Professor Alan Shapiro, the W.H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology in the Classics Department at Johns Hopkins University, is this year’s Helen North guest lecturer. He will speak on Thursday, March 29th at 4:30 in Science Center 101. All are welcome.

Thomas Mitchell will speak on  “Athenian Democracy: Origins and Ideals” in Science Center 101 on Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 7:30 pm for the eleventh annual Helen North lecture, sponsored by the Office of the President and the Department of Classics.  Dr. Mitchell was Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, from 1991-2001. He was a member of the Swarthmore Classics Department from 1966 to 1979, after which he was Professor of Latin and then Provost at Trinity College.  A reception will follow and all are welcome.

“Talking to the Troops about the Archaeology of Iraq and Afghanistan” will be presented by C. Brian Rose, James B. Pritchard Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, on Wednesday, March 17 at 4:15 in Science Center 199. Shortly after the looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, the Archaeological Institute of America launched a new program wherein lectures on the cultural heritage of Iraq and Afghanistan are provided at US military bases to soldiers who are about to be deployed to those countries. Professor Rose will provide an overview of the history of the program during the last four years, highlighting the archaeological and diplomatic issues that arose in the course of the planning. A reception will follow.

The tenth annual Helen F. North Classics lecture was given on Tuesday, February 2nd by Professor Carmela Vircillo Franklin of the American Academy in Rome.  Professor Franklin discussed “Cultural Appropriation: The case of medieval Echternach and Napoleonic France” .

Dear professors,

I was planning on sending out an update on my adventures up here in Toronto, but I wanted to wait until I had the results of the Fall
Latin exams to report. It turns out that I passed both the MA and PhD exams on the first try, a rare feat in the department up here but nothing amazing given the rigorous training you gave me at Swarthmore. I have been studying Latin for what seems to me to be a long time (almost half my life, which is a scary idea), but I could not have passed without being able to translate contextually, and that is an ability that your teaching specifically fostered. At the very least, cramming before seminars was terrific practice.

I have spent most of the summer doing preparatory coursework,
palaeography in June and advanced Latin in July and August, but I also found time to join the department softball team, volunteer regularly at a local vegan non-profit restaurant, and win a few rounds in the Latin scrabble league. That last part is something you should definitely consider starting up at Happy Hours, as it is surprisingly fun and also great practice.

Toronto itself is an extremely hospitable city. After a year in NYC
it’s a breath of fresh air, although I guess I haven’t seen the
purported misery of the winter. I don’t believe it will get any worse
than the brown slush and wet socks I experienced for most of my
Manhattan January, though. I can walk to the big hippie market at
Kensington, where they have a lot of cheap produce, as well as several restaurant rows.

Thanks again for your assistance over these past few years, both in
class and during my application period. I hope that things have gone well at Swarthmore and that this new year has begun well. Let me know the news and I’ll do my best to keep you up to date in return!

Take care,
Jamison

Dear Classics people,

we love to hear from you! Here is what Andrew Hermann recently wrote us:

I am currently working in NY at Oxford University Press as an editorial assistant in the reference department (I can totally hook you up with dictionaries). Oddly enough, it is in the same building as the CUNY Graduate Center where I learned Greek last summer. Oxford is a great place to work and evidently I am sitting at the desk of a former employee who has just started to pursue graduate work in classics, making me the fresh new classicist of the group. You will be thrilled to know that I am currently working on an online bibliography for classics (kind of like a wikipedia with guidance and annotation of sources) which means l’annee will no longer have to be the only online resource! Rejoice! Coincidentally, I think mentioning the fact that I know how to navigate l’annee was one of my biggest selling points for this position.

I also wanted to thank you again for funding my course at Columbia. I completed it a few weeks ago and am now intimately acquainted with Plato’s Symposium. It was a fun class and a nice transition from academia to the work place (however I am glad I no longer have to be the guy reading Greek on the Long Island Rail Road, I cannot possibly handle receiving the comment “It’s all Greek to me!” ever again). The class of course was nowhere near Swarthmore depth and quality, but that is of course to be expected.

The Classics Department is delighted to welcome Bruce King as visiting assistant professor for the 2008-9 academic year. Bruce’s new book on the Iliad (due to appear with Oxford University Press) deals with issues of identity, kinship, love and the end of the heroic age.

Kellam Conover ’03 has been awarded the Jacobus Fellowship at Princeton University.

Read more in the News at Princeton.