College of William and Mary
January 21, 2014
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailypress/obituary.aspx?n=lewis-william-leadbeater&pid=169270100&
Barbara Flaschenriem
With great sadness, the members of the Department of Classics at Grand Valley State University mourn the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Barbara Flaschenriem.
Barbara passed away on August 15, 2013, at Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, following a long illness. Initially appointed in the Department of English in 1998, she became a founding member of the Department of Classics in 2000.
Professor Flaschenriem held the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to joining Grand Valley, she held faculty appointments at Seton Hall University and Yale University. Her teaching and scholarship were informed by aspects of feminist theory focusing upon representations of women in Roman literature and society. Her writing was marked by great subtlety and intellectual grace. Colleagues and students cherished her unassuming but wry demeanor and her intense passion in the classroom. Prof. Flaschenriem was at work on a monumental study of the Roman poet Propertius that was left uncompleted at her death.
A memorial gathering was held at the Alumni House on GVSU's Allendale campus on Sunday, September 8.
Barbara passed away on August 15, 2013, at Spectrum Health Butterworth Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, following a long illness. Initially appointed in the Department of English in 1998, she became a founding member of the Department of Classics in 2000.
Professor Flaschenriem held the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to joining Grand Valley, she held faculty appointments at Seton Hall University and Yale University. Her teaching and scholarship were informed by aspects of feminist theory focusing upon representations of women in Roman literature and society. Her writing was marked by great subtlety and intellectual grace. Colleagues and students cherished her unassuming but wry demeanor and her intense passion in the classroom. Prof. Flaschenriem was at work on a monumental study of the Roman poet Propertius that was left uncompleted at her death.
A memorial gathering was held at the Alumni House on GVSU's Allendale campus on Sunday, September 8.
Alexander MacGregor
It is with deep regret that the Department of Classics and Mediterranean studies announces the death of our former colleague Alexander MacGregor, retired associate professor of Classics specializing in Latin poetry. He passed away peacefully at his home in Chicago on August 8, 2013 after a brief but severe illness. He was a distinguished scholar and his love of teaching made him a gifted mentor, much admired by his students.
A Memorial service will be held at 10AM, on Saturday, September 14th at St. Ignatius Church in the Rogers Park neighborhood near Loyola. The service will be followed by a gathering of friends and family in the parish hall.
A Memorial service will be held at 10AM, on Saturday, September 14th at St. Ignatius Church in the Rogers Park neighborhood near Loyola. The service will be followed by a gathering of friends and family in the parish hall.
Philip Owen Spann
Dr. Philip Owen Spann died January 26 in Gainesville, Florida, from complications after a stroke. He was born August 13, 1941, the son of Northwestern University German teacher Meno Spann and high school English teacher Marjorie Williams Spann. He received a bachelor's degree in 1965 from Northwestern University and a master's and PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1973 and 1976. He received the prestigious Prix de Rome in 1977 and studied at the American Academy in Rome. Philip was a passionate professor of classics and languages. He taught Latin, Greek and Roman Civilization at the University of Florida, the University of Utah, the University of Arkansas and Santa Fe College. He was the author of "Quintus Sertorius and the Legacy of Sulla" and many academic articles and book reviews. He was teacher of the year, selected by the Student Council of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UF, 1989-1990. He was a Senior Fulbright Research Fellow in Spain both in 1981 and 1992. Philip loved languages and spoke German, Spanish and French. He is survived by daughter Jessica Spann Gaither and two cherished granddaughters, Jade and Jordan, of Dripping Springs, Texas. He married and divorced twice - to Johnanna DeSalvo-Spann and Jeanne Thatcher Escue. Step-children include Stephanie Weinsier, Tim Thatcher and Lisa Kresl. His family will celebrate his life at a later date at a ceremony befitting an intellectual adventurer who loved literature, travel, tennis, sailing and running with the bulls in Pamplona.
Published in Gainesville Sun from January 29 to January 30, 2012
Published in Gainesville Sun from January 29 to January 30, 2012
David Young
DAVID YOUNG, Pindarist and Olympic Historian
David C. Young, Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Florida (http://web.classics.ufl.edu/
The Department of Classics at the University of Florida will post information here http://web.classics.ufl.
Victoria Pagan, Professor and Chair, Department of Classics, University of Florida, 115C Dauer Hall, PO Box 117435, Gainesville, FL, 32611-7435; (352) 392-2075; vepagan@ufl.edu
Gary Meltzer
Eckerd College.
December 31, 2011.
http://obits.dignitymemorial.
December 31, 2011.
http://obits.dignitymemorial.
Charles L. Babcock
Charles Luther Babcock
1924-2012
Not even his heroic combat experience as a Captain of infantry in the European Theater of Operations in World War II (for which he was awarded the Bronze Star with a Valor device) could dampen Charles Babcock’s love of Italy and the sites of Roman literature and history.
Charles Luther Babcock
1924-2012
Born on 26 May 1924 in Whittier, California, to Robert Louis and Margarette Estelle Fuller Babcock, Charles interrupted his undergraduate career at the University of California at Berkeley by enlisting. After being demobbed in 1947 after serving as an aide to Gen. Jon B. Coulter, this California native returned to Berkeley where he completed his received the A.B. in 1948 and the M.A. one year later. He served as an assistant in classics at the University of Utah from 1949 to 1950, when he returned to Berkeley to receive the Ph.D. in 1953. From 1953 to 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar and Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Upon his return, he married Mary Ayer Taylor on 6 August 1955 before assuming a position as instructor in classics at Cornell, with a stint as acting instructor at Stanford in the summer of 1956. Leaving Cornell in 1957 he became assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, then associate professor in 1962. He developed his skills as an administrator first as assistant dean (1960-62), then as vice dean (1962-64) and acting dean (Spring 1964) of the College of Arts and Sciences (1960-62).
