News and announcements of the Department of Classics, Columbia University
Sophomore and Laidlaw Scholar Helen Ruger was awarded the Bettye Beaumont Prize for Best Paper at the Tennessee Undergraduate Classics Research Conference at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville on February 22nd, 2020. Helen delivered a paper titled "Graceful Giving: The Role of the Female in Seneca’s De Beneficiis." The Department of Classics congratulates Helen on her achievement.
Helen Ruger with Dr. Justin Arft
The Department of Classics is delighted to announce that Professor Marcus Folch has been selected as a recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his project, “A Cultural History of Incarceration and the Prison in Greece and Rome.” This is the only award made by the NEH for a Classics-related project this year. During 2020-21 Professor Folch will be researching and writing a book on the social and political history of prisons in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Congratulations to Professor Folch! Click here for the official press release.
An excerpt from Professor Karen Van Dyck’s introduction to the new edition of her translation of Margarita Liberaki's novel Three Summers has been published in the Paris Review blog.
Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature.
Simone Oppen has been appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dartmouth College from 2019 to 2021. Simone is thrilled to return to teaching Classical Mythology and Latin (among other courses) after years working on her PhD thesis, Comparative perspectives on Persian interactions with Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars (co-supervised by Elizabeth Irwin and John Ma, degree conferred in 2019). She is especially grateful for the support of the Columbia Classics faculty and larger community in getting her to this point and looks forward to growing as a teacher and scholar in Hanover!
The Classics Department congratulates its graduating seniors and is delighted to announce the following Honors and prizes:
DEPARTMENTAL HONORS
Lauren Nguyen
DOUGLAS GARDNER CAVERLY PRIZE
Lauren Nguyen
ERNEST STADLER PRIZE
Margaret Corn and Hannah Loughlin
BENJAMIN F. ROMAINE PRIZE
Peter Rachofsky
EARLE PRIZE
William Steere and Andrew Hauser
as well as
New York Classical Club Recitation contest in Latin, 3rd Prize
Uwade Akhere
Optime fecistis!
For more information, visit: https://breakingnews.college.columbia.edu/
The Department of Classics extends its congratulations to the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group, whose 2019 production of Herkales has been hailed as, “[…] something truly special — even beyond the obvious specialness that BCAD treats its audience to every year by performing classical plays in their original languages at such a remarkably high level — and the vision of the director, Caleb Simone, is to thank for bringing this year’s production together in such an innovative and compelling fashion.” Read the entire review, via Medium, here.
Via The New York Review of Books: “‘Nobody has ever made head or tail of Greek music, and nobody ever will,’ said the musicologist Wilfrid Perrett in 1932, quoting a classicist friend. ‘That way madness lies.’ In a sense this last statement was on the mark, for it was the “piping” of Madness, the malign deity of Euripides’s Herakles, that BCAD’s director and composers set out to replicate. Thanks to their efforts, a handful of lucky New Yorkers witnessed something remarkable this month: the awakening of a theatrical tradition that has lain dormant for more than two millennia.”
View a video of the production here.
Photo credit: Pamela Sisson
Join the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality on Thursday, March 28th, for Medea on Trial: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood and Lisa Dwan. The discussion will explore topics of feminism, symbolism, and justice, and will take place at 6pm at The Forum.
RSVP is required to attend.
To RSVP, please click here.
Additional information can be found on the IRWGS event page.
Increasingly literature asks how to translate the foreign accents and multilingual idioms of the migrant. Two contemporary Greek novels–one about Greeks in the United States, the other about Greek Albanians in Greece–address this question by developing translingual practices that are themselves translational. Using hybrid creoles that blend languages through transliteration and homophony, these novels imagine translation solutions that challenge the hegemony of standardized national languages. The American case foregrounds the visual impenetrability of the new alphabet, while the Balkan case treats sound as a permeable means of encompassing ethnic differences. How might attention to translational poetics in the source text enable translators to be more experimental by exposing the instability and ideological import of the translating language? How might comparative studies of translingualism in literature and literary translation offer new categories for understanding migration? Van Dyck presents her work, with a response by Dimitris Christopoulos, President, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). Mark Mazower introducing.
The conference will be held Wednesday, March 20th, from 7-9 PM CET. Tickets can be found here.
The Department of Classics is very pleased to announce that Classics Major Lauren Nguyen (Columbia ‘19) is the winner of the 2019-20 Lionel Pearson Fellowship awarded by the Society for Classical Studies. Lauren will use the Fellowship to earn an M.St. degree at the University of Oxford. We offer Ms. Nguyen congratulations on this accomplishment.
Professor Karen Van Dyck is a 2018-19 fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which opened its doors in Paris in September 2018. Its purpose is to question the established ways in which knowledge is defined, produced, and taught. More information about the CII&I and the 2018-19 Fellows can be found here.
Professor Van Dyck is pictured here, to the left of President Bollinger, at the CII&I inaugural event in Paris, January 2019.
We're delighted to report that Prof. Katharina Volk is the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to be held in 2019-20. Katharina will be working on her project "The Politics of Knowledge in Late Republican Rome," a monograph on the intellectual history of the late Republic, which examines the intersections of scholarship, philosophy, and politics in this turbulent period. Katharina is thrilled about the award and looking forward to spending more quality time with her friends Cicero, Varro, and Nigidius Figulus.
