Santa Clara University

Classics is happy to welcome Rachel Knudsen (Ph.D. Stanford) as our Quarterly Adjunct Lecturer for 2012-13.  Professor Knudsen has taught Greek and Latin language at all levels as well as a wide variety of ancient literature in translation, and has supervised several undergraduate research theses. Her research interests include Homer, Archaic poetry, and ancient rhetoric; she is particularly interested in the representation of speech across all genres of ancient poetry and prose. She will be teaching sections of Cultures and Ideas I: Heroes and Heroism, as well as a course on Classical Mythology.

We are also delighted to welcome back for a second year Carolynn Roncaglia (Ph.D. U.C. Berkeley) as our Academic Year Adjunct Lecturer in Ancient History. Professor Roncaglia's research interests include Roman history, Greek and Latin epigraphy, and Greco-Roman Egypt. She will be teaching our ancient history sequence, which this year includes courses on the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. In fall she is offering a reading course in Latin prose, and she will be teaching the second half of our Heroes and Heroism C&I sequence.

The most moving news this year is the Classics has a new home! Our house on Franklin Street is scheduled to be demolished, and we have moved to a nice, house on Lafayette, the former home of Environmental Studies. Come visit us in our new digs!

In other faculty news, Associate Professor Mick McCarthy, SJ, continues his duties as the Executive Director of the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education at SCU. Associate Professor Scott LaBarge will be teaching a C&I section of Heroes and Heroism as well as his course on Socrates. The department is extremely happy to welcome back Professor William Greenwalt to full-time teaching for Classics, as he has finished up his tour of duty as Director of Honors, Fellowship, and the LEAD Scholars Program. Assistant Professor Dan Turkeltaub begins his third year in a tenure-track position, teaching both halves of a C&I sequence, upper-division Greek and Latin, and his new course on Justice. Senior Lecturer John Dunlap will be teaching the elementary Latin sequence, his C&I sequence on natural law, and Medieval Latin in spring. Professor John Heath is teaching his new course on Sex and Religion in Ancient Greece, as well as Classical Myth in the Western Tradition in winter (with a sabbatical in spring). And in the BIG news department, Associate Professor Helen Moritz begins phased retirement this year, teaching the elementary Greek sequence and serving as Acting Char in spring (some retirement!).

Adjunct Lecturers Carolynn Roncaglia and H. Christian Blood join the Classics program.

Classics House is happy to welcome Carolynn Roncaglia (Ph.D. U.C. Berkely), as our adjunct lecturer in Ancient History for 2011-2012. Professor Roncaglia's research interests include Roman history, Greek and Latin epigraphy, and Greco-Roman Egypt. She will be teaching our ancient history sequence, which this year includes courses on Ancient Greece and Hellenistic History. In fall she is offering a Latin reading course on Roman letters, particularly those of Pliny and Cicero. She will also be teaching the second half of our Heroes and Heroism C&I sequence, and a course of Roman imperialism.

We are also delighted that H. Christian Blood (Ph.D. U.C. Santa Cruz) will be teaching the introductory section of our Heroes and Heroism C&I sequence, as well as the second half of our Gods and Mortals sequence in spring. His research interests and future publications include the history of Great Books program in the United States, the relationship between Classics and Transgender Studies and the Nachleben of Apuleius, Seneca, and Petronius in 18th-century Anglophone literature.