In 1966 he moved to Ohio State as professor of classics (1966-92) and chair of the department of classics (1966-68, 1980-88) before relinquishing his chairmanship to become the first dean of the College of Humanities (1968-70). Charles managed a number of executive and administrative positions with exceptional grace and goodwill, including stints as director of the APA (1968-72), chairman of the Latin Examination committee of the Advanced Placement Examination (1972-74), professor-in-charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (1974-75), and chair of its managing committee following the death of its founder Brooks Otis (1975-82), president of the Vergilian Society of America (1975-76), president of CAMWS (1977-78), and president of the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages (1986). By far the association that gave him the most pleasure involved his beloved American Academy at Rome, where he was professor-in-charge of the summer school (1966), trustee (1981-83), resident in classical studies (1986), and acting Mellon Professor-in-Charge of the School of Classical Studies (1988-89).
Throughout his long and distinguished career as teacher, scholar, and administrator, he never ceased to share his enthusiasm for Rome with students in his classroom and especially on site. His personal warmth and administrative ability successfully served not only the Intercollegiate Center and the American Academy, but the members of his profession as a whole, where he was as helpful to junior members as he was unfailingly collegial with senior members. His distinguished career was recognized in 1982 by a CAMWS Ovatio. His service to Ohio State resulted in numerous awards, including the Alfred Wright Award (1968), the first College of Humanities Exemplary Faculty Award in 1989 (now called the Babcock Award), and the Distinguished Service Award (1996). Perhaps the finest recognition of Charles Babcock’s devotion to sharing his love of Rome and Roman sites was the establishment by Ohio State of a scholarship in his name to support students studying in Italy.
Charles Babcock died on 7 December 2012 in Columbus, Ohio.
Ava Chitwood
AVA CHITWOOD was born Deborah Jean Tipton Chitwood in Charlottesville, Virginia, on December 17, 1953. Her father Edward was a widely respected surgeon and her mother Sarah was a pediatrician. Ava gradated from the University of Massachusetts in 1982 and received an M.A. in Classics from Johns Hopkins in 1983. While she pursued her doctorate, she taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, from 1989 to 1993, when she received her Ph.D. with a dissertation that explored the relationship of Diogenes Laertius’s accounts of the deaths of philosophers Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Democritus with their philosophical works. She later expanded this work into her 2004 book. She taught for one year (1993-94) at Notre Dame and then at the University of Florida (1996-97) before moving to the Department of World Languages at the University of South Florida, where she rose from assistant professor (1997-2001) to associate professor (2001-2012). Apart from her study of the philosophers, her more general interest encompassed Greek civilization and classical mythology. In addition to a complement of language courses, she taught a variety of courses designed to appeal to non-Classics students, such as courses in medical terminology and film. Students commented on the enthusiasm, learning and skill she brought to the classroom. She was honored by USF after a decade of service and was named an honorary “coach” by the athletic department for her services in educating athletes. Following her death on November 1, 2012, in Tampa from a heart attack, students held a memorial service at which they lit candles and poured a libation in honor of her favorite goddess, Athena.
DISSERTATION: “Deaths of the Greek Philosophers” (Johns Hopkins, 1993).
PUBLICATIONS: “The Death of Empedocles,” AJP 107 (1986) 175-91; “Heraclitus αἰνικτής: Heraclitus and the Riddle,” SCO 43 (1993) 49-62; Death by Philosophy: The Biographical Tradition in the Life and Death of the Archaic Philosophers Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Democritus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) REVS: Phronesis 50,4 (2005) 337-340 Jaap Mansfeld; CR n.s. 56, 2 (2006) 286-287 Simon Trépanier.
SOURCES: The Oracle (USF) 8 November 2012.
DISSERTATION: “Deaths of the Greek Philosophers” (Johns Hopkins, 1993).
PUBLICATIONS: “The Death of Empedocles,” AJP 107 (1986) 175-91; “Heraclitus αἰνικτής: Heraclitus and the Riddle,” SCO 43 (1993) 49-62; Death by Philosophy: The Biographical Tradition in the Life and Death of the Archaic Philosophers Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Democritus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) REVS: Phronesis 50,4 (2005) 337-340 Jaap Mansfeld; CR n.s. 56, 2 (2006) 286-287 Simon Trépanier.
SOURCES: The Oracle (USF) 8 November 2012.
J. Rufus Fears
Jesse Rufus FEARS was born in Atlanta on Mach 7, 1945 to Emory Binford and Hazel Elizabeth Davis Fears. He graduated summa cum laude from Emory University in Classics and history in 1966, the year he married Charlene Louise Bauer. He received an M.A. from Harvard in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1971. His dissertation, “Princeps a Diis Electus: A Study of the Monarchical Theory of Divine Election in the Roman Empire before the Official Adoption of Christianity” (published by the American Academy at Rome in 1977) made plain his notion that ideology rather than wealth, power, or birthright was a causative force in Roman history. He joined the Department of Classical Languages at Tulane as an assistant professor in 1971, but the next year moved to the history department of Indiana University, where he rose from assistant professor (1972-75) to associate professor (1975-80) to professor (1980-86). His numerous publications on Greek and Roman history in leading American and European publications helped secure him both a Guggenheim (1976) and a Humboldt fellowship. In this period he also wrote three monograph-length articles for ANRW. In 1986 he moved to Boston University as chairman of the department of Classical Studies and was soon appointed associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts (1987-89) and director of the Boston University Humanities Foundation (1988-90). While he continued to write on classical subjects, he also edited a selection of the writings of the English Catholic historian and politician Lord Acton (1834-1902), who thought that the form of government most capable of insuring individual freedom was not a strong central government, but a confederation of individual states. Acton thus sympathized with the South in the Civil War, believing with Plato that centralized government was the prelude to tyranny. Fears’s interest in liberty gradually overtook his interest in original research in ancient history. In 1990 he moved to his final academic home, the University of Oklahoma as professor of classics (1990-2004), dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (1990-92), and in 1992 was awarded the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, which he held until his death. He took leave from his deanship to become director of the Division of Research at the NEH for one year (1992-93).
