News and announcements of the Department of Classics, Columbia University
The Book Review with Gareth Williams (former Book Review Editor, Classical World) and James Zetzel (Editorial Board, Bryn Mawr Classical Review).
Moderated by Katharina Volk (Latin Editor, Gnomon).
Friday, March 3rd, 4:10pm 603 Hamilton Hall
Dear all,
The Classical Studies Graduate Program warmly invites you to a talk entitled "The Seleucid Paradox: Ethnicity and Cultural Change in Late-Hellenistic Sidon and Tyre" by Tal Ish-Shalom, PhD candidate in Classical Studies at Columbia University. Please join us on Friday, February 17 at 4:10 pm in Room 616 Hamilton Hall, with a reception to follow in Room 618. This talk is being presented in preparation for job interviews.
Greetings!
Columbia University Classics Department is super excited & proud to announce the Book Launch of Dr. Cristina Pérez Díaz's new book Antígona by José Watanabe A Bilingual Edition with Critical Essays.
To celebrate this amazing achievement, we invite you to her book launch event happening on Friday, February 10, 2023, at 4:10p in 603 Hamilton Hall.
This book brings to English readers, in its entirety for the first time, a translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona, accompanied by the original Spanish text and critical essays.
The lack of availability in English has resulted in the absence of Antígona from important Anglophone studies devoted specifically to the reception of ancient Greek tragedy in the Americas. Pérez Díaz's translation fills this gap. The introduction provides the performative, political, and historical contexts in which the text was written in collaboration with the actress Teresa Ralli, from the Peruvian theater group Yuyachkani, who also originally performed it. Following the bilingual text, a critical essay provides an analysis of textual aspects of Antígona that have been disregarded, situating it in relation to Sophocles' Antigone and in conversation with relevant moments of the vast traditions of reception of the Greek tragedy. An appendix briefly surveys some notable productions of the play throughout Latin America.
This comprehensive volume provides an invaluable resource for readers interested in José Watanabe's work, students and scholars working on classical reception and Latin American literature and theatre, as well as theatre practitioners.
Event link: https://sofheyman.org/events/justice-forum-moses-hadas
A panel featuring Rachel Hadas, Roosevelt Montás, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta
In the summer of 1963, Moses Hadas (1900-1966), Jay Professor of Greek at Columbia, used what was then a new AT &T technology to deliver a series of telelectures. Passionate about transmitting the classical legacy to the broadest possible audience, Hadas delivered 18 lectures to students at Historical Black Colleges and Universities in Mississippi and Louisiana. Materials pertaining to these historic lectures will be presented by Rachel Hadas -- poet, translator, educator, essayist, and the youngest daughter of Moses Hadas. Using these materials as a starting point, Rachel Hadas, Roosevelt Montás, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta (SOF 2014-16) will discuss the context of these lectures and the cultural shifts that have had an impact upon pedagogy and technology, the classical tradition, and equity in education-- all issues which, sixty years later, remain not only relevant but urgent.
This event is free and open to the public but requires prior registration (access through the website).
This book brings to English readers, in its entirety for the first time, a translation of José Watanabe’s Antígona, accompanied by the original Spanish text and critical essays.
The lack of availability in English has resulted in the absence of Antígona from important Anglophone studies devoted specifically to the reception of ancient Greek tragedy in the Americas. Pérez Díaz's translation fills this gap. The introduction provides the performative, political, and historical contexts in which the text was written in collaboration with the actress Teresa Ralli, from the Peruvian theater group Yuyachkani, who also originally performed it. Following the bilingual text, a critical essay provides an analysis of textual aspects of Antígona that have been disregarded, situating it in relation to Sophocles' Antigone and in conversation with relevant moments of the vast traditions of reception of the Greek tragedy. An appendix briefly surveys some notable productions of the play throughout Latin America.
This comprehensive volume provides an invaluable resource for readers interested in José Watanabe's work, students and scholars working on classical reception and Latin American literature and theatre, as well as theatre practitioners.
The Classics Department is delighted to announce the publication of The Spear, The Scroll, and The Pebble by Professor Richard A. Billows. This book presents a powerful new argument for how and why the Greek city-states, including their distinctive society and culture, came to be - and why they had the highly unusual and influential form they took. After reviewing early city-state formation, and the economic underpinnings of city-state society, three key chapters examine the way the Greeks developed their unique society. The spear, scroll, and pebble encapsulate the book's core ideas.
