NEWSLETTER | SUMMER 2013
D E P A R T M E N T o f
C L A S S I C S
N O R T H W E S T E R N
U N I V E R S I T Y
Congratulations, Class of 2013!
Classics students and faculty celebrate academic achievements at the annual awards ceremony on June 4.
ANNUAL CLASSICS ACADEMIC AWARDS
At the “lamb roast” and awards ceremony on June
4th, we celebrated the achievements of department
majors and minors, awarding prizes to the following:
The Joseph Clyde Murley Prize for Undergraduate
Achievement by a Classics Major: Maria Kovalchuk;
The Joseph Clyde Murley Prize for Undergraduate
Achievement by a Classics Minor: Demetrios Elias;
The Joseph Clyde Murley Prize for Undergraduate
Research in Classical Literature and Culture: Luke
Fidler; The Joseph Clyde Murley Prize for Excellence
in Honors Thesis Research: Christopher Rowe;
For Excellence in First-Year Greek: Samuel Howes
and Philip Vainikos; For Excellence in SecondYear Greek: Alexander Shaffer; For Excellence in
First-Year Latin: Nicole Sheriko; For Excellence in
Second-Year Latin: Holliday Shuler.
The Classical Association of the Middle West and
South (CAMWS) provided awards for Outstanding
Accomplishment in Classical Studies to Emily
Baldwin, Scott Coughlin, and Ann Lee, and
awarded Maria Kovalchuk a Manson A. Stewart
Scholarship.
A new departmental prize, for excellence in
medieval Latin, was awarded to Stephanie Pentz, a
first-year graduate student in medieval literature.
Katie Hartsock, a graduate student in Comparative
Literary Studies and Classics, received the award for
outstanding performance by a teaching assistant.
Congratulations, one and all!
Department Chair
Ann C. Gunter
[email protected]
Department Assistant
Linda A. Koops
[email protected]
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Jeanne Ravid
[email protected]
Classics Office
1-535 Kresge Hall
847.491.7597
www.classics.northwestern.edu
KATHRYN BOSHER
Department of Classics at Northwestern in 2006. In
2009 she helped win a Mellon Foundation grant for
the Sawyer Seminar “Theater After Athens,” a twoyear series of conferences and colloquia bringing
together scholars working on new approaches to
ancient theater and its modern reception. Kate
recently published an edited book with Cambridge
University Press from the first conference of the
seminar series, Theater Outside Athens, which has
won high scholarly praise. In addition to her research,
she served as a faculty affiliate of the Kaplan Institute
for the Humanities in 2009-2010, exploring the role
The Departments of Classics and Theatre, along of comedy from antiquity to the present.
with the entire Northwestern community, suffered a
On Monday, April 29, a memorial service
tragic loss this spring with the passing of assistant was held in Harris Hall to give thanks for Kate’s
professor Kathryn (Kate) Bosher on Saturday, March many accomplishments and contributions to
23rd, in Evanston after a battle with cancer.
Northwestern University. Faculty, staff, current and
Kate was born September 15, 1974 in Toronto, former students, and friends joined in remembering
Ontario, and earned degrees in Classical Studies her classes, theatrical performances, and other
from the University of Toronto and the University of exciting projects, as well as her thoughtfulness,
Michigan where she earned her Ph.D in 2006. Kate collegiality, and generosity. She will be deeply missed.
studied the origins of comedic theater in ancient The Department of Classics is currently developing
Sicily and southern Italy and traveled to nearly every plans to commemorate Kate and her legacy through
known excavated theater on the island. Among an undergraduate prize and a conference on ancient
other honors at Michigan, she was a member of the theater and performance.
