News

Update: the recording is now available.

On the evening of Thursday, November 15th, Christopher B. Krebs, associate professor of Classics at Stanford, spoke on Princeton’s campus, delivering an engaging and energizing Prentice Lecture entitled “Classics As Crime Fiction: A Conversation with Caesar, Labienus, and Polybius.” Despite mother nature’s best efforts, the event was well-attended, and the Q&A period produced an…

We are delighted to pass on the good news that our colleague Harriet Flower has won a Goodwin Award from the Society for Classical Studies for her book The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner. Only three of these awards are given annually, and they are recognized as the highest honor for books published in our field. Congratulations too to our alumna Amy Richlin (Class of ’73, and last year’s Faber Lecturer) who received the same prize.

Professor Barbara Graziosi recently discussed The Iliad with host Melvyn Bragg and other panelists on the iconic BBC Radio 4 program In Our Time. A recording of the broadcast, along with lists of related recordings and readings, is now available online.

This workshop engages scholars, curators, and artists in a response to the multimedia project “Liquid Antiquity,” commissioned by the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, in order to extend further its explorations of alternative models of engaging classical antiquity and to enrich collaboration between the academic and art worlds in new forms of public engagement around the legacies of classicism. Here the participants share their final whiteboard.

As part of this program designed to provide senior faculty additional research time and to enhance the humanities community more broadly, Prof. Flower will develop his project, “The Art of Historical Fiction in Ancient Greece”. He will also serve as a faculty fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts.

Says a nominating colleague, “Her wide-ranging body of scholarship … has made her one of the leading figures in the study of Roman history. She has made Roman historians recognize how their own reconstructions of the past had been shaped by assumptions about continuities and change. And she has brought the same attention both to detail and the big picture to her teaching and service to the University and all its students.”

Prof. Holmes has been selected for the NYPL’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers 20th class of Fellows, including scholars, academics, and creative writers. While in residence, she will be working on the project “The Tissue of the World: Sympathy and the Nature of Nature in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” which explores sympathy in the human and non-human worlds in Greco-Roman natural philosophy, medicine, natural history and pastoral poetry.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded to a diverse group of scholars, artists, and scientists, on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise. Brooke Holmes is among 173 selected from a group of almost 3,000 applicants. Martin Kern and two other Princeton faculty members were also awarded.

“…we can circle back to James Madison and the extent to which he was molded by his deep readings in the classics as an undergraduate at college. For Madison knew that our word ‘civility’ flowers out of the Latin ‘civis,’ which means ‘citizen.’ To be civil is, therefore, literally to engage in a deeply important activity: to engage in behavior appropriate to a free citizen, to commit oneself to speech and action duly sensitive to your fellow citizens.”

Daniel Mendelsohn, who received his doctorate in Classics in 1994, has been awarded one of the two most distinguished honors Princeton bestows on alumni, the Madison Medal. Daniel’s accomplishments as a writer, critic, and scholar inspire pride and gratitude in equal measure.

Mendelsohn demonstrates and exemplifies the many ways in which classical texts transform the lives of their readers.

Alice Oswald visited Princeton on October 2–4, 2017 as the speaker for the first Robert Fagles Lecture for Classics in the Contemporary Arts. Oswald’s love of the Classics and her deft, thoughtful, and welcoming treatment of Homer’s work strike many of the same notes as Robert Fagles’ translations. By giving these works life, putting long-winged phrases back into the air, Oswald demonstrates the unbroken connection we have with the ancient world.