Once again this year, there have been some big changes in our little department. Our two Lecturers from last year, Jason Schlude and Peter Lech, have moved on to tenure-track positins (Duquesne and U. Mass Boston, respectively. Congratulations-you will be missed! Also missed will be Associate Professor Mick McCarthy, who is now the Executive Director of the Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education at SCU. Associate Professor Scott LaBarge has returned from sabbatical and will be teaching three courses each for Classics and Philosophy, including his first offering of a section of Heroes and Heroism, a sequence he developed for Classics. Professor WIlliam Greenwalt continues to teach a limited load (including a new course in the core) for Classics while serving as Director of Honors, Fellowship, and the LEAD Scholars Program. Fortunately for the department, helen Moritz has returned to us (relatively unscathed!) from her year as interim Chair of English. She is teaching the Odyssey, Catullus, a C&I section of Gods and Mortals, and Classical Tragedy in Translation, and will be on sabbatical in spring. Assistant Professor Dan Turkeltaub begins his second year in a tenure-track position, teaching the Beginning Greek sequence, Classical Myth, and both halves of a C&I sequence. Senior Lecturer John Dunlap will be offering his popular Classics in Cinema course in winter as well as his C&I sequence on Natural law, and he will be on sabbatical in spring. Professor John Heath is teaching the Beginning Latin sequence, Vergil's Georgics, and, as punishment for some grevious error in a past life, continues to serve as chair of the department.

Faculty in Classics continue to develop new courses, both in the core and across disciplines.

In the Spring of 2011, students quickly filled two new classes: Professor Turkeltaub's Ancient and Modern Laughter, and Professor Schlude's Jews Under Empire. Dan Turkeltaub's course cross-listed with English and Theatre, led students through a variety of texts and ended with class performances of Greek and Roman comic plays:

Why do we (or don't we) laugh at chickens crossing roads, baseballs hitting men in their groins, children spouting profanity, brainless blondes, dead babies, blenders, dysfunctional relationships, Canadians, and farts? Why, when it comes right down to it, do we laugh at all? In this course we will investigate the nature of humor and the role it plays in ancient Greek, Roman, and modern American societies, with a particular eye to the Greek and Roman roots of western comedy. Our readings will focus on Aristrophanes' wonderfully scatological mockeries of classical Athenian life and politics, whimsical "situation comedies" written by the Roman playwright Plautus, and some oddly distrubing ones from Terence. Alongside these and a few other ancient masters, we will examin analogous humor from modern comedians as well as movies such as South Park and The Birdcage. Selections from Plato, Aristotle, Bakhtin, Freud, Frye, and othe scholars of laughter from various disciplines will help us understand how the humor in these works...well...work. By the end of the course, you will have a better understanding of the things that you already find funny and gain a new appreciation for the very serious ways in which comedy helps you live your life.

Students also flocked to Jason Schlude's new course, Jew Under Empire, cross-listed with the History Department:

Empire was a defining feature of the ancient Mediterranean. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Greek kings and the Roman elite exercises influence over large areas of the Mediterranean and its peoples. The experience of and response to such empires by their foreign subjects are often as challenging to elucidate as fascinating to imagine. Yet there is one case in which the subject people have left behind a substantial literature documenting their experience: the Jews. In this course, we will explore the consequences of empire for the Jews and the strategies they employed to explain and live under empire. In the process, our conversation will often focus on religion, as the monotheistic religion of the Jews was a driving force in their lives and experience. We will also discuss, however, many other areas of culture, as well as politics, society, economy, and the military. As for specific topics, we will consider a wide range: the Jews of Ptolemaic Egypt, the Maccabean Revolt, the Hasmonean dynasty, herod the Great, the Alexandrian riots of 38 CE, and the First Jewish Revolt. While modern readings will provide context for the subject, we will devote our main attention to the ancient texts produced by the Jews themselves in these periods. And students will have the opportunity to take part in well-informed discussions and to engage more deeply with particular issues through thoughtful presentations and papers.

This coming Winter, Professor William Greenwalt will offer a new Civic Engagement core course entitled Democracy: Ancient and Modern, which compares and contrasts the political functioning of fourth-century Athens with contemporary America. And in Spring quarter Professor Carolynn Roncaglia will teach a new course on oman imperialism. Stay tuned for details.

Professor Scott LaBarge will discuss "The Conceptual Problems of Battlefield Heroism": Tuesday, October 18th, 4:00, O'Connor 210. Interested members of the community are welcome.

Professor LaBarge's presentation, part of his book-length study of the nature of heroism, will chiefly focus on examples from classical antiquity, although he will be drawing larger ethical conclusions.