Following his return from Washington he devoted himself more and more to his classroom teaching and the promulgation of his ideas on liberty in recordings of his classroom lectures and his lectures before largely conservative audiences. He believed that “The first lesson of history is that we do not learn from it,” but nevertheless conducted his classes on the assumptions that the lessons of history always come down to the choice citizens make between the efficiency and security of tyranny and the responsibility of the individual in a system based on freedom. His signature course was a two-semester sequence, “Freedom in Greece” and “Freedom in Rome,” which regularly closed at 300 students each and had long waiting lists. His 2007 student Billy Adams recalled Fears acting out battles in class: “He would carry around a broomstick and it would become a spear, pointer, or javelin.” His intention was a kind of moral instruction by which students could shape their lives according to the examples of great leaders from Pericles to his beloved Churchill. Students warmed to his view that “Today we have a tendency to believe that science and technology put us beyond the lessons of history. But we as a society still need to think historically.” Fears believed himself an agent of outreach. He recorded a course of eighteen lectures entitled “The Story of Freedom” and took an active role in the University of Oklahoma’s Life Long Learning Institute, bringing “Freedom and Morality: The Great Books Tradition” to seniors and alumni both in Norman and in Oklahoma City. He recorded 21 lectures for “The Teaching Company,” later called “The Great Courses” and led tours for alumni on the theme “In the Footsteps of…” visiting Philadelphia, Monticello, and Civil War battlefields as well as sites abroad. David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma, wrote that Fears was “one of the most gifted teachers in American higher education.” Fears won teaching awards at every institution he served. At Oklahoma he was three times named Professor of the Year and won the medal for Excellence in College and University Teaching from the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence in Teaching. In both his teaching and his later writing Rufus Fears eruditely explored conceptions of liberty throughout history.
He died in Norman on 6 October 2012.
Following his return from Washington he devoted himself more and more to his classroom teaching and the promulgation of his ideas on liberty in recordings of his classroom lectures and his lectures before largely conservative audiences. He believed that “The first lesson of history is that we do not learn from it,” but nevertheless conducted his classes on the assumptions that the lessons of history always come down to the choice citizens make between the efficiency and security of tyranny and the responsibility of the individual in a system based on freedom. His signature course was a two-semester sequence, “Freedom in Greece” and “Freedom in Rome,” which regularly closed at 300 students each and had long waiting lists. His 2007 student Billy Adams recalled Fears acting out battles in class: “He would carry around a broomstick and it would become a spear, pointer, or javelin.” His intention was a kind of moral instruction by which students could shape their lives according to the examples of great leaders from Pericles to his beloved Churchill. Students warmed to his view that “Today we have a tendency to believe that science and technology put us beyond the lessons of history. But we as a society still need to think historically.” Fears believed himself an agent of outreach. He recorded a course of eighteen lectures entitled “The Story of Freedom” and took an active role in the University of Oklahoma’s Life Long Learning Institute, bringing “Freedom and Morality: The Great Books Tradition” to seniors and alumni both in Norman and in Oklahoma City. He recorded 21 lectures for “The Teaching Company,” later called “The Great Courses” and led tours for alumni on the theme “In the Footsteps of…” visiting Philadelphia, Monticello, and Civil War battlefields as well as sites abroad. David Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma, wrote that Fears was “one of the most gifted teachers in American higher education.” Fears won teaching awards at every institution he served. At Oklahoma he was three times named Professor of the Year and won the medal for Excellence in College and University Teaching from the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence in Teaching. In both his teaching and his later writing Rufus Fears eruditely explored conceptions of liberty throughout history.
He died in Norman on 6 October 2012.
Ladislaus Joseph Bolchazy (1937-2012)
Lou Bolchazy combined the gifts of foresight, business acumen, and a deep determination to broaden the appeal and of classics to the general public and to publish modern teaching texts and materials for the classrooms of the twenty-first century.
His industry, devotion to the literature of classical antiquity and of modern Slovakia earned him awards and admiration both in his native and his adoptive countries.
Lou’s father, Eugene Bölcházy, was born in the United States but returned with his parents to Michalovec, Slovakia, at age 10, where he worked as a carpenter and farmer. His wife Maria gave birth to Ladislaus Joseph Bolchazy on June 7, 1937. Evacuated during bombing raids on their home town, young Lou and his family survived World War II, but when the Communist regime took over in 1948, Eugene emigrated back to America, where he earned enough money to bring his family over in May 1949. They settled in a Slavic enclave of Yonkers, New York, where Eugene worked as a custodian and Maria as a seamstress. Lou was educated in Catholic schools and intended to be a priest, enrolling at the Divine Word College and Seminary in Conesus, New York. He abandoned that idea, received an A.A. in Classics in 1960 and subsequently received a B.A. in philosophy from St. Joseph’s College and Seminary in Yonkers in 1963. He already had begun teaching at Sacred Heart High School in Yonkers in 1962 and he remained until 1965, when he met and married Marie Carducci, a marriage that lasted nearly 47 years. He enrolled in the graduate program at NYU and took a job as instructor at Siena College in Londonville, New York, for the academic year 1966-67. He received an M.A. from NYU in 1967 and took a position as assistant professor of classics at La Salette College and Seminary in Altamont, New York from 1971 to 1975. In 1973 he received his Ph.D. from SUNY Albany with a dissertation entitled “Livy’s Interest in the Humanizing Role of the Law of Hospitality, subsequently published as Hospitality in Early Rome: Livy’s Concept of Its Humanizing Force (Chicago: Ares, 1977). In early papers delivered at conferences, Lou showed his ability to adapt new technological resources to classicists’ research needs by compiling electronically-generated concordances of More’s Utopia and Ausonius. After a series of one-year jobs, as visiting assistant professor at Millersville State College in Pennsylvania (1975-76), and at Loyola University in Chicago (1976-77), and co-direction of NEH Summer Institutes Sophocles & Thucydides at Cornell (1976) and on ancient history at Michigan (1977), a permanent position still eluded him, and he decided to devote his considerable business skills to establishing a publishing house that would serve the profession. His successful 14-part radio series, “Myth is Truth,” on WLUC at Loyola and WRRG at Triton College in 1978 were evidence that he could answer the popular interest in classics. Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers began in 1978 and by 2012 had published over 450 titles, 98 per cent of them dealing with classical antiquity and filling significant gaps in larger press offerings by producing reprints of significant works of scholarship, class-sized texts appropriate for the new millennium, and recordings of Greek and Latin featuring the latest rules of pronunciation. He founded The Ancient World in 1978, a journal still going strong at is death. In 1988 he revived The Classical Bulletin. Bolchazy-Carducci was the only firm effectively reaching out to over 3000 homeschooling teachers with Waldo Sweet’s Artes Latinae series. His early interest in technology made this the most technologically advanced publishing house in the classics field, marketing an iPhone app for Latin quotations, vocabulary cards for the Wheelock series on iPod, summer webinars for Latin teachers. His exhibit tables at APA, CAMWS, CANE and other meetings were always a site of free buttons with Latin mottoes, interesting new publications for every need, and a welcome as warm as if everyone were members of an extended family, which in Lou’s eyes, we were.