Society of Fellows. Kate joined the faculty of the
A NEW MEMBER OF THE CLASSICS FACULTY
The Department of Classics is pleased to announce
that Dr. Taco T. Terpstra will join us in September
as assistant professor. A specialist in the economic
history of ancient Rome, Dr. Terpstra received a
combined BA and MA in Law from the University
of Groningen in 1998 and a second BA and MA in
Classics from the same institution in 2003. He earned
his PhD in Ancient History at Columbia University
in 2011. His dissertation was published early in 2013
under the title Trading Communities in the Roman
World: A Microeconomic and Institutional Perspective.
He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship with the
University of Heidelberg as part of a research team
devoted to the theme of Material, Text, and Culture.
In the coming academic year, Professor Terpstra will
teach courses on Roman economic history and the
archaeology of Pompeii and its neighbors, as well as
a freshman seminar.
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FACULTY NEWS
MELISSA BAILEY arrived at Northwestern in September to begin
her Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, and has enjoyed her time here
immensely. She worked on revisions to her dissertation and completed
an article, “Roman Money and Numerical Practice,” which will appear
this summer in the Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire. Her chapter
“Calculative Objects” was published in the volume The Construction
of Value in the Ancient World (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2012).
She gave informal research-in-progress talks in the Anthropology
and Classics departments, and at the Theoretical Archaeology Group
conference in Chicago in May presented a paper titled “Systemic
Visions,” which interrogated methods of publishing and visualizing
monetary objects. She also taught two new courses: “Technologies
of Value” (Classics and Anthropology), comparing the beginnings
of writing, number, and money in the ancient Mediterranean and
juxtaposing these cognitive objects with more modern economic
practices; and a course on Roman art (Art History and Classics), which
emphasized the lived experience of art in context.
ANN C. GUNTER (Art History, Humanities, and Classics) continued
to serve as chair of the Department of Classics and a member of the
Humanities Council. She taught a revised version of her introductory
course “The World of Homer” (Classics and Humanities) and a
graduate seminar on ornament in antiquity (Art History). She
contributed an article on “Orientalism and Orientalization in the Iron
Age Mediterranean” to an edited volume titled Critical Approaches to
Ancient Near Eastern Art (DeGruyter, in press for fall 2013). She also
began to edit papers for A Companion to the Art of the Ancient Near
East (Wiley-Blackwell), an extensive multi-author volume scheduled
for publication in 2015.
MARIANNE HOPMAN’s teaching this year included two introductory
courses in translation (“Classical Mythology” and “Poetic Genres in
Ancient Greece”), an upper-level seminar on Homer’s Iliad (in the
original Greek text), and the Classical Receptions graduate workshop.
Her new version of the mythology course focused on stories of youths
coming of age and invited students to consider how characters like
Achilles, Iphigenia, Pentheus, and Jason confront such issues as familial
and social roles, authority, sexuality, and mortality. Her book Scylla:
Myth, Metaphor, Paradox appeared with Cambridge University Press in
December 2012, and she is putting the final touches on a multi-author
volume, Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy, that will be published this
summer. In May she was granted tenure and as of September will be
promoted to the rank of associate professor.
Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox by
Marianne Hopman
Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy
coedited by Marianne Hopman
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MARK KAUNTZE continued his work on the twelfth-century
cosmological poet Bernard Silvestris. He finished his monograph on
Bernard, and has been working on two additional articles: a study
of prose rhythm in Bernard’s Cosmographia, and an edition of a
thirteenth-century commentary on the work. He delivered a paper
on the medieval reception of Aristotle at a conference on “Nature and
the Natural in the Middle Ages” (University of Chicago) and another
on the textual history of the Donation of Constantine (International
Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan). He taught two quarters
of the Medieval Latin seminar, which focused on Ælfric of Eynsham
and Apollonius of Tyre, and an independent seminar on “Theory and
Practice of Textual Editing,” in which students edited a previously
unstudied set of glosses on the Latin Timaeus from digital images of
a twelfth-century manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby MS 23
(of which fol. 51v is reproduced here).