"Latin Education and the Warden of the Bastille," a lecture on why classical languages should be an integral part of the general education, will be presented by Professor Dan Turkeltaub on Friday, November 4, 4:14, at the Latin colloquium for Latin teachers in Jesuit high schools (Bellarmine College Prep). The talk will center on a close reading of a passage from Alexandre Dumas's Le Vicomte de Bragelonne in which the warden of the bastille decries before a Jesuit (Aramis) the value of a Latin education in light of a prisoner of his who composed an anti-Jesuit Latin distich in imitation of Martial. (It's a very fun passage.)

Daniel Turkeltaub’s article, “Reading the Epic Past: The Iliad on Heroic Epic,” has just appeared.

Professor Turkeltaub’s latest work appears in a new collection of essays entitled Allusion, Authority, and Truth: Critical Perspectives on Greek Poetic and Rhetorical Praxis, edited by Phillip Mitsis and Christo Tsagalis (Berlin/New York, 2010).

For details on the publication, check out the following: http://www.degruyter.com/cont/fb/at/detailEn.cfm?isbn=978-3-11-024540-0
http://www.reference-global.com/doi/book/10.1515/9783110245400

Abstract:

In this article, Daniel Turkeltaub challenges the standard notion that the Iliad is an uncritical, orthodox representative of traditional heroic epic poetry through an analysis of how the Iliad engages in a metapoetic and self-reflexive critique that subverts traditional epic pretensions to ethical authority.  Iliadic heroes learn proper heroic behavior from stories about their heroic fathers and forefathers.  By presenting these stories as inherited from its own epic tradition, the Iliad transforms its heroes into “readers” of its own epic tradition as they seek to understand and aspire to equal their fathers’ legacies.  As they do so, Iliadic heroes demonstrate for their own audiences approaches to understanding epic, including the Iliad itself.  Two test cases, Diomedes “reading” his father’s epic legacy in books four through eight and the competing visions of the past given by Nestor and Priam, demonstrate that while the Iliad maintains a traditional narrative voice extolling the heroic virtues and inherited ethical code of its heroes, the poet arranges his events and language so as to reveal that emulating epic values and behaviors is at best ineffective and at worst dangerously counter-productive.  Epic justifies itself through seducing its audience into considering its heroes to be viable exemplars of noble behavior, but because the production of epic necessarily entails aggrandizing and censoring historical events, the audience must always remember that epic heroes are fictional and that their actions are inimitable in the real world.

Classics House is home to three new faculty this year. Daniel Turkeltaub (Ph.D. Cornell University) joins the department as an Assistant Professor of Classics. Daniel is a Hellenist with publications on Homer and the Homeric Hymns. He will be teaching upper-division Latin (Apuleius), upper-division Greek (Euripides), a third-writing core-course, and both sections of a Heroes and Heroism C&I sequence.

Jason Schlude (Ph.D. U.C. Berkeley), a Lecturer in Classics, is an ancient historian specializing in the relationship between Rome and Parthia. He will be teaching both lower- and upper-division courses this year on Western Culture, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and the second half of the Heroes and Heroism C&I sequence.

Peter Lech (Ph.D Brown University) is a Lecturer in Classics brought in this year to strengthen the department’s Latin program. A specialist in Roman Comedy, Peter will be teaching Intermediate and Advanced (Plautus and Terence) Latin, Classical Mythology, and the first half of the Heroes and Heroism C&I sequence.

These three new faculty are part of some big changes in the department for the 2010-11 year. We had prepared for Professors LaBarge and McCarthy to be on sabbatical leave this academic year. And Professor Greenwalt continues to teach a limited load in Classics while serving as Director of Honors, Fellowships, and the LEAD Scholars Program. But who knew that Professor Moritz would be summoned by gods (administration) just one week before classes began to serve as interim chair of the English Department this year? Classics House now echoes with the familiar shuffling of two senior faculty (Dunlap and Heath) along with the lively steps of the three new members of the program.