Welcome from the Chair

We are deep into another fall semester at UT classics, and it as full of energy and enthusiasm as ever. Students are learning Latin and Greek, or reading Virgil and Plato for the first time, or developing expertise in advanced archaeological techniques. An exciting colloquium series has begun. It is an enormous pleasure to share news of our department, with its large, internationally recognized faculty and vibrant community of accomplished graduate students. We offer undergraduate and graduate programs covering a wide range of areas, from ancient history to archaeology to Greek and Latin language and literature. We have a distinctive joint graduate program in classics and ancient philosophy. We have labs in archaeology, digital humanities, and ancient music and performance. Our faculty lead archaeological excavations in Sicily and Romania; study the role of information in Roman imperial administration; and explore ancient literature and the medical humanities among many other things, and we are all committed to fostering a culture of inquiry that is innovative and supportive.

We have an active chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, and an undergraduate research journal, Hapax Legomena. Majors have gone on to grad school at the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina, Harvard, Princeton, Duke, and NYU. No surprise: we have an extraordinary team of advisors and teachers.

As a faculty, we are highly active in public engagement. Drs. Deborah Beck, Ayelet Haimson-Lushkov, and Tom Palaima are frequent contributors to public discourse, with a very large number of opinion pieces on a wide range of subjects appearing in print and on the web. Dr. Beck has also just released a Greek literature podcast, "Musings on Greek Literature," which is available through Apple and Spotify and anywhere else finer podcasts can be found. Drs. Pramit Chaudhuri and Ayelet Haimson-Lushkov are lead researchers on a seed grant to develop a practical template for diversifying the classics based on a holistic view of the field, from the undergraduate classroom to the public sphere, and have had enormous success with a public-facing curatorial project about the history of black classicists in Texas.

In the past seven months or so I have heard from alumni around the world and it is wonderful to hear how people are doing; please continue to send news. In time, I hope to be able to use this platform to share some of that news with the rest of our community.

Paul Woodruff, 1943-2023

We lost Paul Woodruff in September. To my regret, I never met him face to face. I joined the classics department in 2021, and though he reached out to me shortly after I became chair, we never found a time to sit down together. But having taught tragedy and Greek literature for more than 20 years, I have long known and been grateful for his beautiful and accessible translations. As a philosopher, he showed the same generosity and openness as in his translations, as well as a lifelong commitment to letting the wisdom of antiquity help us think through major themes that are as urgent today as they ever were --- leadership, reverence, theatricality on and off stage, democracy. Nor was he just a writer: his thought has had lasting practical impact as well. Because I work at UT, I live, in an important sense, in a house he helped to build. As a director of the Plan II honors program and the first dean of Undergraduate Studies, he left a mark on the institution and the students it serves that will last for many years. Finally, his friends and colleagues loved him. I have heard stories of his hospitality, his generosity, his humor, his commitment to thinking deeply. We call what we do “the humanities,” and in the end that places a burden on us to evince in our actions and character the best that our species is capable of: to be, in a word, humane. Paul Woodruff was exemplary of that ideal in every way.

Blast from the Casts

The William J. Battle collection of plaster casts of Ancient Sculpture began to be assembled in 1894 and came to include plaster casts of the Venus de Milo, the Apollo Belvedere, and parts of the Parthenon frieze. Long on public view in various spaces around UT, they eventually were moved to the Blanton Museum and are now mostly in storage. Under the leadership of Dr. Adam Rabinowitz, a collaborative team of graduate and undergraduate researchers has reunited the Battle Casts as a cohesive collection in digital form here. This makes in-depth, up-close, personal interaction with the casts widely accessible to students and the public, thus continuing the tradition of Texas institutions that provide innovative opportunities for deeper study, dissemination, and critique in the Humanities.

Lunchtime Talks

Last year, we began to host brief, informal lectures during which faculty members present current research projects to an audience consisting of undergraduates, faculty members, and graduate students. Lunch is served, and we have an opportunity for the whole community of classicists to share ideas, get early news about exciting research results, and learn from each other in the comfortable environment of the classics lounge; it has been especially exciting to see so many undergraduate classics majors attending and encountering cutting-edge research from leaders in the field. A single lunchtime talk costs the department a small amount of money, but it is a wonderful way for us all to come together. I am eager for us to find ways to keep it going into future years.

New Faculty in the Department of Classics

We are very pleased to welcome two new tenure-track faculty members to the department this fall.

Dr. Deirdre Klokow received a BA in Classics from Columbia University in New York and her PhD in Classics from the University of Southern California in 2023. A historian of the Hellenistic period (c. 323-30BC), Deirdre's research focuses on the Seleucid empire, a vast multi-cultural power stretching from modern Turkey south down the Levantine coast and east into Afghanistan. Integrating landscape archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy, and digital mapping with the cultures of the Near East and Classical worlds, her research is centered on the intersection between the physical environment and the development and growth of social and economic structures. Additionally, Deirdre works on the social positions and economic agency of women in the Hellenistic period. Currently, she is working on a study of early Seleucid coinage and an article on the life and economic contributions of the Seleucid queen Laodice III.

Dr. Catherine Pratt received her BA in Classical Archaeology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MA and PhD in Archaeology at the University of California-Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the development of socioeconomic complexity in the pre-Classical Mediterranean, with special attention to issues of value construction, commodification, and cultural interaction. She is co-director (with Dr. Sarah Murray-University of Toronto) of the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS) around the Bay of Porto Rafti in Greece (https://bearsarchaeologicalproject.org). She has also participated in excavations at the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor at Pylos, Greece, and the Minoan town of Palaikastro on Crete. She has published articles on the Minoan political economy, Early Iron Age cultural interaction, and archaic Greek amphorae. Her recent publications include an article in the American Journal of Archaeology titled, “The Rise and Fall of the Transport Stirrup Jar in the Bronze Age Aegean” as well as an article titled “The SOS amphora: an update” in the Annual of the British School at Athens. In addition, she has as a monograph with Cambridge University Press titled, Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece: from the Bronze Age to the Archaic Era (2021). Dr. Pratt is currently working on another monograph-length project titled, Gift of Athena: Olive Oil and the Making of Athens. This project incorporates archaeological, literary, and epigraphic evidence, including an interdisciplinary approach to the Panathenaic amphora, to understand better the changing roles of olive oil within the socio-economic identity of ancient Athens.

Gratitude

So many of our activities depend on the generosity of donors who believe in the importance of studying classical archaeology, classical history, and, of course, Latin and Greek. Thanks to them, we are able to provide scholarships to undergraduate students, fellowships to graduate students, and research assistance to faculty members. I am incredibly grateful for the acts of generosity that allow us to continue to serve so many students and conduct such amazing research. You can find out more about our funds here. And gifts are always welcome here. We simply cannot do it without you.

Come and visit us any time. It would be great to see you in Waggener Hall.

Sean Gurd