News and announcements of the Department of Classics, Columbia University
The Columbia Division of Humanities, Arts, & Sciences has graciously mentioned three of our outstanding professors in their news updates.
They congratulated Professor Howley on receiving the 2022 Faculty Mentoring Award as well as Professors Volk and Steiner on receiving the 2022 Goodwin Awards.
Read more about their achievements here.
The Department of Classics is thrilled to congratulate Debbie Steiner and Katharina Volk for winning the Goodwin Award for this year. As we all know, the Goodwin Award, given out by the SCS, acknowledges "outstanding contributions to classical scholarship by members of the society". This wonderful news emphasizes our strength in Greek culture (with a strong interdisciplinary interest in visual material) and in Latin literature and Roman culture (with a strong interest in philosophy and intellectual history). In addition, we are delighted to salute the third recipient of the award, James Uden (PhD Columbia 2011), and to say how we proud we are in his achievement.
For the official announcement of the award by the SCS please see
Lifted is a collection of poetry that explores the ethics of making poems out of other people’s prose and translations as it tells the story of a girl becoming a writer and translator (Agra, September 2022, bilingual edition, translated into Greek by Eleni Bourou, 112 pages). Copies available at Book Culture.
About The Author
Karen Van Dyck is a critic, translator and poet. When she is not teaching at Columbia in New York City, she spends as much time as possible in Greece. Her recent translations include Margarita Liberaki’s novel Three Summers, the anthology Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, and a collection of Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s poetry The Scattered Papers of Penelope. Her essays, translations, and poems have appeared in the Guardian, The Paris Review, Asymptote, and Tender.
About the Translator
Eleni Bourou is a translator, poet and editor. She has published translations of the poets Yosano Akiko, Nanni Balestrini, Nicole Brossard, Audre Lorde, and Keston Sutherland among others. From 2008 she has coedited the Greek poetry magazine Teflon. Recent publications of her own poetry can be found (under different monikers) in the collective works Virgulentxs (Berlin), A Chama Depende do Combustível vol. 2 (Fortaleza), What the Fire Sees (Brussels), ANAMESA (Athens) and in the literary magazine Lichtungen (Graz).
The Department of Classics will be holding Ancient Greek & Latin Placement Exams on August 31st from 1p-3p in 618 Hamilton Hall.
This is a sight exam; no dictionaries or grammatical aids may be used
If students have questions, please reach out to Professor Marcus Folch mf2664@columbia.edu
The Department extends its warmest congratulations to recent Ph.D. Cat Lambert, the 2022 Winkler Memorial Prize graduate winner for her essay "Lucian’s Queer Book User in the Adversus Indoctum." This prize, founded in honor of legendary Classicist Jack Winkler, encourages innovative work in marginal areas of the Classics. In Cat's own words, "Some of my fondest memories while at Columbia include engaging undergraduate students with Jack's work in various contexts, such as courses on Daphnis and Chloe, classical myth, and "Queer Classics". My essay, "Lucian's Queer Book User in the Adversus Indoctum," represents the fusion of two core interests and methods that I have long kept siloed: book history and queer studies." In her prize-winning essay, Cat draws on her expertise in both fields to craft a bibliographically queer reading of Lucian's satire, and the ways in which Lucian twists and subverts his time's dominant, hegemonic perspectives.
You can read the full announcement of this year's Winkler prize here.
The Department of Classics is proud to announce that Classics alumna Caroline Alexander (PhD ‘91) will be honored at the forthcoming Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Awards Dinner as the 2020 recipient of the Dean's Award for Distinguished Achievement - PhD.
More information about alumni award winners can be found here.
The Department extends its warmest congratulations to Dr. Alexander on this momentous honor.
The Department of Classics is delighted to share the news that Professor Joseph Howley, Director of Graduate Studies, will be honored at the 2022 Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Awards Dinner on June 14th as a recipient of the 2022 Columbia University Faculty Mentoring Award.
