Department News and Events
Prof. John W.I. Lee kicked off the Classics Department’s annual lecture series with “African Americans and Xenophon, c. 1800–1910,” arguing that “although Xenophon gets less attention today than Herodotus and Thucydides, his work played a vital role in early African American education.” Analyzing the early curricula of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Prof. Lee found that Xenophon’s Anabasis—a tale of mercenaries in hostile territory whose escape to freedom was often compared to the plight of runaway slaves—was joined only by the Greek New Testament as the primary text for their courses in ancient Greek.
In the past three decades, the role of the dead in living communities has become a topic of widespread interest across disciplinary boundaries. Along different lines, classicists have become increasingly interested in the relationship between the living and the dead in the ancient Mediterranean. This workshop aims to bridge these conversations, linking a historical concern with the ancient dead with broader questions about the ethical and political stakes of haunting. With this framing in mind, we welcome a wide array of papers, projects, and practices, which plot themselves in the realm of spectral cartography. Possible topics include, for example, interactions between the living and the ancient dead, the “deadening” of languages and cultures, theoretical approaches to haunting, and the haunted disciplinarity of Classics.
With the new academic year in full swing, we sat down with Prof. Jesse Lundquist, an expert in ancient linguistics and the latest addition to the faculty of Princeton Classics, to ask him about his work, the value of teaching, and how he came to learn so many languages.
We are delighted to welcome poet, translator, and classicist A.E. Stallings as Princeton’s 2023–2024 Robert Fagles Lecturer for Classics in the Contemporary Arts. Known for her rhyming translations of Lucretius and Hesiod and for her five books of formalist verse, Stallings has received numerous prizes, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur “Genius” grant, and the Runciman Award. A Pulitzer Prize finalist and current Oxford Professor of Poetry, Stallings will deliver a lecture on October 3rd titled “Homer's Hippiad: From the First Deaths to the Last Word,” exploring how mules and horses mirror and shadow their human counterparts in Homer’s Iliad.
The recent surge of interest in “global Classics”, the study of the texts and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean beyond the bounds of Greece and Rome, has directed much scholarly attention to the reception of Classics in vernacular languages and the role of Classics as a medium of interaction between cultures. Excitingly, such inquiry has also opened the door to exploring more marginalized voices in Classical studies, such as translations by women [“Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England, Smith 2012] and the reception of Classics in Latin America [Empire without End: Virgilian epics from Spanish and Portuguese America, Valdivieso forthcoming] and East Asia [Plato Goes to China, Bartsch 2023]. Furthermore, we are interested in exploring the potential avenues generated by examining the bi-directional relationship between translation in and out of Classical languages and vernaculars and the composition of new texts within the confluence of different cultures.
We are proud to welcome Dr. Joseph Fins to Princeton as the Old Dominion Visiting Professor in the Humanities Council and Department of Classics for Fall 2023. The E. William Davis, Jr. M.D. Professor of Medical Ethics and Chief of the Division of Medical Ethics at Weill Cornell Medical College, Dr. Fins is also a professor at Yale Law School, the President of the International Neuroethics Society, a Member of numerous academies and learned societies, and the author of over 500 papers, chapters, essays, and books, including Rights Come to Mind: Brain Injury, Ethics, and the Struggle for Consciousness (Cambridge, 2015).
While on sabbatical at Princeton, Fins will teach a course with Professor Brooke Holmes entitled, “Bio/Ethics: Ancient and Modern” and conduct archival research for a biography of the physician-humanist Dr. Lewis Thomas ’33, the poet, scientist, and National Book Award-winning author for whom Princeton's Molecular Biology building is named. Dr. Fins will also deliver a public lecture—watch this space for more details!
The 2023 Princeton Department of Classics Newsletter has arrived!
The department's annual newsletter is now available online and in print.
Inside, you can find exciting updates from faculty and students, as well as articles highlighting Classics Department events!
The John J. Keaney Prize is the departmental prize for the best senior thesis. This award is in fond memory of Professor John Keaney, who served the Department as colleague, teacher, and mentor for 41 years, from 1959 to 2000. The award was established in 2010 to replace the Atkins Prize for the best senior thesis, which was awarded until 2009. Initial funding has been provided by a grateful alumnus, one of the many who learned so much from Professor Keaney.
The Department of Classics' Andrew Feldherr with Graduate Alum Luca Grillo and others co-organized the two-day conference hosted by the University of Notre Dame, Rome Gateway Center.
The conveners included Luca Grillo (University of Notre Dame), Emily Baragwanath (UNC, Chapel Hill), Andrew Feldherr (Princeton University) and Christopher Krebs (Stanford University).