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby MS 23,
fol. 51v
RICHARD KRAUT (Philosophy and Classics) spent a week in
February 2012 lecturing and teaching in Berlin. He presented a paper
on Aristotle at the Humboldt University, and taught several classes
on Aristotle’s politics at the European College of Liberal Arts (ECLA),
now a branch of Bard College. There he also was a respondent in a
roundtable discussion of his book, What is Good and Why. In March he
was the keynote speaker in a conference held at St. Louis University on
the topic of well-being and happiness. In 2013 he became the Director
of Weinberg’s Brady Scholars Program in Ethics and Civic Life.
SARA MONOSON (Political Science and Classics) was promoted
to full professor. In fall 2012 she taught an upper-division course in
ancient political thought (Political Science 301), a Classical Traditions
offering recognized by the Classics major. On the research front, her
book Socrates in the Vernacular is now under contract with Harvard
University Press. She also serves on the advisory board of several
collaborative projects in classical receptions: Classics & Class (based
at King’s College, University of London); the international Classical
Reception Studies Network; the Elliniko Theatro’s production of
“Socrates Now”; and Northwestern’s Classicizing Chicago.
JOHN SCHAFER spent another rewarding year with his students and
his research, teaching Virgil (again, to his enduring delight), Neronian
literature, Roman civilization, and—likewise to his boundless
satisfaction—a new course in Latin prose composition. He will
present a paper on Seneca at an international conference in Italy titled
“Aeneid Six and Its Cultural Reception” (June 2013). He continues to
explore intertextual relations between Virgil and Horace in addition
to his primary focus, a study of Seneca’s Letters. Most joyfully, he was
selected as a Junior Fellow in Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan Institute for
the Humanities for the coming academic year.
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FRANCESCA TATARANNI continued to enjoy being at the helm of
the Latin program, whose classes this year reached a peak enrollment.
In fall 2012, she received a Provost Student-Faculty interaction grant
to take her Latin students to see the newly installed Mary and Michael
Jaharis Galleries of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art at the Art Institute
of Chicago. In Winter 2013, she trained and conducted a chorus of
Latin students who performed at the art event “Words,” organized
by world-renowned artist Marco Nereo Rotelli and sponsored by
the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. In May she and Sara
Monoson were awarded a grant from the Alumnae of Northwestern to
stage ancient Greek texts and organize a marathon reading of Homer’s
Iliad on campus during the coming academic year. In fall 2012, she
also served as Faculty Host of an NU Alumni Association Travel trip
to Rome and is now getting ready to sail the Adriatic Sea with a new
group of NU alumni on a cruise from Venice to Athens. Her article
“Hope and Leadership in Ancient Rome” is forthcoming in the Italian
journal Teoria (fall 2013).
ROBERT WALLACE spent a busy year teaching, lecturing on
Sophocles and especially on a new topic, Greek oligarchy, in Jerusalem,
Aix-en-Provence, Milan, and the annual meeting of the Association of
Ancient Historians, and working toward completion of his new book
project on Sophocles and Athens. His book on Damon—Athens’ most
famous music theorist and Perikles’ councilor on democratic politics—
was accepted for publication by Oxford University Press. Several articles
appeared in print, including “ ‘One vote only’: the Areopagos’ verdict
in Aeschylus’ Eumenides,” in Quaderni di Dioniso n.s. 1 (2012), and
“Councils in Greek oligarchies and democracies,” in A Companion to
Ancient Greek Government (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He was appointed
to the “Scientific Committee” of the series Hellenica (Turin) and to the
editorial board of a new journal, Erga/Logoi (Milan).
Split Harbor, Croatia
JOHN WYNNE taught classes reading Plato’s Ion in Greek and
Augustine’s Confessions in Latin. He also taught a graduate seminar
on the Stoics and the emotions. He published a paper titled “God’s
indifferents: Why Cicero’s Stoic Jupiter made the world” and completed
the manuscript of his book Cicero on the Philosophy of Religion.
Malcolm Schofield, professor emeritus of the University of Cambridge,
came to campus to take part in a colloquium on the book manuscript.
