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Outside of their scholarly endeavors, several members of the Cornell Classics Department are also accomplished artists. Here we share a sample of recent creative projects undertaken by graduate students in the department, many of which reflect their studies of the ancient world: Charlotte Hunt, a third-year PhD student in Philology &...
Rebecca Gerdes is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Classics. Her project is titled, "Developing a more robust approach to organic residue analysis for the study of ancient Mediterranean foodways.”Food is foundational to everything from daily life and the economy to social connections and religious practices. Archaeological finds of ancient...
Astrid Van Oyen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Cornell, has recently been appointed to Associate Editor of the Journal of Roman Archaeology (JRA). She will join an all-new editorial team along with Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Trimble (Stanford University), Associate Editor Benjamin Russell (University of Edinburgh), and Book...
Two doctoral students will be graduating in Fall 2020 and receiving their PhD in Classics--Peter Osorio with a concentration in Ancient Philosophy and Jonathan Warner with a concentration in Ancient History. ---Peter joined the Classics program in 2014, after completing his BA in Classical Studies and Economics at Dartmouth College and the post...
Dan Gallagher, Ralph and Jeanne Kanders Senior Lecturer in Latin at Cornell, will be giving a short talk on NPR’s WAMC Northeast Public Radio on Wednesday, December 9 for the Academic Minute segment. It will air here at 7:30 AM and 3:56 PM EST. He will speak about his Living Latin classrooms and the benefits of spoken Latin. Gallagher offers a...
Caitie Barrett, Associate Professor in the Classics Department, is teaching CLASS 2646 “Magic and Witchcraft in the Graeco-Roman World” this semester, which has turned out to be in very high demand. The course covers the whole span of time between the Greek Archaic period and the end of the Roman empire, and the final weeks of the semester will...
On October 24th, 2020 at 2:30 pm, Professor of Classics Michael Fontaine will give a lecture on the rediscovered art of drinking during a virtual symposium hosted by Classical Wisdom. The lecture, entitled “How to Drink: A Classical Guide to Imbibing,” is based on Fontaine’s recent publication How to Drink, which is an English translation of...
The Cornell Classics Department is excited to welcome our newest Post-Doctoral Associate , Mathura Umachandran. Mathura completed her PhD at Princeton University in 2018, and previously held a post-doctoral position at the University of Oxford from 2018-2019 and a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute of Classical Studies in London from 2019-2020...
How much grain is enough to make it to the next harvest? How much for a lord to appease his subjects? How much is enough to survive, to grow, to flourish? Anthropologists and archaeologists have approached these questions under the banner of surplus. ‘Surplus’ denotes that extra bit that allows some people to be released from the relentless need...
Statues are ideological powerhouses that compress whole systems of authority into bodies of bronze or marbleWith the wave of statue-felling currently sweeping across the United States and United Kingdom, it is clearer than ever that we are living at a time of iconoclasm. From the Protestant Reformation to the American War of Independence, image-...
Ten students graduated this May with degrees from the Department of Classics - one with her PhD and nine with their Bachelor’s. They share their research, reflections on their time at Cornell, and plans for the future. Congratulations to the Class of 2020!Jennifer Carrington defended her dissertation in Fall 2019 and is receiving her PhD in...
Amidst the changes brought about by COVID-19, Cornell graduate students have found ways to keep presenting their research. Last month, second-year Classics PhD students Charlotte Hunt and Emmy Shanahan presented at the UVA Classics Graduate Student Colloquium, “WARNING: Storm Approaching: Weather, the Environment, and Natural Disasters in the...
From compiling digital databases to analyzing archaeological artifacts and digging at Pompeii, undergraduate students have opportunities to participate in a wide variety of Classics faculty projects at Cornell. Below is a sample of the work that undergraduate students are currently doing, as well as projects which are looking for more students to...
Two Cornell Classics PhD students, Charlotte Hunt (Philology & Literature) and Isaac Hoffman (Philology & Literature), recently presented at a new conference dedicated to issues of equality and inclusivity in Classics. The conference, Our Voices: A Conference for Inclusive Classics Pedagogy, was hosted by Columbia University on February 15...
The 2020 joint annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies and the Archaeological Institute of America took place from January 2-5 in Washington, D.C. Several members of the Cornell Department of Classics participated in the event, which is one of the largest annual gatherings of classicists in North America. Associate Professor Courtney...
Cornell University recently hosted colleagues from Columbia University for a meeting of the Margarete Bieber Reading Group. The reading group was formed in Spring 2019 with students and professors from both Cornell and Columbia.Margarete Bieber (1879-1978) was a German Jewish classical archaeologist. When she assumed her position at the...
The American Academy of Arts & Sciences defines quality as a national priority for the future of undergraduate education and presents Cornell's Active Learning Initiative as a model. Here is a link to a video that features Classics instructors Verity Platt and Stephen Sansom among others.
"The activities of the ‘Cyprus Dendrochronology Lab’ (CDL) began vigorously with the study of the Byzantine and Medieval Troodos Churches included in the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. The churches of Panayia Podithou in Galata and Ayios Nikolaos Steyis in Kakopetria were the main focus of the study carried out in mid-November. Research at the...
On November 7-9, Cornell University hosted the first of a sequence of Media Studies conferences, Siren Echoes: Sound, Image, and the Media of Antiquity. It was sponsored by CIVIC (Critical Inquiry into Values, Imagination and Culture), the provost’s Radical Collaboration initiative focused on the Humanities and the Arts. The conference was...
Nicole Giannella, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics, will be teaching CLAS 2806 Roman Law in Spring 2020. When asked what she was most looking forward to about the course, Giannella said, “I love teaching Roman Law; this is the third time I’ll be teaching it at Cornell. What I really like about the course is that, perhaps...
The Department of Classics is fortunate to have at its disposal the Prescott W. Townsend Memorial Fund, established by his widow, Daphne Townsend, in 1982. Prescott W. Townsend (1893-1961) obtained a BA from Cornell University (1916) and a PhD from Yale University (1926). He taught ancient history at University of Indiana between 1919 and 1959. He...
Courtney Roby, Associate Professor of Classics, has been selected as a 2019 recipient of the Stephen H. Weiss Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. A total of eight faculty members from a variety of disciplines received Weiss Awards this year, which Cornell President Martha E. Pollack described as “the highest honors Cornell confers for...
Barbara Graziosi, Professor of Classics at Princeton Univeristy, will deliver three Townsend Lectures in the Fall of 2019 on ‘Homecoming and Homemaking in the Ancient Mediterranean.’ In this series of lectures, Prof. Graziosi asks what it means ‘to go back where you came from’ and what it takes to make a new home somewhere. She returns to the...
Michael C. J. Putnam, Brown University, delivered seven Townsend Lectures in the Spring of 1985 on "Artifices of Immortality: The Odes of Horace's Fourth Book."The dates and titles of his seven lectures were:February 26, 1985 - "Horace's Valediction"Putnam adopts a "post-reconstructionist" view in his analysis of Horace's fourth book of odes....