Faculty News 2011

December 12, 2011

John Ferrari continued as chair, with an exceptionally busy schedule of important personnel cases.

Mark Griffith has completed a short book on Aristophanes' Frogs, due to appear next year with Oxford U.P.   He has also been busy (in collaboration with Glenn Most) revising the "Complete Greek Tragedies" series of translations, originally edited by Richmond Lattimore and David Grene for the  U. of Chicago Press.  The new edition is due to appear in Fall 2012. Most of the original translations are retained (with modifications and improvements), but a few are being replaced by new versions:  one of these is MG's own translation of The Children of Heracles.   Meanwhile, he co-organized last May (with Mary-Kay Gamel) an international conference at Santa Cruz and Berkeley on ancient Greek theater music, in conjunction with a performance at UC Santa Cruz of Euripides' Orestes.  One of his treasured memories of that spectacular weekend was jamming on the piano with Stefan Hagel on auloi  in the Women's Faculty Club, improvising in something that perhaps approximated the "Phrygian" mode (Hagel, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is a world authority on the technicalities of ancient Greek music, and ace reconstructor of and perfomer on those Dionysian pipes).  Other publications of his are in the works on dithyramb and satyr-play, on Plato's ideas about the music(s) most suitable for a Cretan city, and on music and dance in post-5th century tragedy.  In July-August, MG gave three lectures at the U. of Canterbury, New Zealand, on Greek music; and he was pleased to witness some New Zealand dolphins dancing as energetically and elegantly as their Greek counterparts.  A Green-and-Yellow (Cambridge) edition of Aeschylus' Agamemnon is also underway, but not as yet close to completion.

Erich Gruen remains in denial about his "retirement." After a year at the Getty in 2007/8, he spent a term as visiting fellow at Oxford in 2009, where he ran the faculty seminar in ancient history, then a term as visiting fellow at Tel Aviv University in 2010. Various other short-term visits for talks found him in places like Munich, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Jerusalem, Princeton, Penn, and Ohio State. In the meantime, he taught a course, together with four graduate students, at San Quentin in fall, 2009, enjoying some of the most industrious students he has had. He recently returned from six weeks in Australia and New Zealand, which included ten different lectures in ten different venues, plus attendance at two conferences, one of which was organized in his honor. Two books appeared at the end of 2010: Rethinking the Other in Antiquity and (an edited volume) Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean. Five of his students obtained PhDs in May, 2011, and seven others are nearing the finish line. He is also chairing the Jewish Studies Program here, a task that should mercifully come to an end in June, 2012.

As reported in a separate story, Todd Hickey was promoted to tenure and took over the role of Director of the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri to go along with his position as Papyrologist/Curator. His book Wine, Wealth, and the State in Late Antique Egypt: The House of Apion at Oxyrhynchus is currently in production at the University of Michigan Press.

Robert Knapp's Invisible Romans was published this year by Profile Books (London) and Harvard University Press.  It appears in Spanish (Ariel) as Los Olvidados de Roma and will soon appear in German (Klett-Cotta) as Römer im Schatten der Geschichte, with a  Japanese translation to appear next spring.

After more than ten years spent working on Aesop and the invention of Greek prose, Leslie Kurke is delighted to be able to return to Pindar and choral lyric poetry for a new project on the aesthetics and sociology of choreia in the archaic and classical periods.  Two articles that preview the project will appear in 2012 or 2013: "The Value of Chorality in Ancient Greece" in an interdisciplinary volume on Value in the Ancient World, edited by John Papadopoulos and Gary Urton, and "Imagining Chorality: Wonder, Plato's Puppets, and Moving Statues" in The City Dancing: Performance and Culture in Plato's Laws, edited by Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi (Cambridge University Press).  During a calendar-year leave in 2011, she gave talks on aspects of her Pindar research at an interdisciplinary Conference on "Historical Poetics" at the University of Chicago in May; at a Conference on "Authorship, Authority, and Authenticity in Archaic and Classical Greek Song" at Yale in early July; and at the Classics Triennial at Cambridge University in late July. It was a real pleasure to return to ongoing scholarly conversations on Greek lyric poetry, and especially to participate in conferences together with several former students—among them, Jason Aftosmis, Tamara Chin, Pauline Leven, Boris Maslov, Melissa Mueller, Richard Neer, Chris van den Berg, and Victoria Wohl.