Lou retained dual citizenship in Slovakia, which he called his “mother” and America, which he called his “wife.” Among the numerous Slovakian works he had translated for the first time into English was the memoirs of Cardinal Jan Chryzostom Korec (b. 1924), who was imprisoned by Communists. In August 31, 2007 Slovak President HE Ivan Gasparovic presented Lou with the Slovak National Award (Rad Ludovita Stura) at Bratislava Castle for his lifelong efforts on behalf of the Slovak Republic.
He died July 28, 2012, in Barrington, IL.
PUBLICATIONS: A Concordance to the Utopia of St. Thomas More and a Frequency List in collaboration with Gregory Gichan & Frederick Theobald (Hildesheim: Olms, 1978); “From Xenophobia to Altruism. Homeric and Roman Hospitality,” AncW 1 (1978) 45-64; “Hospitality in Early Rome,” Anthropos 74 (1979) 619-620; Concordantia in Ausonium with indices to proper nouns and Greek forms, ed. with J.A.M. Sweeney in collab. With M.G. Antonetti (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1982) [REVS: Gnomon LV 1983 749-750 Prete ; Latomus XLIV 1985 643-647 Évrard]; “Scholarship, Research, and the Search for Alexander. A Register of Titles of Unpublished Scholarly Papers Read at Four Meetings: June 7, 1981-February 27, 1982. Bibliographical Memos and Notes,” comp. with A. N. Oikonomides, AncW 4 (1981) 67-89; 5 (1982) 3-8; “A Report on the 8th International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy. Athens 3-9 October 1982 with a Register of the Communications of Its Meetings,” comp. with A.N. Oikonomides AncW 7 (1983) 53-61; “Studies on Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World in the USSR" AncW 13 (1986) 67-72; “Tables and Indices for the Catalogue and Supplements of The Search for Alexander Exhibition" AncW 14 (1987) 115-118; “Detecting the Real Sherlock Homes: A Stylometric Comparison of Doyle and Meyer" CB 65 (1989) 105-110; Anton Špiesz & Dusan Caplovic, Illustrated Slovak History: A Struggle for Sovereignty in Central Europe (ed.) (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2006).
SOURCES: Chicago Tribune, 29 July, 2012; WhAm (2006) 454.
Ward Briggs
His industry, devotion to the literature of classical antiquity and of modern Slovakia earned him awards and admiration both in his native and his adoptive countries.
Lou’s father, Eugene Bölcházy, was born in the United States but returned with his parents to Michalovec, Slovakia, at age 10, where he worked as a carpenter and farmer. His wife Maria gave birth to Ladislaus Joseph Bolchazy on June 7, 1937. Evacuated during bombing raids on their home town, young Lou and his family survived World War II, but when the Communist regime took over in 1948, Eugene emigrated back to America, where he earned enough money to bring his family over in May 1949. They settled in a Slavic enclave of Yonkers, New York, where Eugene worked as a custodian and Maria as a seamstress. Lou was educated in Catholic schools and intended to be a priest, enrolling at the Divine Word College and Seminary in Conesus, New York. He abandoned that idea, received an A.A. in Classics in 1960 and subsequently received a B.A. in philosophy from St. Joseph’s College and Seminary in Yonkers in 1963. He already had begun teaching at Sacred Heart High School in Yonkers in 1962 and he remained until 1965, when he met and married Marie Carducci, a marriage that lasted nearly 47 years. He enrolled in the graduate program at NYU and took a job as instructor at Siena College in Londonville, New York, for the academic year 1966-67. He received an M.A. from NYU in 1967 and took a position as assistant professor of classics at La Salette College and Seminary in Altamont, New York from 1971 to 1975. In 1973 he received his Ph.D. from SUNY Albany with a dissertation entitled “Livy’s Interest in the Humanizing Role of the Law of Hospitality, subsequently published as Hospitality in Early Rome: Livy’s Concept of Its Humanizing Force (Chicago: Ares, 1977). In early papers delivered at conferences, Lou showed his ability to adapt new technological resources to classicists’ research needs by compiling electronically-generated concordances of More’s Utopia and Ausonius. After a series of one-year jobs, as visiting assistant professor at Millersville State College in Pennsylvania (1975-76), and at Loyola University in Chicago (1976-77), and co-direction of NEH Summer Institutes Sophocles & Thucydides at Cornell (1976) and on ancient history at Michigan (1977), a permanent position still eluded him, and he decided to devote his considerable business skills to establishing a publishing house that would serve the profession. His successful 14-part radio series, “Myth is Truth,” on WLUC at Loyola and WRRG at Triton College in 1978 were evidence that he could answer the popular interest in classics. Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers began in 1978 and by 2012 had published over 450 titles, 98 per cent of them dealing with classical antiquity and filling significant gaps in larger press offerings by producing reprints of significant works of scholarship, class-sized texts appropriate for the new millennium, and recordings of Greek and Latin featuring the latest rules of pronunciation. He founded The Ancient World in 1978, a journal still going strong at is death. In 1988 he revived The Classical Bulletin. Bolchazy-Carducci was the only firm effectively reaching out to over 3000 homeschooling teachers with Waldo Sweet’s Artes Latinae series. His early interest in technology made this the most technologically advanced publishing house in the classics field, marketing an iPhone app for Latin quotations, vocabulary cards for the Wheelock series on iPod, summer webinars for Latin teachers. His exhibit tables at APA, CAMWS, CANE and other meetings were always a site of free buttons with Latin mottoes, interesting new publications for every need, and a welcome as warm as if everyone were members of an extended family, which in Lou’s eyes, we were.
