News
AHRC Fellowship
Rebecca Sweetman has been awarded an AHRC Research Fellowship for 2012 in support of a project on the Christianisation of the Peloponnese in the 5th to 7th centuries CE. Congratulations to her on this success!
Congratulations to Emma-Jayne Graham
Emma-Jayne Graham has been successful in winning a grant from the British Academy Small Grants scheme for a project on 'Swaddled infants and the terracotta votive tradition in ancient Italy'. The project will catalogue and analyse the evidence for terracotta votive offerings (ex votos) of swaddled infants deposited at sanctuary sites across Central Italy from the 4th-1st century BC in anticipation of, or thanks for, divine assistance in pregnancy and childbirth.
Double success for Emma Gee
Emma Gee has been successful in winning two awards for work on her project Mapping the Underworld in Ancient Greece and Rome. She has been given a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for 2011-12, and will follow that in 2012-13 with the previously announced award from the Loeb Foundation.Congratulations to Stephen Halliwell
Stephen Halliwell has been elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Further details available here: http://www.royalsoced.org.uk/fellowship/elections/elect11.htm
Joe Howley wins position at Columbia
We're delighted to report that Joe Howley, currently a Teaching Fellow with us, has been appointed to an Assistant Professorship at Columbia University, which has one of the best Classics Departments in the US. As well as being wonderful news for Joe himself, this is great testimony to the School's international reputation, since Joe is also a product of our own PhD programme.
Laura Jansen wins position at Stanford
We're delighted that Dr Laura Jansen, who twice held a Teaching Fellowship in the School, has been appointed Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Stanford University for 2011-12.
Congratulations to Emma Gee
Emma Gee has been awarded a Loeb Library Foundation research award for the second semester of 2011-12: this is for work on her book (under contract to CUP) Mapping the Underworld in Greece and Rome.
Congratulations to Rebecca Sweetman
Rebecca Sweetman was awarded a Caledonian Research foundation/RSE European Visiting Research Fellowship for the project entitled 'Late Antique Churches as evidence for the diachronic complexities of the Christianization of the Peloponnese'. The fellowship will be used to undertake research at the British School at Athens and fieldwork on the 5th - 7th century churches in the Peloponnese in Spring 2011.
Congratulations to Karla Pollmann
Karla Pollmann has been appointed Professor Extraordinary in the Department of Ancient Studies, Stellenbosch University, for 2011-13. This is the first time that any such link has existed between the two universities.
Visiting Professor at the University of Campinas
Greg Woolf spent two weeks in February as a visiting professor at the University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil at the invitation of Professor Pedro Paulo Funari, Director of the University's Institute of Advanced Studies. While there, he gave a graduate course on religious pluralism in ancient Rome to students from a number of Brazilian universities. He spoke about his impressions of UNICAMP in this interview.
Yale Visiting Scholar
Pauline Leven visited the School for two weeks from 21 February as Yale Visiting Scholar. She gave three papers during her visit, including one at a conference on 'Voice and Fictionality in Greek poetry' held in the School on Saturday 26 February: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/classics/conferences/voice.shtml
Radio 4 - 'In our Time'
Stephen Halliwell took part in the popular Radio 4 history of ideas programme, 'In our Time', presented by Melvyn Bragg, on Jan. 27th. The topic was Aristotle's Poetics and the programme is available on the BBC 'In our Time' website.
Shadi Bartsch unable to come
Sadly, the volcanic ash cloud has prevented Shadi Bartsch from coming to St Andrews.
Distinguished Visiting Professor
The School is delighted to welcome Professor Shadi Bartsch, who is visting from 4th to 9th May 2010. She is the Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor of Classics at Chicago University. Her most recent book is "The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire". She has also edited volumes on the history of rhetoric, Eros, ekphrasis, and Seneca.
During her visit to St Andrews, Professor Bartsch will deliver a public lecture "The Stoic Path to Happiness: Advice from an Ancient Philosophy" on Thursday 6th May at 5 pm in School 5, and deliver a research paper ‘Metaphor and Senecan Stoicism’ at 4 pm on Friday 7th May in the School of Classics.
