Professors

Richard Hamilton (Ph.D. Michigan), Paul Shorey Professor of Greek, Chair
Thomas Hall 246
e-mail: rhamilto@brynmawr.edu

Russell T. Scott (Ph.D. Yale), Doreen C. Spitzer Professor of Latin and Classical Studies, Major Adviser
Thomas Hall 242
e-mail: dscott@brynmawr.edu

Associate Professors

Catherine Conybeare (Ph.D. Toronto)
Thomas Hall 240
e-mail: cconybea@brynmawr.edu

Radcliffe Edmonds (Ph.D. Chicago), Major Advisor (On leave 2007-08)
Thomas Hall 245
e-mail: redmonds@brynmawr.edu

Assistant Professor

Annette M. Baertschi
Thomas Hall 244
e-mail: abaertschi@brynmawr.edu

Lecturer

Alex Gottesman
Thomas Hall 245
e-mail: agottesman@brynmawr.edu

Professors Emeriti

Gregory W. Dickerson (Ph.D. Princeton), Professor Emeritus of Greek

Julia H. Gaisser (Ph.D. Edinburgh), Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Professor Emeritus of Latin
E-mail: jgaisser@brynmawr.edu

Mabel Lang (Ph.D. Bryn Mawr), Katharine E. McBride Professor Emeritus of Greek and Paul Shorey Professor Emeritus of Greek

Cooperating Faculty at Haverford College

Deborah Roberts (Ph.D., Yale), Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature
Hall 206, Haverford College
e-mail: droberts@haverford.edu

Bret Mulligan (Ph.D., Brown University), Assistant Professor
Hall Building 008, Haverford College
e-mail: bmulliga@haverford.edu

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Faculty Profiles

Radcliffe Edmonds, Associate Professor, Major Advisor (on leave 2007-08) I love teaching in the atmosphere of Bryn Mawr: the small community of earnest and eager graduate and undergraduate students, the faculty's mix of disciplines and perspectives, the fantastic resources for research, not to mention the idyllic setting and beautiful traditions that surround us all. My research and teaching interests center on Greek social and intellectual history, with particular focus on mythology, religion, and Platonic philosophy. I enjoy the opportunity to teach courses on some of the less familiar aspects of ancient Greek culture, such as ancient Greek ideas of sexuality, magic, and mystery cults, as well as courses on the language, mythology, and history of ancient Greece. From my research, I have recently published on eros and midwifery in Plato, on Orphism and the mysterious gold tablets, and on magical techniques in the "Mithras Liturgy", and my study of the journey to the underworld in the Greek mythic tradition, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Aristophanes, Plato, and the 'Orphic' Gold Tablets, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. My current research interests include the history of myth interpretation and the marginal categories of magic and Orphism within Greek religion, and I am working on a study entitled, Redefining Ancient Orphism. Orphism was taken by 19th-century scholars to be a particular, ancient Greek religious tradition, with a doctrine of original sin and a focus on practices of purification to expiate it, but I argue that we can't understand ancient Greek religion using modern Christian models; we can only make sense of the evidence within the dynamics of ancient polytheism. To the extent that 'Orphism' existed, it was not a coherent movement but a label given to a variety of religious practices that deliberately departed from the norm, elaborating on and altering traditional myths and rituals in innovative ways, while appealing to the authority of tradition by invoking the name of Orpheus, the greatest of poets. In addition to scholarship here, I have been enjoying directing the Greek Plays on May Day, playing on the intramural softball team, and singing with the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Renaissance Choir.

 