The Arts and Sciences Graduate Council instituted the Faculty Mentoring Award in 2004 to commemorate excellence in the mentoring of PhD and MA students. The Mentoring Award is a student initiative, and selections were made entirely by graduate student representatives from GSAS and affiliated schools based on student nomination letters spanning across all disciplines.
The Department extends its warmest congratulations to Professor Howley on this well-deserved honor.
Joseph Howley
With great sadness, the Department of Classics announces the passing of Professor Leonardo Tarán on February 18, 2022.
Professor Tarán was born on February 22, 1933 in Galarza, Argentina, into a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. He came to the United States in 1958, when he entered Princeton’s Ph.D. program in Classics. He was a member of the faculty of Columbia University’s Department of Classics from 1967 until his retirement in 2004.
The department extends condolences to Professor Tarán’s wife, Judit Sonya Lida-Tarán, his son, Gabriel Tarán, and the rest of his family.
We are very grateful to Dr. David J. Murphy, PhD 1986, for composing the following appreciation of his mentor’s career and accomplishments as a scholar, researcher, and role model.
After studying Classics on his own, and ancient philosophy under the guidance of Rodolfo Mondolfo in his native Argentina, Leonardo earned a law degree in Buenos Aires in 1958. His heart, however, was with ancient philosophy, and he earned his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton in 1962. During post-doctoral fellowships at Wisconsin and at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, Leonardo turned his dissertation into his first book, Parmenides. A Text with Translation, Commentary and Critical Essays, which Princeton University Press reprinted three times after its publication in 1965.
Leonardo’s dissertation sponsor was Harold Cherniss, then at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. Cherniss in turn had taken a seminar in Chicago with Paul Shorey and had imbibed much from Shorey’s writings about Plato. One can see in Leonardo’s work a continuity with the rigorously philological approaches of Shorey and Cherniss. Leonardo’s books and articles ranged over the whole span of ancient Greek philosophy from Heraclitus and Parmenides of the earlier fifth century BCE to the twilight of Neoplatonism in the sixth century CE. John Dillon called Leonardo “one of the chief authorities in the field” (rev. of Leonardo’s edition of and commentary on the Epinomis in AJP 101 [1980] 486‒8 at 486.) Jaap Mansfeld commented that “much is to be learned ... both as to contents and as to method” from Leonardo’s extensive review articles as well as from his other papers (rev. of Leonardo’s Collected Papers in Mnemosyne 57 [2004] 764‒5 at 764). Roger Bagnall told me that former Chair Walter Ludwig said in a departmental meeting that Leonardo’s Speusippus of Athens was the finest work of classical scholarship produced by a member of the department since Kurt von Fritz. In addition to his teaching and research, Leonardo benefited the profession by bringing out collections of philosophical papers by Cherniss and, with Garland Publishing, Inc., reprints of books and papers on ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and literature. Sadly, Leonardo was prevented from completing two major projects: a critical edition of Simplicius’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics and a commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics as a work—the latter building on the critical edition with textual notes that he and Dimitri Gutas had brought out in 2012.