Tony Long was one of five visiting speakers for the Lennox Series of Lectures on the philosophy of friendship held at Trinity University in Spring 2011.  He contributed a seminar on Aristotle's treatment of virtue friendship, and also a paper on Stoic notions of philia. His audience for the paper surprisingly included more than a dozen army officers from countries in the Middle East.  Tony later gave the same paper in the series of seminars on Stoicism of the Centre Léon Robin of the University of Paris, at which he had previously spoken during the first year of the series in 2000.  He also delivered a paper on eudaimonism in March at the University of Hong Kong, and repeated it at San Francisco State and at Pomona College in a week-long series of lectures on ancient philosophy in Fall 2011.  He was a panel discussant on C.P Snow's Two Cultures for the campus's "Learning in Retirement Program," and on T. Engberg-Pedersen's book, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul, at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Tony spent the first week of June this year at Cambridge University, where he was the final speaker at a week-long conference to honor the work of Malcolm Schofield.  In February 2011 the University of California Press published Michael Frede's 1997 Sather Lectures, Free Will. Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought, edited by Tony from the typescripts that Frede had left unrevised at the time of his death in 2007.  Tony continues to translate and annotate Seneca's Epistulae Morales, on which he will teach a course in Fall 2012. He has also begun to collaborate on a new English edition of Diogenes Laertius for Harvard University Press.  He is mainly at work currently on a series of lectures for Renmin University, Beijing, to be given in May 2012, with the title "Models of Self and Identity in Ancient Greek Literature and Philosophy." This is also the topic of Tony's upcoming graduate seminar.  At the annual meeting in London of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies he was elected an honorary member.

In June Donald Mastronarde participated in a PhD oral examination at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and took the opportunity to inspect Euripides manuscripts in Madrid, El Escorial, and Salamanca. He organized the Berkeley-Oxford Papyrological Seminar held in September: this was a two-seminar event involving scholars from Würzburg, Pisa, and Wayne State University as well as Oxford and Berkeley.

In August 2011, Maria Mavroudi participated at the 22nd Congress of Byzantine Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria. This is the largest scholarly meeting on Byzantine studies internationally and takes place every five years. The Congress at Sofia attracted around 1,300 attendees from around the globe. Mavroudi gave a plenary address entitled "Byzantium viewed by the Others," in which she emphasized how paying attention to translations of Byzantine belletristic and technical literature into other medieval languages allows one to discern the unacknowledged importance of Byzantium for other medieval civilizations and to re-cast the received narrative of medieval European and Middle Eastern cultural history. She also gave a round table presentation on "Licit and Illicit Divination: empress Zoe and the icon of Christ Antiphonetes," outlining how pagan Neoplatonism meets Christian and patristic thought in the eleventh century. In October, she delivered the inaugural Tousimis Distinguished Lecture at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. The title was "Greek Education in Muslim Lands during the Early Islamic Period." This was an event organized on the occasion of the Byzantine Studies Conference, the largest annual meeting of Byzantinists in the U.S. (attended by approximately 250 scholars this year).

With Freud's Rome:  Psychoanalysis and Latin Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2009) finally behind her, Nelly Oliensis is happily devoting herself to Ovid.  During her recent calendar-year leave in 2010, she made progress on a book on Ovid's Amores entitled Loving Writing and also secured a contract from Cambridge for a commentary on Ovid Metamorphoses 6 (her favorite) in the "Green and Yellow" series (where she is honored to be joining Mark Griffith and Donald Mastronarde). 2010 saw the appearance of her contribution on psychoanalysis in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies as well as the reprinting of two earlier pieces on Horace in the relevant volumes of the Oxford Readings series.  She has enjoyed the opportunity of presenting some of her ongoing work on the Amores at UCLA, the Boston Area Latin Colloquium, and most recently at Dartmouth College, where she gave the 2011 Benefactor's Lecture.  (The latter was the occasion for her favorite lecture poster, featuring a stuffed parrrot; to see it, just scroll right past Andy Stewart's poster at this link.) Since returning from leave she has resumed her position as Graduate Advisor, which she expects to retain (with a break in spring 2012) for at least one more year.