Richard Hamilton, Paul Shorey Professor of Greek, Chair "The most exciting thing I'm doing? Oddly enough, it's teaching baby Greek. You'd think after almost 30 years here I'd find first-year Greek pretty routine but in fact this is the first time I've taught it. We've had a wonderful tradition of really rigorous Greek at Bryn Mawr that goes back way before my time; in the 70s Mabel Lang often had to split the class in two (meeting at 8 a.m., if you can imagine that) to handle the crowd, but eventually students found they couldn't afford to spend 20 hours a week on Greek and so this year we've reinvented the course, trying to preserve the essential goal of reading real Greek after the first month of the second semester but with only five hours of class a week instead of nine. Next week, we'll find out how well prepared the class is to read. Stay tuned! "Also, there's the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, which we started a decade ago as an electronic journal (the second-oldest humanities journal online apparently) with a print backup that was discontinued in 1998. Subscriptions continue to grow at an inexplicable rate and now number over 4,500 (by comparison there are 3,000 classicists in the national association). What's most important is the international scope.For some time now, a significant portion of our readership has been outside America, but now a significant portion of the writership is as well (causing something of a postal crisis). Needless to say, this is a huge pain to administer, but very exciting to plan: we are about to unveil a new Web site; some of us are thinking about a monograph series as well as a site with journal abstracts; thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation we have been instrumental in starting several other electronic reviews and in helping some existing journals become electronic, most notably Zeitschrift fuer Papyrologie und Epigraphik (my favorite journal, actually). "My research? Well, I just finished a huge project studying the lists of dedications on the sacred island of Delos from which I'm still recovering, but I have again become interested in what Greek vases show us, if anything, about daily life. I've been looking at nonmythological religious scenes and have become curious about what appears to be a distinction between the use of the footless, handleless dish called a phiale and the use of the similar-looking footed and handled kylix. Since many of the vases are poorly described and poorly illustrated I will be forced, reluctantly you can be sure, to travel to the major museums in Europe to see for myself. "I went into the field, so to speak, in my senior year in college, when I wised up and realized I hadn't learned anything yet. I decided to learn Greek, believing, as I still do, that if you've learned a language you've really learned something. My first years at Harvard were a disaster academically, but in my last year I moved from the bottom of the class to near the top. I think there's a lesson here – don't worry about grades unless you're pre-med or pre-law. College is the time to make mistakes; you can screw up and still succeed. This is especially true at a place like Bryn Mawr, where two years of Greek is the equivalent of four years elsewhere. "Ideal majors? We like curious majors, critical ones. The orderliness of classics appeals to some people – the human mind, after all, requires order – but students who want to translate 50 lines a day, who want to do the work and be rewarded for it, but who don't find the subject interesting are not the best majors. About a fourth of our majors go to graduate school. The rest do almost anything and everything. One's a midwife, another's a farmer, a third's a head hunter, a fourth a rabbi, and so on." Rick Hamilton is the author of four books, the most recent of which is Treasure Map: A Guide to the Delian Inventories (2000) and more than 30 articles, including "'Archon' Names on Panathenaic Amphorae" and "Comic Acts." Supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, his research has focused on "Choes and Anthesteria" and "Delian Temple Inventories." Editor of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Hamilton is also the general editor for Bryn Mawr Commentaries.

Russell T. Scott, Doreen C. Spitzer Professor of Latin and Classical Studies Professor Scott has taught at Bryn Mawr since 1966 and served as Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in Charge of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome from 1984-1988. He has written widely on Roman history and historiography and the archaeology of Roman Italy, particularly the excavations at Cosa and in the Roman Forum carried out by the Academy under his direction. He has also served as Mellon Professor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome and is a director of the American Academy's summer program in Italian archaeology.

Catherine Conybeare, Associate Professor, Director of the Graduate Group and Graduate Adviser You will notice that my colleagues Julia and Rick emphasize the serendipitous pursuit of a beloved path of research, rather than pragmatic and passionless choices. This has been my path too, and it has led me to study on both sides of the Atlantic. I was lucky enough to start both Latin and Greek as a child, and went on to read for a BA in Literae Humaniores, or ‘Greats’, at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. There I took a special option in Medieval Latin, and became fascinated with the later developments of the language. This fascination led me to the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto to take my doctorate. I found a breadth of training there – from palaeography and the editing of texts through Latin literature from the fourth to the fifteenth century – which has influenced my ideals for both research and teaching ever since. Oxonian philology and Torontonian breadth is what I hope to bring to the department here. Above all, it’s the period known generally as ‘late antiquity’, the closing centuries of the Roman Empire in the West, which captures my imagination. My first book was based on letter collections from the late fourth and early fifth centuries A.D., and particularly on the letters of Paulinus of Nola, who corresponded with many of the prominent figures of his day. The book looks at epistolary culture and ideas of friendship in late antiquity, the typological imaginary, and the construction of the self. It’s called Paulinus Noster: Self and Symbols in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola (Oxford 2000). Arguably Paulinus’ most important correspondent – and one of the few whose answers survive, at least in part – was Augustine of Hippo. Augustine is, of course, revered or reviled, according to preference, as a founding father of dogmatic Christianity. But his letters, through which I first encountered him, tell a more complicated and personal story, and my current book is an exploration of anti-dogmatic tendencies in his early works. Its provisional title is The Irrational Augustine.

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