Fall 2010 Newsletter


Notabilia

Congratulations to the Brandeis Class of 2010, which graduated on May 23, 2010, and to our graduating majors and minors!

Majors: Laurence A. Birnbaum, Jack K. Bouchard, Alex Clos, Sarah A. Costrell, Brenda Green-Sisson, Zachary Margulies, Lee A. Marmor. Elizabeth Moguel, and Amy Ostrander.

Minors: MaryCate Brower, Seth Coburn, Eric Engelstein, Nora Epstein, Matthew Fealy, Brian Fox, Anna Kagan, Andrew S. Karasick, HyunSeo Kim, Tahl Mayer, and Joshua E. Reuss.

We are so proud of each and every one of you! See a slideshow of the Senior Dinner Party and Commencement.

Laurence A. Birnbaum '10 was the recipient of the 2010 Eunice M. Lebowitz Cohen Prize for Excellence in Classical Literature, a prize that carries a $500 award.

Sarah A. Costrell '10 won the 2010 Safier-Jolles Prize for Best Senior Thesis in the History of Ideas. Sarah was a CLARC Intern (2008-09), CLARC student supervisor (2009-10), and a Classical Studies Undergraduate Departmental Representative (2009-10). She is working on a Post-Bac at Smith College in pure Mathematics this year.

Lee A. Marmor '10 received the 2010 Eunice M. Lebowitz Cohen Prize in Classical Art and Archaeology, which carries an award of $500. He was the 2009 winner of the David S. Wiesen Memorial Prize. Lee was a CLARC Intern (2008-09) and a Classical Studies Undergraduate Departmental Representative (2008-10). In fall 2010, he began work on his M.A. in Classical Archaeology at Tufts University.

Elizabeth L. Moguel '10 received the 2010 David S. Wiesen Memorial Prize, which was established to honor our late colleague who taught at Brandeis from 1966-1975. Currently, she is studying for her M.A. in Latin at Boston University.

Amy E. Ostrander '10  received the 2010 Dorothy Blumenfeld Moyer Memorial Award for her senior thesis.

For news about our new Undergraduate Department Representatives (UDRs), Blake Kasan ‘11, Otis Munroe ‘12, Jessica Schaengold ‘11, and Alissa Thomas ‘10, visit our UDR page.



Master's Degree Students

Welcome back to our second-year graduate students and to a new group of first-year graduate students in the Master's Degree Program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies!

Second-Year Graduate Students (who entered in 2009): Claudia P. Filos '94, Lana Georgiou, Jennifer Stern '91, University Curator of Visual Arts, and Justin Villet.

First-Year Graduate Students (who entered in fall 2010): Anna Accettola, Larissa Boehmke, Leigh Bryan, Pete Caccavale, Catherine Davie, Lana Holman, Sarah Jane Sprecher, Deirdre Trollman, Michiel van Veldhuizen, Jeffrey Weimer. The graduate students have appointed Lana Georgiou and Michiel van Veldhuizen as Graduate Student Representatives (GSRs) for this year. They are a lively, intelligent, and hard-working group.

Congratulations to all of these graduate students for entering our exciting, still quite new Master's Degree Program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies.

CLARC Interns

Each year Classical Studies holds an undergraduate competition for three positions as Classical Studies Interns in the Classical Studies Artifact Research Collection (CLARC). After a vigorous competition in spring 2010, Rachel Berman-Vaporis '12, Charlotte Padden '11, and Noam Sienna ‘11, with Jessica Schaengold '11 (2009-10 intern, acting as senior intern this year), were selected to work with Classical Studies Archaeologist and Chair Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow at CLARC throughout 2010-11.

Photo of Jessica Schaengold, Blake Kasan and Laurence A. Birnbaum Last year's group of interns Laurence A. Birnbaum '10, Blake Kasan '11, Jessica Schaengold '11 (pictured at right), along with senior supervisor Sarah Costrell '10, shared the winning poster at the annual poster exhibit of the Experiential Learning Fair in Usdan in March 2010. For more on this impressive accomplishment, the program, and the impressive collection of artifacts, see Classical Studies Artifact Research Collection.

