Spring Research Briefings from the Faculty in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Archaeology's James C. Wright and his wife Mary Dabney ('76) will travel to Australia in August and September to lecture as Visiting Professor at the Australian Archaeological Institute in Athens. In March he delivered the keynote address at the Cyprus-American Archeological Research Institute's annual conference.

Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology Peter Magee is quoted on the archaeological significance of the United Arab Emirates.

Chemistry’s Michelle Francl spoke at the Philly March for Science on April 22. This summer, she will return to work at the Vatican Observatory as an adjunct scholar.

Graduate Group director and Classics Professor Annette Baertschi has published two book reviews that will appear later this summer: her review of Seneca, Medea (Anthony J. Boyle ed., Oxford 2014) will appear in Classical Review; and a review of A Companion to the Flavian Age of Imperial Rome (Andrew Zissos, ed., Malden, MA/Oxford 2016) is forthcoming in Classical World. In April, she presented a paper entitled "Impersonation and Role-Play in Lucan: Cicero's Speech in Bellum civile 7.62ff." at the International Conference 'Lucan in His Contemporary Contexts' at Brigham Young University in Provo.

In January, Classics Professor Catherine Conybeare organized a panel at the Society for Classical Studies with a colleague from Cambridge, Simon Goldhill. Called "Philology's Shadow", it explored the notion that theology is the suppressed other of classical philology. She also gave a paper on the panel, entitled "Virgil, Creator of the World." This may, in honor of distinguished colleague Brent Shaw, Professor Conybeare will deliver the lecture "Enarrationes in Psalmos" at a conference at Princeton, "Subjects of Empire: Political and Cultural Exchange in Imperial Rome."

Professor Radcliffe Edmonds III published an article “When I walked the dark road of Hades: Orphic katabasis and the katabasis of Orpheus,” in Les Études Classiques 83, Katábasis in Greek Literary Tradition and Religious Thought, (Bonnechere & Cursaru eds.). He also presented a selection of his book in press, Drawing Down the Moon: Defining Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World, at several institutions including l’École Normale Supérieure, Paris.  In April, he attended a special faculty seminar at the University of Virginia on the newly discovered sacred law (cult regulation) from Larisa in Thessaly, joining with several experts in Greek religion from different institutions to examine this fascinating text. In July, Professor Edmonds will give the keynote lecture at the conference “Aspects of Death and the Afterlife in Greece and Beyond” at Durham University in England. The talk is tentatively titled, “A Path Neither Simple Nor Single: The Afterlife as Good to Think with.” His recent monograph Drawing Down the Moon: Magic in the Ancient Greco-Roman World is in under contract and will soon be in press.

This summer, the Institut d’Avignon invites Professors Jennifer Tamas (Rutgers) and Philippe Met (UPenn) to give two graduate seminars respectively on family conflicts within tragedies and on the tradition of film noir in France. In February, French Professor Rudy Le Menthéour gave a talk on Rousseau and “the art of preservation,” as part of a one-day conference dedicated to Rousseau’s relevance today (UC Santa Barbara); the proceedings will be published next year.

In March, Professor Emeritus in History of Art Christiana Hertel delivered the keynote address at the Austrian Studies Association Conference held at the University of Illinois, Chicago; her talk was entitled “Contradiction in Perpetuity: Ulrike Truger’s Encounter Monument Elisabeth – Zwang – Flucht – Freiheit, 1998/99."

History of Art Professor Homay King contributed a catalogue essay, “Myth for an Age of Lies and Marble for an Age of Walls,” for the exhibition Myths of the Marble, curated by Alex Klein and Milena Høgsberg currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. In March at the ICA, she participated in a panel discussion, “Art History Activism.”

Professor Emeritus Dale Kinney published the article “The Image of a Building: Santa Maria in Trastevere” in California Italian Studies Journal. In addition she published “Managed Memory in Santa Maria in Trastevere” in Monuments and Memory, “Trophies and Orphans: the Use of Spolia Columns in Ancient Churches” in Sacred Architecture, and two chapters in The Red Monastery Church (2016), edited by Elizabeth Bolman Ph.D. ’97.

History of Art Professor Lisa Saltzman published an article, “Before Recognition: On the Aesthetics of Aftermath,” in Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture (Yochai Ataria, David Gurevitz, Haviva Pedaya, Yuval Neria, eds., New York and Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing AG, 2016, 87-99). In March, she participated in a symposium at Emory University, “Elective Affinities/Elective Antipathies: German Art and Its Histories,” organized by an undergraduate alumna of the department, Lisa Lee, who now teaches there; Professor Saltzman delivered a colloquium, “A Ghost Story for Grown-ups? On Austerlitz and the Afterlife of Images.”

In April, Math Professor Lisa Traynor participated in a workshop on Engel Structures at the American Institute of Mathematics in San Jose, CA. This May, she gave a talk at a workshop on Quantitative Symplectic Geometry at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics in Stony Brook, NY. Additionally, she co-authored an article, “Non-orientable Lagrangian cobordisms between Legendrian knots,” in the Pacific Journal of Mathematics.