Those two projects show Leonardo’s conviction that despite centuries of production of editions of ancient Greek and Latin authors, many of their works still lack critical editions founded on scientific principles. Studying the history of transmission of a text, collating manuscripts that contain it, establishing their filiation so as to isolate the primary witnesses, and producing a text with critical apparatus showing all readings of primary witnesses were endeavors to which Leonardo devoted himself throughout his career. He was the first to publish Asclepius of Tralles’ Commentary to Nicomachus’ Introduction to Arithmetic (1969). At the opposite pole, Aristotle’s Poetics had been edited often. Leonardo and Gutas, however, put its text on a firm basis by making complete use of the medieval Arabic and (fragmentary) Syriac witnesses and William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation, and Leonardo proved the existence of an archetype from which all our extant witnesses are derived. Pierre Pellegrin praised the volume as “fondé sur une érudition éblouissante” (rev. in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger, 205 (2015), 239‒241 at 240), and Omert J. Schrier called it “a landmark in the history of the Poetics” (rev. in Mnemosyne 69 [2016] 319‒36 at 335). Sometimes aspects of Leonardo’s writing provoked controversy. Now when fluency in ancient Greek is no longer assumed of readers of scholarship in Classics, Leonardo maintained the once-standard custom of providing no English translation of quotations in Greek. Some readers lacked patience for Leonardo’s comprehensive treatment of a question (“minutiae of scholarly controversy,” Jonathan Barnes, CR 27 [1977] 121). Yet, in this Leonardo was paralleling the stance of Cherniss, who would explicate why he rejected an interpretation on the grounds that “there can be no approach to common agreement on more general issues until scholars stop passing by in silence the discordant interpretations of specific passages...” (Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato and the Academy [1944] xxii). Leonardo’s care to eschew speculative conclusions sometimes was criticized (“pervasive scepticism,” John Dillon in his review of Speusippus in CR 33 [1983] 225‒7 at 225), but one must always do justice to Leonardo’s reasoning in particular cases. I mention one. Leonardo dismissed as “unworthy of what we know about Plato and Aristotle” the “undignified” story in Aelian (VH 3.19 = T34) that Aristotle and followers repeatedly badgered the aging Plato with elenctic questions, forcing him to stay indoors rather than walk in the garden, and that it took Xenocrates to deal with the situation after Speusippus did nothing. Dillon in a later article averred that “it is unreasonable of its latest commentator [sc. Leonardo] to dismiss [this story] as spurious,” since it could have been embellished from some grains of truth (“What Happened to Plato’s Garden?”, Hermathena 134 [1983] 51‒9 at 54). Professor Dillon, though, neglected to tell us that Leonardo had offered an argument: if this story is true, “it is hardly likely that Aristotle would still have been considered a member of the Academy at the time of Xenocrates’ election (cf. T2, lines 14‒27).”
Leonardo came to Columbia in 1967 after a year of teaching at UCLA in 1965‒66. Prior to and during his long tenure at Columbia, Leonardo received grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Leonardo was twice a Visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study (1966‒67, 1978‒79). Leonardo served the department as Chair and in later years at Director of Graduate Studies. To him the signal honor of the named chair, John Jay Professor of the Greek and Latin Languages, was awarded in 1987.
In my first two years in the graduate program of what was then called the Department of Greek and Latin, I had no course with Professor Tarán. But another graduate student advised me to seek him out as a prospective dissertation advisor. Professor Tarán, this student said, gives the most direct and best guidance.
When I met with Professor Tarán and spoke of my interest in specializing in Plato, he treated me to an hour’s survey of Plato’s work and career. I still picture myself sitting in front of Leonardo’s desk furiously taking notes as he told me of the Phaedo’s picture of reasoning by hypothesis toward “something sufficient,” ἱκανόν, and of the Republic’s picture after that of a “not-hypothesized first principle,” ἀνυπόθετος ἀρχή, that would account for reality.
There followed a seminar with Leonardo on Heraclitus and Parmenides and another on Euripides’ Bacchae. In each, after Leonardo gave a model presentation, we would try to do what he did in our presentations. He was an exacting critic; we strove to meet his standards. Later, when I was writing my dissertation, I profited from the same pedagogical modeling. Finding some of my footnotes too long and lacking structure, Leonardo rewrote two pages of them. That got me started on a much tighter, more focused product. I cannot begin to detail all the help, personal and institutional support, and encouragement he gave, or the many questions he patiently answered. Leonardo was supportive not only of his students but also of some younger colleagues going through difficult times.
As I wrote to Leonardo’s wife, Dr. Judit Sonya Lida-Tarán: “Leonardo made a big contribution to my life, and I owe him much. I appreciate how he taught and modeled concern for truth, discernment between what we can know and what we can only conjecture, indefatigable searching for direct evidence, and deep familiarity with other scholars' work. It is solely to Leonardo that I owe my rewarding experience of working on Greek manuscripts. Although most of my teaching was at the secondary level, I always found inspiration as a teacher in Leonardo's example of intellectual rigor and ‘the spirit of the hunt’.”
In Leonardo Classics, ancient philosophy, and the Columbia community have lost an esteemed colleague and teacher. I am grateful that Leonardo Tarán was my Doktorvater.