Lou retained dual citizenship in Slovakia, which he called his “mother” and America, which he called his “wife.” Among the numerous Slovakian works he had translated for the first time into English was the memoirs of Cardinal Jan Chryzostom Korec (b. 1924), who was imprisoned by Communists. In August 31, 2007 Slovak President HE Ivan Gasparovic presented Lou with the Slovak National Award (Rad Ludovita Stura) at Bratislava Castle for his lifelong efforts on behalf of the Slovak Republic.
He died July 28, 2012, in Barrington, IL.
PUBLICATIONS: A Concordance to the Utopia of St. Thomas More and a Frequency List in collaboration with Gregory Gichan & Frederick Theobald (Hildesheim: Olms, 1978); “From Xenophobia to Altruism. Homeric and Roman Hospitality,” AncW 1 (1978) 45-64; “Hospitality in Early Rome,” Anthropos 74 (1979) 619-620; Concordantia in Ausonium with indices to proper nouns and Greek forms, ed. with J.A.M. Sweeney in collab. With M.G. Antonetti (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann, 1982) [REVS: Gnomon LV 1983 749-750 Prete ; Latomus XLIV 1985 643-647 Évrard]; “Scholarship, Research, and the Search for Alexander. A Register of Titles of Unpublished Scholarly Papers Read at Four Meetings: June 7, 1981-February 27, 1982. Bibliographical Memos and Notes,” comp. with A. N. Oikonomides, AncW 4 (1981) 67-89; 5 (1982) 3-8; “A Report on the 8th International Congress of Greek and Latin Epigraphy. Athens 3-9 October 1982 with a Register of the Communications of Its Meetings,” comp. with A.N. Oikonomides AncW 7 (1983) 53-61; “Studies on Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World in the USSR" AncW 13 (1986) 67-72; “Tables and Indices for the Catalogue and Supplements of The Search for Alexander Exhibition" AncW 14 (1987) 115-118; “Detecting the Real Sherlock Homes: A Stylometric Comparison of Doyle and Meyer" CB 65 (1989) 105-110; Anton Špiesz & Dusan Caplovic, Illustrated Slovak History: A Struggle for Sovereignty in Central Europe (ed.) (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci, 2006).
SOURCES: Chicago Tribune, 29 July, 2012; WhAm (2006) 454.
Ward Briggs
A. Trevor Hodge
A. Trevor Hodge was born in
Belfast, Northern Ireland on June 30, 1930, the son of Alfred, a mechanic who
had been an ambulance driver in World War I, and Agnes Hodge. He graduated from
the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in 1947 and received a B.A. from
Cambridge in 1951, a Diploma in Classical Archaeology (1952), after which he
spent a year at the British School of Archaeology in Athens, and two years at
the British School at Rome. He received an M.A. in 1955 and Ph.D. from
Cambridge in 1956, after which, this devotee of railroads worked for three
months as the most educated operator of a signal box in Britain. He then
decamped for North America where he held instructorships in classics at
Stanford (1957-8), asst prof. Cornell (1958-9), University of Pennsylvania
(1959-60). Carleton College in Ottawa was establishing a permanent campus and
growing its one-person classics department in 1960. He married Colette Fabre, a
French nurse visiting Ottawa, in 1965. He rose to associate professor (1963-6) then
professor (1966-97), and on his retirement Distinguished Research Professor
(1997-2012) of classics at Carleton College, Ottawa. Chaired department 1967-72) His most popular
course at Carleton was Ancient Science and Technology. His early research
focused on the most perishable of building materials, wood, particularly as
used in Greek buildings. He then became an authority on Roman aqueducts and the
Greek colonization of Southern France. His Cambridge thesis dealt with the
vanished wood of Greek roofs, which resulted in his 1954 work on the carpentry
of the roof of the Athenian treasury at Delphi and he ultimately led to The Woodwork of Greek Roofs (Cambridge,
1960). In bow tie and with a thick Ulster accent, he was an animated and
stimulating teacher. Engineers obliged to take a humanities course invariably
took his and were challenged to construct ancient machines. His students over
the years filled the storage rooms at Carleton with catapults, triremes, and
two-headed axes, their metal extracted from ore as the ancients did. His most
famous classroom and public lecture debunked by demonstration Herodotus’s story
(6.115) of the shield signal at Marathon. He spent a portion of his retirement
lecturing on cruise ships in the Caribbean and Mediterranean and described his "current ambition to combine his talents as railwayman, detective, and archaeologist by straightening out Agatha Christie on what really did happen in the Murder on the Orient Express." He also
wrote a murder mystery set on the London-Mancester railway train, The Late Ulsterman (2008), which he
published on his website. He regularly appeared on the CBC Court of Ideas radio
series, with one famous episode putting Nero on trial for genocide and bad
violin playing. and he contributed over
120 letters and contributions to the Ottawa
Citizen. He died in Ottawa on February 16, 2012 at the age of 81.