2023 marks the 35th anniversary of the appearance of A. J. Woodman's Rhetoric in Classical Historiography, a work that has transformed our understanding of the Greek and Roman historians, especially among anglophone scholars. Woodman argued above all that the aims of these historians must be understood according to the principles of ancient rhetoric, for example, to praise, inspire or entertain, rather than anachronistically presuming that they shared the same fundamental goal as the modern academic discipline of history: to represent the truth of what happened in the past.
The Department of Classics is happy to share the news that Grant Bruner was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1776 and the oldest of all national honorary scholastic societies, has a chapter at Princeton. Election to this chapter is based on scholastic standing and generally includes the highest-ranking tenth of each graduating class. Congratulations Grant!
The Stinnecke Prize, established at Princeton in 1870, is given to the sophomore or junior who passes the best examination based on the Odes of Horace, Eclogues of Vergil, and the Latin Grammar and Prosody, as well as the Anabasis of Xenophon or Plato’s Euthyphro, Crito, Apology and Phaedo and the Greek Grammar. The winner receives a one-time stipend of $5,000 in addition to any scholarship or other financial assistance, which he or she may be receiving.
The Humanities Council is pleased to award 27 new grants for innovation and collaboration in 2023-24. These projects, led by 41 faculty from across 25 academic departments and programs, will contribute to humanistic inquiry across disciplines on Princeton’s campus and beyond. In addition, the Council continues to support six previously awarded multi-year initatives.
The Department of Classics celebrates the 90th birthday of our esteemed emerita, Professor Froma Zeitlin. Professor Zeitlin is an exceptional scholar who has dedicated her career to the field of ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in epic, drama and prose fiction, along with work in gender criticism, and the relationship between art and text in the context of the visual culture of antiquity. Froma's work on establishing new approaches to Greek tragedy has been considered particularly influential.She has been an inspiration to generations of students and colleagues, and her contributions to the department and the wider academic community are immeasurable. We are honored to celebrate her milestone birthday and recognize her outstanding achievements. Please join us in wishing Froma a very happy 90th birthday!
You may view Froma's Liber Amicorum (Book of Friends), here.
Grant Bruner, a senior in classics, took the first prize in both Greek and Latin at the New York Classical club undergraduate Greek and Latin examinations. Laurie Drayton, a freshman with classics interests, took the second prize in both.
The Classics Department will offer a minor beginning with the Class of 2025.
Annabelle Duvalis a history concentrator from Rhinebeck, N.Y. with a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies.Traditionally, the salutatorian delivers their address in Latin, a language Duval first started studying in the sixth grade. As an undergraduate, Duval studied the antiquity period in her home department, as well as in Classics. She also has taken courses focused on Latin literature.
Toni Keaney, the wife of our much-missed former colleague John Keaney, passed away on March 23. The Keaneys moved to Princeton in 1959 and raised three children here while Toni worked as a nurse and teacher in the local school system. We pay tribute to a life rich in service to others and send our condolences to her family. A fuller obituary can be found here.
In the 2022 Prentice lecture, ‘The Moon and the Map in the Ancient World,’ Karen ní Mheallaigh, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University, charted the long history of our fascination with the moon. Through a series of close readings of Lucian, Plutarch and other ancient thinkers, she unraveled an ancient phenomenology in which the moon was understood as an “optical prosthesis” that could supplement earthly vision and enhance the numinosity of space.
The Society of Fellows is very much delighted to announce that Yelena Baraz, the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature and Professor of Classics, has been appointed as its faculty director, beginning in fall 2023. She is to succeed Michael D. Gordin, Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History, who has led the Society since 2017.
In 2022, the third year of the SCS Erich S. Gruen Prize, the selection committee received 18 submissions from graduate students across North America treating aspects of race, ethnicity, or cultural exchange in the ancient Mediterranean. The committee was impressed by the papers’ quality and range of disciplinary perspectives, methodologies, types of evidence, and time periods across the multicultural ancient world.
The Harold W. Dodds Fellowship was established in 1957 by an anonymous donor to provide a fellowship fund in honor of Harold Dodds, fifteenth president of Princeton. The fellowship recognizes exceptional students in their later years of study.
The American Historical Association is pleased to announce the winners of its 2022 prizes, to be awarded at the AHA’s 136th annual meeting, which will take place in Philadelphia from January 5–8, 2023.
The AHA offers annual prizes honoring exceptional books, distinguished teaching and mentoring in the classroom, public history, and other historical projects. Since 1896, the Association has conferred over 1,000 awards. This year’s finalists were selected from a field of over 1,300 entries by nearly 150 dedicated prize committee members. The names, publications, and projects of those who received these awards are a catalog of the best work produced in the historical discipline.
This summer, as a recipient of funding from the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Princeton Classics Department, I was able to attend the course in Modern Greek at the Princeton Athens Center, taught by Lelia Panteloglou, as well as a three-week French course through LSF in Montpellier, France. Department funding also supported my travels to other sites in Greece as well as visits to museums and sites within Athens relevant to my research and coursework.