David J. Murphy, Ph.D. 1986
Leonardo Tarán
The Classics Department congratulates its graduating seniors and is delighted to announce the following Honors and prizes:
DEPARTMENTAL HONORS
Helen Ruger
PHI BETA KAPPA
Adam Burns
Matthew Nola
DOUGLAS GARDNER CAVERLY PRIZE
Helen Ruger
ERNEST STADLER PRIZE
Virginia Ignelzi
Matthew Nola
EARLE PRIZE
Erin Pugh
Optime fecistis!
The Department of Classics congratulates Professor Stathis Gourgouris who was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for 2023. During the Fellowship year, Prof. Gourgouris will pursue a new research project, "On Listening: Acoustics, Acousmatics, Noise/Music, and the Worldly Encounter". The project will engage both the Pythagorean and later Enlightenment views on listening as a human sense in the contemporary context of technologies of sound and the social construction of aural aesthetics.
For the Foundation's announcement, see www.gf.org/announcements
Prof. Stathis Gourgouris
The Department extends its congratulations to PhD candidate Cat Lambert, who will be joining the Department of Classics at Cornell University as a postdoctoral fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, and then as an Assistant Professor.
Cat works widely on Latin and Greek literature, with particular interests in book history, gender, and queer studies. Her current research is driven by a desire to open up new understandings of material texts and their readers in antiquity. In particular, in her recent article, “The Ancient Entomological Bookworm” (Arethusa 2020), she traces the vermiculate gaps left in the bookworm’s wake as it munches through the papyrus scroll and becomes activated by imperial Greek and Latin texts as a metaphor for skewering inept, pedantic readers of low-social status.
At Cornell, Cat will develop her book project, Bad Readers in Ancient Rome. This project builds on a central insight from her work on the bookworm, which is that staking a claim to an ideal, readerly embodiment over another also stakes a historically specific claim to power, embodiment, and identity. Her book blends the methodology of book history with the insights of feminist, queer, and critical theory to understand why certain readerly embodiments and modes are stigmatized for deviating from the hegemonic norm, and to illuminate the broader material, social networks that are adumbrated by books as objects in the imperial Roman Mediterranean. Ultimately, she argues that "bad readers" offer a powerful locus for telling a new story about books and readers in antiquity, as well as a lens for theorizing how certain hermeneutic modes in the discipline today intersect with and reproduce hierarchies of power.
Cat is also excited to get to know students at Cornell through her teaching. She will teach Latin and Greek language and literature, as well as "Queer Classics," a course she developed at Columbia through the Teaching Scholars program.
You can read a full write-up of Cat's appointment here: https://classics.cornell.edu/news/cornell-classics-welcomes-new-faculty-member-cat-lambert
Congratulations to Sydney Hertz (Barnard first year) and Gavin Barba (Columbia postbac) for their first prizes in Greek at the 2022 New York Classical Club’s Competition in the Oral Reading of Greek and Latin! Because of the Covid pandemic, this year’s contest was video-based. Sydney and Gavin submitted films of themselves reciting a set passage from Euripides’ Bacchae (Agaue with the head of Pentheus), impressing the judges both with their linguistic and metrical accuracy and their dramatic impressiveness.
Karen Van Dyck, Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Language and Literature, will receive an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Athens on March 23, 2022.
Read more about the ceremony here.
The Department extends its warmest congratulations to Professor Van Dyck.
Honorary Doctorate Ceremony
The Department of Classics extends its congratulations to Nancy Worman, Barnard Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, on winning the AAP’s PROSE Award in Classics for Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama.
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) selects academic works across 39 different categories to recognize the contribution and accomplishment of authors in their distinguished field.
The official press release notes:
“This year’s PROSE Award entries overwhelmingly raised the bar in quality, content, and diversity, reflecting the profound expertise that goes into creating scholarly publications in every conceivable area of study,” commented Syreeta Swann, Chief Operating Officer, AAP. “We are pleased to announce that our panel of 24 judges has reviewed more than 560 entries, in the process singling out 106 titles to be honored as finalists. From this list, our judges then identified 39 outstanding titles to be honored as Category Winners.”