Faculty Notes

While department chair, Professor Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow, was on sabbatical in spring 2010, she published two long articles, as well as some shorter pieces and three book reviews. Her work on the infrastructure of Dura Europos, "Water, Baths, Latrines, and the Goddess Fortuna in a Desert City," was included in the exhibition catalogue, Dura Europos: Crossroads of Antiquity, for the show on Dura that will open in February 2011 at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. Her long review article, "Facilities in France, Germany, and Switzerland for Roman Merde" reviewing a new book by Alain Bouet on recent sanitary discoveries from the archaeological record of three countries in northern Europe, appeared in the Journal of Roman Archaeology in October 2010.

Professor Patricia A. Johnston was the keynote speaker last April 2010 at the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association conference in a special session entitled, "Ethnicities in Ancient Religions," in Newton, MA. The title of her talk was "The Mysteries in Ancient Italy." Professor Johnston also organized and chaired the Vergilian Society's Symposium Cumanum 2010, "From Aetas Aurea to Domus Aurea: Roman Life, Literature, and Art under the Julio-Claudian Emperors," at the Villa Vergiliana in Cumae, Italy, from June 23-26, 2010. She concluded the symposium with her talk, "The Purpose of Nero's Golden House." Her translation of Vergil's Aeneid in dactylic hexameters will be published this year by the Oklahoma University Press, and her new commentary on Aeneid 6 will be published by Focus Publishing. The department is pleased that she will be teaching a brand new course, CLAS 190B, "Ancient Mysteries, Cults, and Myths," this spring.

Professor Andrew Koh, visiting us this spring 2011, spent the summer of 2010 in Greece and Israel studying the production, trade, and consumption of ancient organic commodities and the resulting interactions between complex societies. His research will serve as the foundation for a book detailing the origins and history of aromata and herbalism. His latest article, "Wine and Olive Oil from an Early Minoan Hilltop Fort," co-authored with P. Betancourt, recently appeared in Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry. It presents the earliest evidence we have for the domestication of olives and grapes on Crete. After teaching introductory Greek history and classical archaeology at Dartmouth College in fall 2010, he looks forward to revisiting an old interest of his at Brandeis when he teaches CLAS 135A, "The Silk Road: China Looks West, the Mediterranean Looks East," this coming spring.

Professor Leonard Muellner delivered a paper entitled "Grieving Achilles" at a conference on Homer in the 21st Century at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in May 2010, a paper on Sappho entitled "Love Even Unwilling" at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Nafplio, Greece, in June 2010, and a longer version of the Achilles paper at Johns Hopkins University in October 2010. In December, he participated in a panel discussion on "Open Access and e-Research in the Humanities" as part of an international conference at the National Documentation Centre in Athens on Open Access in Research, Education, and Public Data. He is on sabbatical for the spring 2011.

Professor Cheryl Walker published an article in early fall 2010 called "Hostages" in the brand new, distinguished online Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History. The editors of the encyclopedia are Roger Bagnall, Kai Brodersen, Craige Champion, Andrew Erskine, and Sabine Hübner. Professor Walker's invitation to participate confirms that she is the acknowledged international expert on the subject of hostages in the Greek and Roman worlds.

Affiliated Faculty

Professor Bernadette J. Brooten has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for 2011-2012 to do research for her next book,  "Enslaved Women and Female Slaveholders in Early Christianity, First to Fourth Centuries." Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), which she edited, with the editorial assistance of Jacqueline L. Hazelton, came out in October 2010. The volume pays significant attention to the nexus of slavery, religion, gender, and sexuality in the Ancient Near East, the Jewish and Christian bibles, early Christian history within the context of the Roman world, and the Qur'an and early Islamic jurisprudence, as well as to slavery in the U.S., which drew upon classical and biblical models of slavery, and its long-term effects. This past summer, she completed the nine-week intensive Arabic program run by Middlebury College, which will help her in future research on the ancient Mediterranean.

In the spring of 2010, Professor William Kapelle taught HIST 110A, "The Civilization of the Early Middle Ages," and HIST 123A, "The Renaissance," as always to strong student reviews. During fall 2010 he taught HIST 112B, "The Crusades and the Expansion of Medieval Europe" (to 51 students) and his by now iconic course, cross-listed with Classical Studies, HIST 103A, "Roman History to 455 CE". Among the 38 students in the class, many were majors or minors in Classical Studies, and the stories of Professor Kapelle's riveting lectures now echo in the halls of the Mandel Center for the Humanities, the new home of Classical Studies.

Events

Read coverage and see photos of our 2010 events.