Publications:
“A Roof at Delphi,” ABSA 49(1954) 202-214; The
Woodwork of Greek Roofs (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1960); “The Auxerre
Goddess,” EMC 31 (1987) 187-97; “Aqueducts,” in Roman Public Buildings, ed. I.M. Barton (Exeter: U. Exeter, 1989) 127-149;
Future Currents in Aqueduct Studies (ed.)
(Leeds: Cairns, 1991); Roman Aqueducts
and Water Supply (London: Duckworth, 1992); “In Vitruvium Pompeianum: Urban
Water Distribution Reappraised,” AJA
100,2 (1996) 261-76; Ancient Greek France
(London: Duckworth, 1998); Frontinus' Legacy:
Essays on Frontinus' De aquis urbis Romae, ed. with Deane R. Blackman with
contributions from from Klaus Grewe et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2001); “Reflections on the Shield at Marathon,” ABSA 96(2001) 237-59.
Sources: Ottawa Citizen, 25
February 2012; Toronto Globe and Mail 9 April 2012.
John Miles Foley
John Miles FOLEY was a prolific scholar and perhaps the
leading expert of his generation on the oral transmission of ancient culture. William
H. Byler Professor of Humanities (1985-2012) and Curators’ Chair of Classical
Studies and English (1997-2012) at the University of Missouri, Columbia. He
received his A.B. from Colgate University where he majored in physics,
mathematics, and chemistry. He switched to English literature for his M.A.
(1971) and to English and Comparative Literature for his Ph.D. (1974), both
from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was director of the Center for Studies in
Oral Tradition (1985-2012) and the Center for eResearch (206-12), he chaired
the Classics Department (1996-2000). His
first teaching position was as assistant professor of English at Emory
(1974-9). At the University of Missouri he was associate professor (1979-83)
and professor (1983-2012) of English, professor of Classical Studies
(1991-2012), adjunct professor of Anthropology (1992-2012), and professor of
Germanic and Slavic languages (2003-12).
He did visiting stints at the University of Belgrade (1980) and Harvard
(1976-7, 1980-1) He was a fellow of the Nordic Institute for Advanced Studies,
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (1994),
and the American Folklore Society, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation
(1980-1), a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (1995-6)
a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the International Folklore Fellows
(Helsinki) learned societies, and a special advisor to the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences (2009). He directed NEH Summer Seminars for College Teachers
(1987, 1989, 1991, 1992, and 1994) and for School Teachers (1996).
Homer’s Original Art won Choice
magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award (2000) and, for The Wedding of
Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey as Performed by Halil Bajgorić, won the Biennial
Award (2004-2005) for a Distinguished Scholarly Edition from the Modern
Language Association.
He wrote over 160 articles and numerous reviews.
Books:
Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research: An Introduction and
Annotated Bibliography (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1985; repr. 1986, 1989); The Theory of Oral
Composition: History and Methodology (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988; repr. 1992; Chinese version trans. Chao Gejin (Beijing: Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, 2000); Traditional Oral Epic: The Odyssey,
Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian Return Song (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990; repr. 1993); Immanent Art: From Structure to Meaning
in Oral Traditional Epic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); The
Singer of Tales in Performance (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1995); Homer’s Traditional Art (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); How to Read an Oral Poem
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002)
Books Edited:
Oral Traditional Literature: A Festschrift for Albert Bates
Lord (Columbus, OH:
Slavica Publishers, 1981; repr. 1983); Oral Tradition, a special issue
of Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 15, i (1981); Oral Tradition in
Literature: Interpretation in Context (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1986); Comparative Research on Oral Traditions: A Memorial for Milman
Parry (Columbus, OH: Slavica Publishers, 1987); East European Folklore,
a special issue of Southeastern Europe, 10 (1983), 1987; Oral-Formulaic
Theory: A Casebook (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1990); De
Gustibus: Essays for Alain Renoir (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992); Teaching
Oral Traditions (New York: Modern Language Association, 1998); The Epic:
Oral and Written, with Lauri Honko and Jawaharlal Handoo (Mysore, India:
Central Institute of Indian Languages, 1998); Epea and Grammata: Oral and Written Communication in Ancient Greece,
ed. with Ian Worthington (Leiden: Brill, 2002); The Wedding of Mustajbey’s
Son Bećirbey as Performed by Halil Bajgorić (ed. & trans.) Folklore Fellows Communications, vol. 283 (Helsinki:
Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004); Performing
the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark : Essays Dedicated to Werner Kelber, ed. with Richard A. Horsley and Jonathan A.
Draper (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006); A Companion to Ancient Epic (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2005; repr. 2008).
ARTICLES
(SAMPLE): “The Problem of Aesthetics in Oral and Oral-Derived Texts,” Homer 1987: Papers of the Third Greenbank Colloquium,
April 1987, ed. John Pinsent & H. V. Hurt
(Liverpool : Liverpool
Classical Monthly, 1992) 51-63; “Oral Tradition and Homeric Art : The Hymn to
Demeter, New Light on a Dark Age: Exploring
the Culture of Geometric Greece, ed. Susan Langdon (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. 1997) 144-53; “Traditional
Signs and Homeric Art,” Written Voices, Spoken
Signs: Tradition, Performance, and the Epic Text, ed. Egbert J. Bakker and
Ahuvia Kahane
(Cambridge (Mass.); London : Harvard University Press, 1997)
56-82; “Epic cycles and Epic Traditions,” Euphrosyne:
Studies in Ancient Epic and Its Legacy in Honor of Dimitris N. Maronitis, ed.