In Spring 2011, Nikolaos Papazarkadas was a resident fellow at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies. The Center's excellent facilities and friendly environment constituted the ideal starting point for his new project 'Law and Judicial Administration in Hellenistic Athens.' And it was there in DC that he also finalized most of the arrangements for the international symposium 'Epigraphy and History of Boeotia: New Finds, New Developments' (Berkeley-September 2-3, 2011). The symposium, organized by the Sara B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy, in collaboration with the Collège de France, and with the generous financial support of the France-Berkeley Fund and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, was a bonanza of exciting old and new epigraphical documents and analyses. But the highlight of his year was the publication of his book, Sacred and Public Land in Ancient Athens, in the series Oxford Classical Monographs (Oxford University Press, 2011), the end of research project he found long, at times challenging, but ultimately gratifying.

Ted Peña continued his work on the Palatine East Pottery Project (PEPP) on a sabbatical trip to Rome in January-February, then during June-July brought three undergraduate students who had worked as his research apprentices on campus during the academic year to Rome to assist him in his work with the Palatine East materials. During his sabbatical trip to Italy he also met with the site director at Pompeii to plan a new research project that he will initiate there during the summer of 2012: it is to be known as the Pompeii Artifact Life Cycle Project (PALHIP). He also chaired the committee that organized the second edition of the Berkeley Ancient Italy Roundtable (BAIR), a conference that brings together on the Berkeley campus for one weekend each October students of the archaeology, history , and art of ancient Italy.

Dylan Sailor taught a Sallust seminar at Stanford in the spring quarter of 2011, and he also completed the section on Agricola for the Blackwell Companion to Tacitus, due to appear in January 2012.

During a spring sabbatical leave in Cambridge, Kim Shelton completed a manuscript for the Well Built Mycenae series, the final publication of the British excavations at the Bronze Age site, on the Tsountas House area in the Cult Center. While in the UK she served as an external examiner at the University of Birmingham and taught, together with Elizabeth French, a "Master Class" in Mycenaean pottery for the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge. This summer she continued study of the material from her excavation at Petsas House, Mycenae, and directed for the Nemea Center the second of three seasons of excavation in the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea, where significant evidence of prehistoric and early historic occupation was recovered.

Andy Stewart continues to chair AHMA. He resumed work in the Athenian Agora in summer of 2010 and his massive article on Aphrodite in Hellenistic Athens, including publication of two dozen statues and statuettes of the goddess from the Agora, will appear in January in Hesperia, the journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. A second article, on the Capitoline Aphrodite type and the sculptor Kephisodotos II, son of Praxiteles, has now been published in the Australasian classics journal Antichthon. A third and fourth, on the fragments of a colossal cult group of Demeter and Kore in the Agora tentatively attributed to the Athenian City Eleusinion and the second-century B.C. sculptor Polykles of Thorikos, and on sculptors' models, sketches, and doodles from the Agora, are currently under consideration at Hesperia. He was the Classics Department Annual Lecturer at U.C. Santa Barbara and a speaker in the Getty Villa's public lecture series in Fall 2010, and gave the Biggs Lectures at the University of Washington in St. Louis in April 2011. He returned to Athens and the Agora in June 2011 to find yet more sculptures to work on, and to speak at a symposium in honor of his friend and colleague in the Agora Museum, Susan Rotroff. In fall 2011 he spoke to the AIA at Berkeley on "Pheidias's World: The Berkeley Casts of the Parthenon Frieze and their Athenian Context; and at Dartmouth College on "The Wardrobe Malfunction that Shook the World: Nudity, the Olympics, and Greek Self-Fashioning." Meanwhile, he devotes what little free time he has to sailing his 38-foot sloop "Obsession" on San Francisco Bay; playing with his twin granddaughters Giselle and Sofia; and ministering to his wife Darlis's menagerie of cats.