A discussion of the preservation and translations of Corinthian Arvanitika poetry.
ZOOM LINK: https://depaul.zoom.us/j/98792934031?pwd=bWEvdHNmTWgrT09nZmRsMDdnTWxPZz09
Password: "bregu"
Join professor and literary translator Peter Constantine (Princeton University) on the preservation of Corinthian Arvanitika and his translations of Arvanitika poetry, alongside professor and translator Karen Van Dyck (Columbia University) on Gralbanian in contemporary Greek fiction, and novelist Gazmend Kapllani, author of A Short Border Handbook and My Name is Europe, who will speak about his fictional work dealing with themes of immigration, borders, and border-crossing.
In this session, we will discuss Constantine’s efforts to preserve Arvanitika, Van Dyck’s new work on translingualism and Gralbanian, and Kapllani’s fictional work, which originally appeared in Greek, focusing squarely on the interface between Albanian and Greek.
This year, the SCS/AIA is holding its annual conference virtually, and Department of Classics faculty, graduate students, affiliated students, and alumni will be making presentations over the coming days. Please read on for more details.
Thursday, January 6
FIRST PAPER SESSION (8:00am-10:30am PST = 11:00am-1:30pm EST)
SCS-1: Rebuilding, Reconnecting, Restructuring: The Future(s) of Classical Studies Post-COVID (organized by the Graduate Student Committee, I. Morrison-Moncure, and C. Gipson)
Elizabeth Heintges (Classics), “Collaboration on the Macro- and Micro-Scale”
SCS-3: Ancient Music and the Visual Arts (organized by MOISA and C. Brøns)
Deborah Steiner (faculty), “Things that Sing: Objectified Music in Archaic and Early Classical Greece”
SCS-5: Enslavement and Literary Work in the Roman Mediterranean (organized by J. Coogan, J. Howley, and C. Moss)
Brett Stine (Classics), “A Slip of the Tongue: An Exploration of Enslaved Visibility in Roman Book Work”
Cat Lambert (Classics), “Enslavement and the Reader(s) in Seneca's Moral Epistles”
Joseph Howley (faculty), “The Amanuensis as Vilicus: Enslaved Labor in Roman Agriculture and Authorship”
AIA-1C: Roman Epigraphy and Writing
Alice Sharpless (CLST), “Inscribing Value? A New Look at Weight Inscriptions on Roman Silver”
THIRD PAPER SESSION (2:00pm-5:00pm PST = 5:00pm-8:00pm EST)
SCS-25: Parmenides and Plato (M. Folch presiding)
Emma Ianni (Classics), “Antigone in Magnesia: Plato's Revision of the Sophoclean Tragedy in the Laws”
AIA-3F: Boundaries and Liminality in Roman Material Culture (colloquium; organized by L. Porstner and S. Madole Lewis)
Nikki Vellidis (CLST MA ’21), “Beware of Envy: A Study of Phthonos in the Envy Mosaic of the Villa of Skala”
Friday, January 7
FOURTH PAPER SESSION (8:00am-10:30am PST = 11:00am-1:30pm EST)
SCS-32: The Poetics of Slavery and Vergil's Georgics (organized by K. Dennis and E. Valdivieso)
Joseph Howley (faculty), “Response”
FIFTH PAPER SESSION (11:00am-1:00pm PST = 2:00pm-4:00pm EST)
SCS-36: Honig's Bacchae / Euripides' Theory of Refusal (organized by C. Conybeare)
Vanessa Stovall (CLST M.A. ’20), ““Actin' Womanish” - Fabulation, Cosmetics, and (En)gendered Sophistry with Euripides and Hartman in Bacch(ant)ic Canon”
SCS-38: Ancient Medicine (T. Mulder presiding)
Erin Petrella (Classics), “Magicae Herbae, Alchemy, and the 15th Century Reception of Pliny's Historia Naturalis”
SIXTH PAPER SESSION (2:00pm-5:00pm PST)
SCS-50: Black Athena before Black Athena (organized by Eos: Africana Receptions of Greece and Rome, M. Hanses, and J. Murray)
Yujhán Claros (Classics PhD ’21), “Modernist Poets at the Margins: The Prophetic Arts and Aesthetics of Kahlil Gibran and Melvin Tolson”
AIA-6C: Signifying the Senses and Female Emotions in Italy and Greece (colloquium; organized by A. Eichengreen and D. Smotherman Bennett)