John N. Kazazis and Antonios Rengakos
(Stuttgart : Steiner, 1999
) 99-108; “The
Textualization of South Slavic Epic and Its Implications for Oral-Derived Epic,”
Textualization of Oral Epics, ed. Lauri Honko
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,
2000) 71-87; “Reading between the Signs,” Inclinate aurem: Oral Perspectives on Early European Verbal Culture: A Symposium, ed.
Jan Helldén, Minna Skafte Jensen and Thomas Pettitt (Odense: Odense University
Press, 2001) 83-110; “L'épopée du retour et le/la vrai(e) héros/héroïne de
l'«Odyssée»,” La mythologie et
l'« Odyssée » : hommage à Gabriel Germain : actes du colloque
international de Grenoble, 20-22 mai 1999 / textes réunis par André
Hurst et Françoise Létoublon
(Geneva: Droz, 2002
) 249-57; “What South Slavic
Oral Epic Can – and Cannot - Tell Us about Homer,” « Epea
pteroenta » : Beiträge zur
Homerforschung : Festschrift für Wolfgang Kullmann zum 75. Geburtstag ,
ed. Michael Reichel und Antonios Rengakos (Stuttgart : Steiner, 2002
) 53-62; A Companion to Ancient Epic (ed.) (Oxford
: Blackwell, 2005); “Fieldwork on Homer,”
New Directions in Oral Theory, ed. Mark
C. Amodio (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005)
15-41.
He was the editor of Oral Tradition (1986-2012); A.B.
Lord Studies in Oral Tradition, (1987-98); Voices in Performance and Text,
1994-99; Poetics of Orality and Literacy, (2004-12).
May 3, 2012
May 3, 2012
Sally A. MacEwen
Sally Anne MacEwen
was born on January 5, 1948, in Abington, PA to Quakers
Jack & Isabelle McVaugh. She devoted her life to Society of Friends ideals
of pacifism, community service, racial justice, gender equality, and education.
She was educated in Quaker secondary schools in Riverton, NJ, where she became
known as a powerful lacrosse player, a reputation that followed her (and which
she enhanced) at Mount Holyoke, from which she graduated in 1970. She enrolled
in graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania where her skills at
lacrosse were somehow morphed into fearsome reputation as a fireballing softball
pitcher. A stint as visiting lecturer in Greek and Latin at the University of
Utah (1979-82) yielded both her first college-level teaching experience and the
man who would become her life partner, Aaron Ruscetta. She completed her
dissertation, “Theme and
Structure in Three Plays of Euripides” in 1981 and the next year removed to
Agnes Scott, where she would spend the rest of her academic career, as
assistant professor in the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures
(1982-88), associate professor (1988-2010) and professor (2010-12), where she
chaired the department (1988-91, 1993-94, 1997-2003, 2004-11) and served on the
Women’s Studies faculty (1999-2012). She loyally attended CAMWS meetings and
served as chair of the Resolutions Committee (1989-92) and the Program
Committee (1991-94). She edited Cloelia from 2004 to 2010. Her chief academic interest was in the
cultural values of ancient Greece, particularly notions of heroism as reflected
in Athenian tragedy. Her coursework went
hand-in-hand with her research and reflected her own commitment to integrity
and social justice. Students ranked her among the best teachers at Agnes Scott
consistently throughout her career and colleagues admired her leadership of the
Classics Department. Her commitment to education and Quakerism led her to help
found the Friends School in Atlanta in 1990 in time for her daughter Elaine
Isabell to receive its benefits. Her
commitment to social justice was recognized by the Agnes Scott Human Relations
Award, and the Liberty Bell Award of the Decatur-DeKalb Bar Association. Her noble,
courageous, and generous soul departed after a long bout with cancer on March
15, 2012 in Atlanta, four days
after marrying her beloved Aaron in a Friends ceremony conducted by their
25-year-old daughter.
PUBLICATIONS:
“Homer as the Door to Critical Theory,” in Approaches
to Teaching Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey,
Modern Language Association Publications (Spring 1987) 101-7; Iphigenia at Aulis, ed. with T. Tarkow
(Bryn Mawr, 1988); “Oikos, Polis and the Question of
Clytemnestra,” Views of Clytemnestra, Ancient
and Modern (ed.) (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990) 16-34 [REVS: CR
XLI 1991 495-496 Flintoff | CW LXXXV 1991-1992 126 Gutzwiller; Phoenix XLVI
1992 90-91 Nielsen; RPL 16 1993 269-272 R. Cecire]; “Greek Tragedy and the
American Western,” CB 73,2 (Spring
1997) 101-10; “Using Diversity to Teach Classics,” CW 96,4 (Summer 2003) 416-20; Superheroes
and Greek Tragedy: Comparing Cultural Icons (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen
Press, 2006).
SOURCES: DAS 10th ed. 3:169.