The Spear: city-state Greeks developed a citizen-militia military system that gave relatively equal importance to each citizen-warrior, thereby emboldening the citizen-warriors to demand political rights.
The Pebble: the resultant growth of collective political systems of oligarchy and democracy led to thousands of citizens forming the sovereign element of the state; they made political decisions through communal debate and voting.
The Scroll: in order for such systems to function, a shared information base had to be created, and this was done by setting up public notices of laws, proposed policies, public meeting agendas, and a host of other information.
To access this information, these military and political citizens had to be able to read. Billows examines the spread of schools and literacy throughout the Greek world, showing that the male city-state Greeks formed the world's first-known mass literate society. He concludes by showing that it was the mass-literate nature of the Greek city-state society that explains the remarkable and influential culture the classical Greeks produced.
Dear Members of the Classics Community,
We will be holding a holiday celebration from 11am-4pm on Thursday December 15th 618 Hamilton Hall.
Please stop by anytime between 11 and 4 to help yourself to some sweet treats and drinks to celebrate the end of the semester and the beginning of the holiday season.
In an effort to keep our community healthy this will be a 'grab and go' event rather than a formal gathering.
We hope to see you on the 15th!
Two of our PhD Students, Izzy Levy and Charles Pletcher, are writing as co-directors of 2023’s Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group play, ‘Aristophanes’ Women-at-the-Thesmophoria’s Euripides’ Helen.’
The show is a tragicomic mashup of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria) and Euripides’ Helen. It will be performed entirely in Ancient Greek, with a contemporary drag cabaret twist.
Genderbending and genrebending are going to be at the heart of the performance. No previous performance experience or knowledge of Ancient Greek is required to participate, although both are very welcome!
On Tuesday, December 13, we will be holding auditions for the show in Hamilton 618, from 5-8pm. Sides will be provided at the audition with English translations of scenes from both Helen and Thesmophoriazusae — no need to prepare anything in Greek. If you are interested in a singing role (Chorus members, as well as ~3 main characters), please prepare to sing a brief (roughly 16-bar) selection of your choice (unaccompanied)
If you’d like to get involved behind the scenes, please fill out this Google Form with your interests and information and Izzy and/or Charles will be in touch.
Columbia University’s interdisciplinary and interdepartmental Classical Studies Graduate Program is delighted to announce the first Classical Dialogues talk of the 2022-2023 academic year.
Professor Maggie Popkin (Art History, Case Western Reserve University) will be on campus to discuss her recent book Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge UP, 2022) on Friday October 28, 11:00-1:00 in 603 Hamilton Hall.
This in-person only event has an author-meets-readers format. Thus, we are circulating in advance two of Prof. Popkin’s chapters: “Introduction: Souvenirs of the Roman Empire” and “Souvenirs of Cult Statues” Please email Lauren Palmer for a copy of the chapters
After an introduction by Prof. Francesco de Angelis (CU Department of Art History & Archaeology), Prof. Popkin will discuss her book, engage in dialogue with two graduate student respondents (Giulia Bertoni and Giovanni Lovisetto), and answer questions from attendees.
We look forward to seeing you there and to welcoming you to a short reception following the event.
About Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome
In this book, Maggie Popkin offers an in-depth investigation of souvenirs, a type of ancient Roman object that has been understudied and that is unfamiliar to many people. Souvenirs commemorated places, people, and spectacles in the Roman Empire. Straddling the spheres of religion, spectacle, leisure, and politics, they serve as a unique resource for exploring the experiences, interests, imaginations, and aspirations of a broad range of people - beyond elite, metropolitan men - who lived in the Roman world. Popkin shows how souvenirs generated and shaped memory and knowledge, as well as constructed imagined cultural affinities across the empire's heterogeneous population. At the same time, souvenirs strengthened local identities, yet excluded certain groups from the social participation that souvenirs made available to so many others. Featuring a full illustration program of 137 color and black and white images, Popkin's book demonstrates the critical role that souvenirs played in shaping how Romans perceived and conceptualized their world, and their relationships to the empire that shaped it.
– Cambridge University Press webpage https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/archaeology/classical-archaeology/souvenirs-and-experience-empire-ancient-rome?format=AR&isbn=9781009051347
About Maggie Popkin:
Maggie L. Popkin is Robson Junior Professor and Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and numerous articles on Greek and Roman art and architecture. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright Organization and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
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