Chaire Cardinal Mercier
During April and May 2010 Stephen Halliwell is holding the Chaire Cardinal Mercier at the Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium. This visiting professorship, which involves a series of lectures and seminars (on the theme 'An Aristotelian perspective on the relation between aesthetics and ethics'), has a long distinguished history but has been held by very few scholars from the English-speaking world.
Congratulations to Jill Harries
We are delighted to learn that Professor Jill Harries has been elected to a
Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for her distinguished record as an
ancient historian. Jill was one of four St Andrews academics, including the
Principal herself, on the list of new FRSEs announced in March 2010. See the
further report at
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2010/Title,48625,en.html
Congratulations to Roger Rees
It has been announced (April 2010) that Roger Rees has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship for 2010-11 to pursue his research project on Latin panegyric.
More Congratulations to Stephen Halliwell
Hot on the tail of the Premio Europeo di Estetica, Stephen's latest book, Greek Laughter. A study of cultural psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge 2008) has just been awarded the John D. Criticos Prize awarded annually to creative works of history, literature, classical studies, art, archaeology and philosophy written in the English language by prominent authors, irrespective of their nationality.
New Appointments in Classics
The School is delighted to announce that the academic staff will be reinforced next session by two new colleagues.
Félix Racine, currently completing a Ph.D. on the literary geography of late antiquity at Yale, following degrees from Montréal and McGill in Canada, will be joining us as a Lecturer in Roman History.
Dr. Georgia Petridou will be joining us as a Teaching Fellow in Greek and Classical Studies. She is a graduate of the Universities of Athens, Glasgow and latterly Exeter where she wrote a thesis on Divine epiphanies in Greek culture and literature. She has also held a research position at the British Institute in Ankara. A warm welcome to them both.
Congratulations to Stephen Halliwell
Stephen Halliwell, Professor of Greek in the School of Classics, has been awarded the Premio Europeo di Estetica for 2008 by the Società Italiana d'Estetica for his book The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton U. P. 2002). The prize was presented at the Society's annual conference in Rome in April 2008 (view photos) and the Italian translation of the book is being published in April 2009.
Congratulations to Jason König
Dr Jason König has just won a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation to pay for a semester's research leave to enable him to complete a study of narrative representations of consumption and the symposium in the Roman empire.
Visitor from Cologne
The School is delighted to welcome Dr Gunnar Seelentag from the University of Cologne, who is the first participant in an Erasmus exchange scheme between ancient history there and in St Andrews. Dr Seelentag is an expert on archaic Crete, and has also written on Roman coinage and imperial ideology and monuments. He will be with us for a fortnight, giving a number of talks on his research.
Harry Hine Retires
Professor Harry Hine retired at the end of August 2008 after 23 years as Scotstarvit Professor of Humanity. Harry came to St Andrews from Edinburgh in 1985 and was Head of School for an epic eight year stint as well as playing a major part in UK Classics and in the international scholarly community. He now plans to continue his research into the language of Seneca. There is an interview with him, and a Latin ode in his honour, in the 2008 Alumni magazine.
We wish him all the best for his retirement.
Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship
Professor Greg Woolf has won a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowships for the three years from 2009 to 2012. This is a highly prestigious and fiercely competitive award.
Professor Woolf will be writing a study of religious creativity in the Roman empire which asks Why was the Roman empire a good place for new religions to develop? The new kinds of religions that emerged in this period - religions that crossed political and cultural boundaries - include those that formed the world we now live in, one in which worldwide faiths and religious minorities set the agenda for politics rather than simply reinforce the authority of the political order. This project develops from the Rhind Lectures which he gave to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 2005, and on longer term research on the sociology of early empires. As well as considering the specific circumstances within which new kinds of religions - Christianity among them - appeared in the Mediterranean world that transcended the limits set by existing communities and states, the Roman empire being the greatest of these, the project has a comparative dimension, looking at religion in early empires in general. Professor Woolf will be spending the first year of this Fellowship based in the Department of Comparative Religious History of the University of Erfurt, with which the School is developing a series of collaborations.