Professor Wynne also helped to organize the Chicago Area Consortium
for Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy (CACAGRP) biennial
conference, which this year focused on the theme “Animality: GrecoRoman Conceptions of the Human Being.”
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CLAUDIA ZATTA enjoyed teaching ancient Greek and reading with
her students the Iliad and Lucian’s science fiction novel, among other texts. She continued her study of animals in antiquity, the subject
of her freshman seminar, and presented a paper titled “Flying Geese,
Wandering Cows: How Animal Movement Orients Human Space in
Greek Myth” at an international conference on “The Role of Animals
in Ancient Myth and Religion” (Grumentum Nova, Italy, 5-7 June).
She also gave a paper on city happiness in Herodotus for the Classics
Department and Committee for Social Thought at the University of
Chicago. Finally, she became an improvised director for the short performance Unburied, based on Iliad 18 and acted out memorably by our
gifted students of ancient Greek at the department’s annual end-of-year
“lamb roast.”
DANIEL GARRISON PREPARES TWO
MAJOR PUBLICATIONS ON VESALIUS
Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (1514-1564)
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September 2013 will see the publication of two major publications on
which Classics professor emeritus Dan Garrison has worked in recent
years. Both are English translations of works in Latin by Andreas
Vesalius of Brussels (1514–1564).
The Fabric of the Human Body, the first illustrated atlas of human
anatomy, was originally published in 1543, when Vesalius was
twenty-eight years old. A revised edition appeared in 1555; both were
published in Basel, Switzerland. Professor Garrison’s co-author in this
project, Malcolm Hast of Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine,
identified and annotated the anatomy. In addition to translation from
the original Latin, Garrison’s tasks included notes on Vesalius’ Greek
and Latin sources, his contemporaries, and controversies he provoked.
The new edition, to be published in two volumes by Karger in Basel,
was made possible by grants totaling $1,555,000.
The second book is also an annotated translation: Vesalius: The
China Root Epistle, which will appear with Cambridge University Press.
First published three years after the appearance of the Fabrica, this
monograph takes the form of a clinical appraisal of an acclaimed new
wonder drug, but concentrates chiefly on the defense of Vesalius’ new
observation-based method in anatomy.
2014 will be the 500th anniversary of the birth of Vesalius. It will
be an important date for the medical and scientific community,
since the Fabrica, which appeared in the same year as Copernicus’
De revolutioninus orbium caelestium, helped to launch the modern
scientific revolution. Vesalius highlighted his scientific skepticism with
a quotation from Horace Epistles 1.1.14, nullius addictus iurare in verba
magistri, later adapted for the motto of the Royal Society, Nullius in
verba.
Congratulations, Professor Garrison!
Students of Latin, led by Prof. Francesca Tataranni, recite in chorus Latin dactylic hexameters by Ennius in the Deering Library on March 12 as
part of the “WORDS—Light Installation, Reading, and ‘The Poetry Way’” series of events.
ETA SIGMA PHI
Eta Sigma Phi, a vibrant community of classics majors
and minors, had a very successful year, hosting many
events in addition to weekly meetings. Students
and professors alike laughed and chatted through
informal evenings for students and faculty to interact
outside of the classroom. We held multiple “Classics
Pictionary” parties, one themed on Lupercalia (the
Roman equivalent of Valentine’s Day). We had
movie screenings, including the hilarious Sondheim
musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
the Forum and the more recent epic 300. In April,
students competed against each other pitilessly in a
trivia match, learning all sorts of interesting facts in
the process (including the tidbit that a scorpion will
sting itself to death if you pour alcohol on its back).
We’ve had more intellectual activities, too. On
Halloween, professors shared their favorite ancient
ghost stories. We attended a lecture on Late Roman
and Byzantine art at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Our most successful event was held in February,
when Emeritus Professor Daniel Garrison shared his
groundbreaking research on classical medicine and
Prof. Daniel Garrison presents his research on classical medicine and
Vesalius.
the medieval anatomist Vesalius with an audience of
over twenty students and faculty members.