Maria Dimitropoulos (CLST), “Lemnian Deeds: Representations of Spousal Homicide in Vase Painting”
AIA-6F: Material Evidence of Dance Performances in the Ancient World (colloquium; organized by A. Bellia and E. Angliker)
Deborah Steiner (faculty), “Buildings that Dance: Choral Architecture in Stone and Text”
Saturday, January 8
SEVENTH PAPER SESSION (8:00am-11:00am PST = 11:00am-2:00pm EST)
SCS-63/AIA-7D: Multilingualism and Coinage in the Ancient World (Joint AIA-SCS Session, organized by J. Simmons and T. Ish-Shalom)
Ute Wartenberg (faculty), “Multilingualism and Coinage in the Achaemenid Empire”
Tal Ish-Shalom (CLST), “Beyond Audiences: Bilingual Coins in Late-Hellenistic Sidon and Tyre”
Jeremy Simmons (CLST PhD ’20), “Signals in Script: Finding Meaning in Multilingual Issues of the Kushans and Western Kshatrapas”
AIA-7A: Roman Sculpture
Alexander Ekserdjian (Art History), “Communication from on High: the Function of the Images of the Gods in the Temple Pediments of Hellenistic Italy”
NINTH PAPER SESSION (2:30pm-5:00pm PST = 5:30-8:00pm EST)
SCS- 77: Freedom and Enslavement (J. Howley presiding)
SCS-79: Egypt (E. Kelting presiding)
Susan Rahyab (CLST), “The Private Lives of Public Notaries: Uncovering the Agoranomoi in Greco-Roman Egypt”
Announcing debut poetry collection in English by Greek poet Jazra Khaleed edited by Karen Van Dyck with an introduction by Peter Constantine.
Based on a 2019 Columbia conference, this volume contains sixteen essays by a group of international scholars, which explore the hitherto understudied and underappreciated philosophical aspects of Ovid’s work. The collection questions the feasibility of separating out the categories of the "philosophical" and the "literary,” and investigates the ways in which Ovid offers unusual, controversial, or provocative reactions to received philosophical ideas. Ultimately, it makes a case for viewing the Ovidian corpus not just as a body of writings that are often philosophically inflected, but also as texts that may themselves be read as philosophically adventurous and experimental.
The Classics Department and Classical Studies Graduate Program are delighted to announce the creation of two fellowships for our post-baccalaureate certificate in Classics. These fellowships, which are part of the university’s commitment in support of diversity, equity, and inclusion, include full coverage of tuition and fees, a $25,000 combined living stipend and housing subsidy, and support for the student to participate in excavations held over the summer at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli.
For information on the post-baccalaureate certificate, see http://classics.columbia.edu/overview-2.
For information on fellowship eligibility and application requirements, see http://classics.columbia.edu/fellowship.
The fellowship application deadline for AY 2022–23 is March 1, 2022. If you have any questions, you are welcome to contact Darcy Krasne (dk3009@columbia.edu), the faculty advisor of the Classics post-baccalaureate certificate.
In collaboration with the Heyman Center for Humanities, the Classics Department will be having an event celebrating the recent publication of Professor Katharina Volk’s The Roman Republic of Letters. In her book Volk explores a fascinating chapter of intellectual history, focusing on the literary senators of the mid-first century BCE who came to blows over the future of Rome even as they debated philosophy, history, political theory, linguistics, science, and religion.
This event will take place in-person at the Heyman Center and virtually over Zoom. We ask that everyone register via Zoom, even those who plan to attend in-person. For more information please visit either the events page at Columbia Classics or The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