Ward Briggs
Ross S. Kilpatrick
Ross Stuart KILPATRICK was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on 3 October 1934, the youngest of three children of John Stuart, a streetcar driver who never owned an automobile, and Ellen May Kilpatrick. His mother taught herself to play the piano and her son Ross did the same, along with the ukulele, French horn, and recorder. After completing his secondary education at Malvern Collegiate Institute in Toronto. He received his B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1957. While Ross was directing a production of Finian’s Rainbow, an undergraduate named Suzanne Mitchell auditioned for a part. She was not cast, but in 1960, she and Ross were wed, a marriage that would last for 51 years. Ross largely paid for his college education by serving as in the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve (1955-61) as a sub-Lieutenant. His first academic job was teaching Latin, English, Greek, and Instrumental Music at East York Collegiate Institute in Toronto. He returned to his alma mater, where he received an M.A. in 1964. He received another M.A. from Yale in 1965, and the Ph.D. in 1967, writing his dissertation, “Musis amicus unice secures: A Study of Consolation in the Odes of Horace.” Horace occupied a He taught at Yale as instructor (1967-8) and assistant professor (1968-70) for three years and returned to Canada in 1970 to teach at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, where he remained until his retirement in 2000. He chaired the Classics department for ten years and for many years was a faithful secretary to the Classical Association of Canada, a member of the Canadian Philhellenic Society, the Società Dante Alighieri and was past president of the Humanities Association of Canada. His chief love was Latin poets and his favorite Latin poet was Horace, but he also had an expert’s knowledge of the visual arts and was adept at finding hidden symbols both in poetry and visual arts. In his 60s, Ross wrote about the London-based Japanese artist Yoshio Markino in Italia: The Travels of a Samurai Artist (Queen’s University, 1999) and in 2010 found that in the “Mona Lisa,” Leonardo was alluding to Horace, Ode 1.22 and two sonnets by Petrarch. After 42 years he retired from Queens in 2000, teaching for no salary each year afterwards until a week before his death on February 24, 2012
Emmett L. Bennett, Jr.
Emmett Leslie BENNETT, Jr., played a major role in the decipherment of the ancient Minoan language known as Linear B. Born in Minneapolis on 18 July 1918, he received a B.A. from the University of Cincinnati in 1939 and an M.A. in 1940. In 1941 he married Marja Dorothy Adam. Their union produced three sons and two daughters.
Bennet’s mentor, the archaeologist Carl Blegen (1887-1971), also a Minneapolis native, having excavated the mound of Hisarlik, the presumed site of ancient Troy (1932-8), continued his exploration of Mycenaean culture at the excavation at Nestor’s Palace (Ano Englianos) at Pylos (in the western Peloponnese) in 1939 under the auspices of the University of Cincinnati and the Greek Archaeological Service. Blegen retrieved numerous clay tablets that contained mainly municipal records inscribed in a language partly ideograms (a single sign capable of conveying complex notions), which would be useful in accounting, and partly phonetic characters found in regular combinations. The language had first been found on clay tablets discovered in 1900 at the site of the palace of Knossos (The conflagration that destroyed both palaces also fired and thus preserved the otherwise friable clay tablets.) by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (1851-1941). Evans did not believe the language was a form of Greek and posited a pre-Mycenaean civilization which he called Minoan and he named the language of the tablets Linear B, as he had named the earlier language of Cretan tablets Linear A. Linear A is the second known written language in the Aegean and Helladic areas, Linear B the third (the first is unknown) and dates from the second millennium BCE. Blegen’s excavation at Pylos lasted only a year before it was interrupted by the onset of World War II (it was not taken up again until 1952), but he was able to entrust the clay tablets to Bennett, who used them as the basis of his M.A. thesis in 1940 before joining the Army as a cryptanalyst. Cryptology during the war, particularly on coded Japanese transmissions, by Bennett, who worked on Japanese code from 1942 to the war’s end, the Cambridge linguist John Chadwick (1920-98), and Bennett’s associate Alice Kober (1906-50), who had been an assistant to Evans’s associate, the archaeologist Sir John Myres (1869-1954) and a member of the Brooklyn College Classics Department, indirectly led to the decipherment of Linear B because these scholars who taught themselves Japanese while also working on Linear B were training themselves to notice the subtle differences between ideograms. Kober, for instance noticed that there seemed to be variant endings on many words and posited that Linear B was perhaps an inflected language like Latin or Greek. Following the war, Bennett returned to Cincinnati and in 1947 produced a dissertation, “The Minoan Linear Script from Pylos,” a descriptive catalogue of about 80 characters showing the principal variants in the formation of each character but with no attempt at decipherment. Kober’s notions of declension and Bennett’s catalogue of signs greatly served the man who, aided by Chadwick, ultimately deciphered Linear B in 1952, the young English architect and amateur classicist, Michael Ventris (1922-56). Ventris determined, against Evans’s notion, that the language was in fact a pre-Homeric form of Greek.
After completing his dissertation, Bennett was an instructor in classics at Yale (1947-51), and then assistant professor (1951-8). In 1955 he published The Pylos Tablets: Texts of the Inscriptions Found 1939-1954 (Princeton: Princeton University Press) with an introduction by Blegen. After spending 1958-9 at the University of Texas, he was visiting lecturer at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1959-60), lecturer (1960-1), and acting director (1968-9). He joined the Wisconsin Classics department in 1960 was promoted to associate professor the next year and professor the year after that. He was a Fulbright resident scholar in Athens (1953-4) and Cambridge (1965), and a Guggenheim fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1955-6). He began editing Nestor in 1957. He retired in 1988 and died in Madison on 15 December 2011 at the age of 93.Additional Obituary: http://camws.org/News/files/obits/Bennett obit.doc
John D. MacIsaac (2011)
John Douglas MacISAAC conceived a love of the ancient world while a boy. He was born 8 November 1944, the son of an Air Force officer who was stationed in Athens when John was of high-school age. John received his secondary education at the American Academy (ACS) in Athens and he graduated from Fordham with a major in classics. When he graduated, the Vietnam Conflict was growing and John joined the Air Force Reserve, flying over 100 missions as a navigator/bombardier. He retired from the Reserve in 1996 as a lieutenant colonel. After active duty, he married Liane Houghtalin and began graduate study in archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned the MA. He then moved to the Johns Hopkins, where he received a Fulbright Scholarship to work on his dissertation, “The Location of the Republican Mint of Rome and the Topography of the Arx of the Capitoline” (1987). He received the Ph.D. and taught at a number of institutions in Italy and the United States and at the University of Mary Washington from 1993 to 2007. In 2005 he published Excavations at Nemea. 3, The Coins co-edited with Robert C. Knapp (Berkeley: University of California Press). He died 19 November 2011 in Fredericksburg, VA, after a long illness.
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