Ottoman Balkans (in this case the cities of Drama and Serres in Northern Greece), and such documents are extremely rare and poorly known to scholarship. Her work on them will appear in the relevant volume of the series “Archives de l’Athos” (Paris and Athens). She is currently organizing a colloquium on Byzantine identity to be held at Dumbarton Oaks in March 2011.

Andrew Stewart was one of the recipients of the campus’ Distinguished Teaching Award in Spring 2009, and his 2008 book Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art was shortlisted for the Runciman Prize for the best book of the year on a Hellenic topic. He has continued work on the Hellenistic sculpture of the Athenian Agora and on the finds at the sanctuary of Hera at Samos. An article on Aphrodite in Hellenistic Athens, including the publication of two dozen statues and statuettes of her from the Agora, is forthcoming in Hesperia, and two more articles on  Agora sculptures have been submitted. In October 2009 he was Lansdowne Lecturer at the University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C., and Classics Department Annual Visiting Lecturer at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana; in March 2010 he was Brittingham Foundation Visiting Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In June 2010, he gave the keynote speech, “Desperately Seeking Skopas,” and also was moderator and session chair at an international conference on the subject of his 1972 dissertation, the sculptor-architect Skopas, held at Paroikia on Skopas’s home island of Paros.