This award is the latest in a series of grants from the Leverhulme Trust which has supported a wide range of research in the School, making it possible to employ post-doctoral researchers, to fund doctoral students, to bring distinguished visitors to St Andrews and also carry to out major collaborative research projects.
RAE Results
The School is pleased to announce that 60% of its research activity was graded as either 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent' in the most recent UK Research Assessment Exercise, putting it at 7th place among UK Classics departments.
Alumni Newsletter - Summer 2008
The first edition of 'Classics News' is now available online in pdf format.
The newsletter is an annual publication designed to keep our former students and staff more closely in touch with current events in the School.
Welcome to New Academic Staff
The School is pleased to welcome two new colleagues who will be with us throughout the session.
Dr. Emma-Jayne Graham studied at the University of Sheffield and the British School in Rome and comes to us from a position at Cardiff University. She is an archaeologist, expert in Roman burials in Italy and the west, and will be strengthening our provision in archaeology.
Mr Mark Woolmer studied at Swansea and comes to us from Edinburgh where he has been working as a research assistant. His research interests extend from ancient Carthage to the Persian Empire and he will also be teaching Roman history.
Congratulations to Recent Postgraduates
Two of our recent Ph.D.s have taken up teaching positions this year.
Dr Anna McCullough has just taken up a position as Assistant Professor at Ohio State University teaching Latin and Roman cultural history. She has just published a paper in Classical World on female gladiators.
Dr Jeremy Armstrong has just taken up a Lectureship in the University of Auckland. He has contributed a chapter on recruitment in the early Republic to Beyond Battlefields and is organizing a panel for the Roman Archaeology Conference to be held in Michigan in April 2009
Dr Jamie Macintyre also completed his doctorate this summer. He is currently employed on a project Mapping Classics Teaching across the UK, based in Durham at the Classics part of the Higher Education Subject Centre in History, Classics and Archaeology
Our congratulations to all of them.
Appointment of former student
We are pleased to hear that Kelly Joss Wrenhaven, who obtained her PhD here in 2006 has been appointed Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Cleveland State University.
Promotions in the School of Classics
Congratulations to Dr. Sian Lewis and Dr. Rebecca Sweetman, both of whom have been promoted to Senior Lectureships.
Dr. Lewis, who came to the School from Swansea in 2004, is currently working on ancient tyranny and is pro-Dean of Graduates in the Faculty of Arts.
Dr. Sweetman is currently on research leave at the British School in Athens, where she was formerly Assistant Director. Supported by the AHRC, the Molly Cotton Trust and the Carnegie Trust she is working on a publication of the Roman and late antique mosaics of Crete.
Adrian Gratwick's retiral
Adrian will be retiring at the end of December 2008 after just over 40 years at St Andrews. He arrived in the University in 1966 as an Assistant Lecturer in Humanity (the traditional name for Latin in Scottish universities), and since 1997 has been Professor of Classical Philology. He is well known internationally, particularly for his work on new comedy and early Republican Latin literature: he wrote several of the early chapters for the Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. 2, and has published editions of Terence’s Adelphi and Plautus’ Menaechmi, as well as many articles, on scientific topics as well as literary ones. In his retirement he will be completing a major study of the metre of Roman comedy. In St Andrews he is also well known as a skilled craftsman: his office was adorned with his replicas of ancient comic masks, and with models that he used to illustrate his lectures on ancient astronomy and on sundials. At a dinner to mark his retirement Harry Hine produced a Latin ode in his honour, and Adrian produced a Latin version of the dinner menu.
Visitor to the School
Jesper Madsen, Lecturer in Ancient History in the University of Southern Denmark at Odense, will be spending 10 days or so visiting St Andrews from 22nd November. Jesper spent a semester with us finishing his doctorate a couple of years ago, and we are pleased to welcome him back.