Ashley Simone, PhD student in Classics at Columbia, will give the inaugural lecture in the NYU Society of Ancient Studies Graduate Lecture series, Monday, November 12, 6:15, NYU Department of Classics Seminar Room, Silver Center for the Arts and Science (Room 503), 100 Washington Sq. E., New York, NY 10003.
The Department of Classics is very pleased to announce that Gareth Williams, Violin Family Professor, has been selected as the recipient of the 2017-2018 Lionel Trilling Book Award.
Lionel Trilling CC'25, GSAS'38, a faculty member from 1927-1974, was one of the most significant 20th century public intellectuals. He became nationally known for both his scholarship and his literary criticism, which appealed to a wide audience. At Columbia, Trilling was recognized as a gifted and dedicated teacher with a special commitment to undergraduate education.
The Lionel Trilling Book Award is awarded annually to a faculty member who has published, in the previous year, the book that is deemed to best exhibit the standards of intellect and scholarship found in Trilling's work.
In awarding the Lionel Trilling Book Award to Professor Williams for his work entitled Pietro Bembo on Etna: The Ascent of a Venetian Humanist, the Committee chairs wrote that the book struck them and other students on the committee "as especially moving, stylistically brilliant and accessible, as well as informative."
Professor Williams will be honored at the Trilling/Van Doren Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, May 2, 6pm-8pm in Low Library, Faculty Room. RSVP to Jessica Cubas at jcc2239@columbia.edu
Cicero Conference in honor of James E. G. Zetzel, Anthon Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, on the occasion of his retirement. Co-sponsored by the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean
Speakers include:
Professor Robert Kaster (Princeton University), Professor Peter White (University of Chicago), Professor Catherine Steel (University of Glasgow), and Carina de Klerk (Columbia).
Conference Program. Reception to follow.
Alan Cameron, the Charles Anthon Professor Emeritus of Latin and Literature at Columbia University, died on July 31st at the age of 79 in New York while receiving treatment for complications arising from ALS. Alan was educated at St. Paul’s School in London, and at New College, Oxford, where he was awarded a first class degree in Literae Humaniores in 1961. Without ever needing to complete a Phd, a point of considerable amusement and pride, Alan took up teaching positions in Glasgow and London before joining the Columbia faculty in 1977; he remained in the department until his retirement in 2008.
Alan had an unrivalled expertise in the history and literature of Hellenistic Greece and Late Antiquity and an infallible command of Greek and Latin philology that included both the canonical and more recondite areas of the corpus. Combining his impeccable knowledge with innovative approaches, an engaging style, and a zest for challenging and upending long-established views, Alan produced scholarship that ranged as broadly as its learning was deep. His publication record runs to many pages (over 200 articles plus more than a dozen books), and his discussions remain ‘must read’ items for those in any number of different areas, religion, social and political history, mythology, and the history of classical scholarship among them. Among his most ground-breaking books are Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (1976), Callimachus and his Critics (winner of the APA Goodwin Prize in 1997), Greek Mythography in the Roman World (2004) and The Last Pagans of Rome (2011), and a sampling of only his most recent essays (‘Psyche and her Sisters’, ‘Black and White: A Note on Ancient Nicknames’, ‘On the Date of John of Gaza’ and ‘Notes on the Erotic Art of Rufinus’) stands testament to Alan’s boundless intellectual range and curiosity as well as his facility for eye-catching titles.
In addition to his tireless scholarly activity, his participation in conferences and willingness to deliver lectures in many parts of the world, and the recognition he received in the form of many honors (among them he was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1975 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978), Alan was an immensely popular and much revered teacher at all levels. Generations of Columbia graduate students, as well as some of Alan’s colleagues, remember with particular fondness and gratitude the classes in Greek and Latin Verse Composition that he used to hold at his New York home. Endlessly hospitable and with friends across the globe, Alan also found time to swim, bike, travel, cultivate a taste for films of sometimes questionable artistic merit, and, as a school boy in company with Martin West, to be one among the three members of the St. Paul’s Astronomy Club.
My colleagues at Columbia and I are deeply saddened by the loss, and extend our deepest condolences to Alan’s wife Carla, his son and daughter and his recently born and much anticipated first grandchild, Silas, whom Alan was able to meet shortly before his death. As more information becomes available about memorial arrangements, we will communicate it here.
Deborah Steiner
John Jay Professor of Greek and Latin
Chair
Department of Classics
This powerful bilingual anthology of poetry is a display of resilience and beauty, showcasing the richness and strength of contemporary Greek poetry. According to Kate Kellaway, writing for The Observer, the book provides “an uncommon chance to share Greek experience beyond the headlines—in a way that is fascinating, revelatory and only possible through poetry.”
Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature in the Classics Department at Columbia University. She writes on modern Greek and Greek diaspora literature, and gender and translation theory.
Read by Karen Van Dyck.
Fri, June 2, 2017, 7-8pm
Bohemian National Hall, 3rd Floor, BBLA Library
321 East 73rd Street
New York, NY 10021
RSVP: eventbrite.com
