News
CLASSICS MAJOR GIVES VALUABLE SKILLS FOR GRAD SCHOOL AND BEYOND
5/13/13 by Bailey Bryant, Daily Illini
After becoming bored with the biology involved in pre-medicine, uninterested in organic chemistry and apathetic toward accounting, Julia Henninger, senior in LAS, began pursuing her fourth and final major: classics.
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NEWLY PUBLISHED BOOKS BY ANTONY AUGOUSTAKIS AND ARIANA TRAILL
Ritual and Religion in Flavian Epic
Edited by Antony Augoustakis
This edited collection addresses the role of ritual representations and religion in the epic poems of the Flavian period (69-96 CE): Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica, Silius Italicus' Punica, Statius' Thebaid, and the unfinished Achilleid. Drawing on various modern studies on religion and ritual, and the relationship between literature and religion in the Greco-Roman world, it explores how we can interpret the poets' use of the relationship between gods and humans, cults and rituals, religious activities, and the role of the seer / prophet and his identification with poetry.
http://www.oup.com/localecatalogue/cls_academic/?i=9780199644094
Blackwell Companion to Terence
Edited by Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill
A comprehensive collection of essays by leading scholars in the field that address, in a single volume, several key issues in interpreting Terence offering a detailed study of Terence’s plays and situating them in their socio-historical context, as well as documenting their reception through to present day
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405198753.html
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KIRK SANDERS RECEIVES EXCELLENCE IN UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING AWARD
Professor Kirk Sanders of the Department of the Classics has been named a recipient of the Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. He will be recognized at the Celebration of Teaching Excellence scheduled for April 23 at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center.
The peer-nominated award recognizes professors, instructional staff members and graduate teaching assistants who display consistently excellent performance in the classroom, take innovative approaches to teaching, positively affect the lives of their students, and make other contributions to improve instruction, including influencing the curriculum.
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ANGELIKI TZANETOU - CITY OF SUPPLIANTS: TRAGEDY AND THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS, 2012
After fending off Persia in the fifth century BCE, Athens assumed a leadership position in the Aegean world. Initially it led the Delian League, a military alliance against the Persians, but eventually the league evolved into an empire with Athens in control and exacting tribute from its former allies. Athenians justified this subjection of their allies by emphasizing their fairness and benevolence towards them, which gave Athens the moral right to lead. But Athenians also believed that the strong rule over the weak and that dominating others allowed them to maintain their own freedom. These conflicting views about Athens’ imperial rule found expression in the theater, and this book probes how the three major playwrights dramatized Athenian imperial ideology.
Through close readings of Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Euripides’ Children of Heracles, and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, as well as other suppliant dramas, Angeliki Tzanetou argues that Athenian tragedy performed an important ideological function by representing Athens as a benevolent and moral ruler that treated foreign suppliants compassionately. She shows how memorable and disenfranchised figures of tragedy, such as Orestes and Oedipus, or the homeless and tyrant-pursued children of Heracles were generously incorporated into the public body of Athens, thus reinforcing Athenians’ sense of their civic magnanimity. This fresh reading of the Athenian suppliant plays deepens our understanding of how Athenians understood their political hegemony and reveals how core Athenian values such as justice, freedom, piety, and respect for the laws intersected with imperial ideology.
Angeliki Tzanetou is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is coeditor with Maryline Parca of Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean and has published articles on ritual and gender in drama and on tragedy and politics.
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/tzacit.html
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NEW CLASSICS FACULTY
It is our great pleasure to announce that Professor Brian Walters, currently visiting, will be joining us permanently. He has just accepted our offer of a tenure-track position.
Professor Walters, PhD University of California at Los Angeles (2011), is a specialist in Latin Prose Literature (Violence in Cicero). He holds a visiting appointment at our Department this year. He is in the process of publishing a monograph: based on his dissertation, as well as several articles, one of which is in a prominent peer-reviewed journal (Classical Quarterly). He is also the author of a translation of Lucan’s Civil War (forthcoming from Hackett Press in 2013). He is also a distinguished teacher (as many of our undergraduates already know).
Please join us in welcoming Professor Walters!
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CLASSICS GRADUATE STUDENT IN THE NEWS
"Sebastian Anderson's Classics MA thesis on Archilochus was selected to represent the University of Illinois at the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS) Distinguished Master's Thesis Award. This is a very competitive process, and we are thrilled that Sebastian's thesis will represent the University."