Further Appointments in Classics
New Appointments to the School
The School is delighted to welcome two new permanent members of staff, both arriving this September.
Dr. Emma Gee, who comes to us from the University of Sydney, is an expert on astronomy and the Roman calendar. Her research interests include Latin prose and poetry and the works of George Buchanan, the sixteenth century Scots intellectual who among other achievements taught Latin to Mary Queen of Scots, was Principal of St Andrews and imprisoned in the castle here. Dr. Gee is the author of Ovid, Aratus and Augustus published by Cambridge University Press in 2000 and she has since written on the astronomy of Marcus Cicero and of his brother. She is at present completing a book for Cambridge University Press on cosmology and the afterlife in Greece and Rome.
Dr. Juan Coderch comes to us from Oxford to take up the new position of Senior Language Tutor in Greek and Latin. He has degrees from the Universities of Sheffield and Barcelona and for the last four years has been Lector in Classics, following a career that has included teaching in schools and universities. He was for many years editor of a web site that published world news in Ancient Greek, and is a marathon runner. He will take charge of language teaching at St Andrews and play a vital part in extending our support for Latin and Greek from beginners classes (which are at record levels) to the support of postgraduate students both as developing researchers and as teachers themselves.
Classical Reception Network
The School is delighted to announce that it has just joined the Classical Reception Studies Network. This network, funded by the AHRC, brings together researchers at all levels from eight UK universities in a series of workshops and other collaborative projects concerned with the reception of classical texts and classical antiquity up until the present day. Researchers in the School have been involved in reception topics as diverse as Classics in the Caribbean, Classics in Film, the importance of classical ideas in the Scottish Enlightenment and in the French and American Revolutions and the reception of St Augustine's writings after antiquity.
For further information about research and other activities in this area please contact Professor Karla Pollman, kfp@st-andrews.ac.uk
Academic Fellowship
Dr Alex Long has been appointed to a five year RCUK Fellowship in Post-Classical Philosophy in the School of Classics from 1 July 2007. He has written on the dialogue form in Plato and has particular interests in the ethical theories of Stoic and Epicurean writers.
Leverhulme Trust funds project on Science and Empire in the Roman World
A grant from the Leverhulme Trust to Dr. Jason König and Prof. Greg Woolf will fund a three-year research project on the relationship between scientific enterprise and imperialism during the Roman Empire. For more background to the project, see the LOGOS page.
This new project will employ collaborative research and comparative analysis to create a systematic cultural history of encyclopedic and scientific writing in the Roman world. The Trust's grant makes possible a series of meetings and conferences and enable the School to employ a postdoctoral researcher who will work with the two principal investigators.
- Dr. König's publications include Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire and a forthcoming collection (co-edited with Prof. Tim Whitmarsh of Exeter University) entitled Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire.
- Prof. Woolf is the author of Becoming Roman. The origins of provincial civilization in Gaul and has co-edited Literacy and Power in the Ancient World (with Prof. Alan Bowman) and Rome the Cosmopolis (with Prof. Catharine Edwards).
The project will be run under the aegis of the LOGOS Centre.
The School has been hosting a series of workshops and conferences on this theme
over the past two years. During 2007 the School will host a meeting of COST Action
A36 'Tributary Empires Compared'
- After Augustine, a major study of the reception of St. Augustine's thought, is currently underway under the leadership of Prof. Karla Pollmann: two conferences on the theme were hosted during May 2006.
- Prof. Elizabeth Craik was in 2003 awarded an Emeritus Fellowship to support her work on the Hippocratic Treatise on the Eye.
- During 2001 the Trust funded Prof. Kai Brodersen of Mannheim University to spend a year in the School, where he worked on an edition of Pomponius Mela's Chorographia, the earliest geographical work in Latin that survives. An account of his time here may be read at http://www.geschichte.uni-mannheim.de/altertum/I-kai-sta.htm.