Eta Sigma Phi is looking forward to more exciting
events next year. The new slate of officers for 201314: Maria Kovalchuk and Brian Earl, co-presidents;
Sam Howes, vice president; Arpan Patel, secretary/
treasurer; Michael Lamble, herald.
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NEWS ABOUT THE CLASSICS CLUSTER AND THE ANCIENT
PHILOSOPHY PHD
Sara Monoson, director of the graduate
Classics Cluster, is delighted to report that the
interdisciplinary cohort of doctoral students in
classical studies had an active year. Now in its third
year of sponsorship from the Alice Kaplan Institute
for the Humanities, our Research Workshop
in Classical Receptions supported research
presentations by our own students and faculty, a
group trip to see Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses
at the Lookingglass Theatre, and a private tour of the
new Greek and Roman galleries at the Art Institute
of Chicago. We also held seminars with visitors
such as Felix Budelmann (University of Oxford),
Francesca Schironi (University of Michigan), Glenn
Most (University of Chicago and University of Pisa),
Seth Schein (University of California at Davis), and
James Porter (University of California at Irvine).
The Cluster also supported student attendance at the
annual meeting of the Ancient Philosophy Society
at Notre Dame and assisted several students with
research travel needs.
Our cohort will expand next year. In fall 2013 we
will welcome new philosophy and theatre and drama
doctoral students with interests in classical studies
and its receptions to the existing group of Classics
students from comparative literary studies, English,
political theory, art history, theatre, and philosophy.
The Ancient Philosophy PhD program continued
to flourish this year. Haewon Jeon obtained her PhD
with a dissertation on the virtues of ordinary people
in Plato’s Republic. Oksana Maksymchuk, known
to many Classics students as a teaching assistant, is
completing her dissertation on Plato’s Protagoras
and will begin an appointment as assistant professor
at the University of Arkansas in the fall. Marcus
Hines will move to the University of Georgia to
pursue an MA in Classics. Malcolm Schofield
from the University of Cambridge, Kirk Sanders
from the University of Illinois, and Eric Brown
from Washington University in St. Louis visited
our Ancient Philosophy workshop. June will see the
conference Moral Education: Ancient and Modern.
Katie Hartsock, a PhD candidate in the
Comparative Literary Studies program, published a
cycle of poems adapting passages from Augustine’s
Confessions in the Birmingham Poetry Review. The
poems began life as a project for a Latin course on
the Confessions this spring with our own Professor
John Wynne.
VISITING LECTURERS
For a week in February, the Department of Classics ancient Greek drama, theology, law, economy, and
hosted Franco De Angelis, professor of ancient Greek finance. Professor De Angelis’s three lectures drew
history at the University of British Columbia, who from his recently completed book on the social and
visited Northwestern under the auspices
economic history of ancient Sicily and
of the University Seminars Program of
his historiographic research on ancient
the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit
colonization and intercultural contacts.
Foundation (USA). The foundation
The Department of Classics also hosted
sponsors eminent scholars from the
lectures by John Papadopoulos, UCLA
USA and abroad to offer lectures,
(in partnership with the Archaeological
seminars and courses on university
Institute of America, Chicago Society);
campuses in North and South America.
Oswyn Murray, University of Oxford
Scholars lecture on topics as various as
(emeritus), jointly sponsored by the
Hellenic history and culture; modern,
Chabraja Center for Historical Studies
Byzantine, and ancient history; political
and the Classical Receptions Workshop;
Poster for De Angelis’ visit
thought in Greece and the Balkans
Felix Budelmann, University of Oxford,
during the 19th and 20th centuries; modern Greek co-sponsored with the Classical Receptions
literature (prose, poetry); archaeology, philosophy, Workshop; and Carolyn Dewald, Bard College.
painting, sculpture, theater, cinema, dance, music,
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