Archive
Leverhulme Visiting Scholar
Dr Diana Stanciu, Associate Professor in Political Science in the University of Bucharest, will visit the School from the 6th November to 5th December 2006 to work with Professor Karla Pollmann on the After Augustine Project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
She will give a lecture on 'Re-interpreting Augustine: Cambridge Platonists and Dutch Arminians on Grace and Free Will' on Tuesday, 5 December 2006, at 4 pm (with reception afterwards), in the Senior Common Room, St Mary's College.
Happy Birthday, Augustine
To mark the biological birthday of Augustine, the project "After Augustine. A Survey of His Reception from 430 to 2000" will host a one-day Postgraduate Conference, Augustine and His Readers, in the School of Classics on November 13, 2006, sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust.
The organizers are Professor Karla Pollmann, Carmen Cvetkovic, and Jochen Schultheiss.
Link to Programme
EVERYBODY WELCOME
James Wilson Seminar
The first James Wilson seminar on constitutionalism, 'One, few, many: ancient Greek thinking about constitutions', will take place on Thursday 4 May at 5.00 pm in Swallowgate 12. (Please note change of room).
The speaker will be Dr Roger Brock of the University of Leeds. Dr Brock is author
of a number of articles on Greek history and literature, and co-editor of
Alternatives to Athens (2000), which offers a cogent, wide-ranging introduction
to the scope and scale of political expression in the ancient Greek world. His particular
interests lie in Greek history and historiography, and he is currently working on a research
project on the Athenian Tribute Lists and completing a book on political imagery in Greek
literature.
This seminar is open to all staff and students.
Highers Conference
The school, together with the Tayside Classical Association hosted the annual Schools Highers Conference on 15 th March, attended by over 100 pupils and staff from eleven schools (three state schools and eight private). Very suitably for the Ides of March, it began with the talk “Does killing Caesar ever work?” and was followed by lectures on divination, the Æneid, gender conflict in tragedy, Cicero & court-room practice, and the archaeology of 5th century Athens.
Programme of events.
New Lecturer in Latin
Dr. Emma Buckley will be joining the School in September 2006 to take up a Lectureship in Latin and Classical Studies. Emma has just completed a Cambridge doctorate on the Flavian epicist Valerius Flaccus, whose poem on the voyage of the Argo draws on a mass of Greek and Latin predecessors. She has also written on the Renaissance poet Maffeo Vegio (who wrote a mini-sequel to the Aeneid) and on Seneca's Medea.
STAGE day
This semester's STAGE day, organised for and by postgraduates in Classics Schools in St Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh will be held in St Andrews on Wednesday March 22nd. See programme and registration form.
New Reader in Latin
From September 2006, Dr Roger Rees will be joining us a Reader in Latin. Dr Rees is an expert on the literature and history of Latin Antiquity, and has a published a study on Latin panegyric, on Vergil in Latin antiquity and on the reign of Diocletian. He also recently organised a conference on Ted Hughes and the classics.
New Scholarships in Arts and Divinity
Three of the new PhD Scholarships offered by the University are tenable within the School of Classics. Each is worth the equivalent of the Home Fee (currently £3,085) for three years. See details and application forms.
New e-journals
The University Library has recently purchased access to 375 new e-journals.
- JSTOR Arts and Sciences II and III contain 275 full-text titles, covering
disciplines including archaeology, classics, art, architecture and religion.
Title lists can be found at
These two important archival databases provide core research journals, from the first issue published, to a date generally 3-5 years from the most current issue.
- Periodicals Archive Online: Collection I contains 100 full-text humanities
and social sciences journals, published between 1770 and 1995
Title List at: http://pao.chadwyck.co.uk/journals/listAll.do
Access
- On campus - via the links on the Library web pages or directly at:
- Off-Campus Access - via the links on the Off-Campus Access to Databases page at: http://www-library.st-andrews.ac.uk/External/Journals/remoteaccess.html using a personal ATHENS username and password (register at the IT Helpdesk, University Library).
Links to the individual e-journals will be added to SAULCAT shortly.