Clare Woods
As already apparent from the chair’s message heading up this newsletter, the past academic year brought some unexpected changes and new responsibilities for me. I took over as chair of the department on April 1 (an auspicious day to start a new job!) and have been kept quite busy settling into the role.
My book project (Books on the Road: Manuscripts and Social Networks in Carolingian Francia) is still coming along nicely, though I haven’t had as much time to work on it in recent months. In October 2023, I gave a paper, “Greek Science in the Margins” at a wonderful conference on "Pliny the Elder and Traditions of Natural Histories" at Binghamton’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I’ve been turning this paper into an article and will submit that to the journal Mediaevalia by the end of the summer.
In Fall 2023, I taught two Latin classes: a graduate Latin survey course, and Medieval Latin to a packed room of undergraduate Latinists. The roster for Spring 2024 saw me teaching two of my favorite courses: my graduate seminar on Latin Paleography and History of the Book. Since taking the Book History Workshop at Texas A&M last summer (2023), I’ve been building up the materials to teach letterpress printing. This past spring, I offered a letterpress workshop for my History of the Book students, with generous help from staff in the Rubenstein Library and from Bill Fick (AAH&VS) who helped me run off prints of the poem the students had set. History of the Book encourages students to explore book history in the widest sense and I like to incorporate plenty of practical sessions. For a final team project, students make a book. This year’s student-made books included a bamboo scroll and a short-form digital story shared on social media. I was delighted when Duke Alumni’s Lifelong Learning Program invited me to teach a course on the History of the Book in their first ever Summer Academy in July/August 2024. It was tough to try to compress a semester’s worth of content into a week, but I think we all had an enjoyable time exploring cuneiform, papyri, manuscripts, early and newer printed books, and other items from Duke's collection. I also tried out my new tabletop printing press (a Provisional Press) that I’d acquired this past spring. It worked well enough for everyone to take away a print of what we'd achieved.
One other major highlight of last year was directing Stephanie Morgan’s senior thesis on Medusa. Titled, “Culture Isn’t Set in Stone: Critical Analysis of Ancient and Modern Depictions of Medusa,” Stephanie gathered, translated, and interpreted every ancient textual source on Medusa that she could find. She then explored contemporary trends in the reception, interpretation, and development of Medusa’s myth. Her thesis was a tour de force, and we’re working now on turning a piece of it into an article.
Tolly Boatwright
My biography of Agrippina the Younger is slowly moving to completion. My last Duke research funds enabled a related research visit to Italy in October 2023 (thank you, Duke!). I first stayed on Agrippina’s exile island Pontia (now Ponza). Like every Italian we met, I loved Ponza. It’s wonderfully temperate, off the beaten track, and with a sparkling clean sea (see photo). But Agrippina must have been bored beyond tears in her two-year banishment there! I think she filled her days by perfecting her swimming skills that saved her, temporarily, from the plots of her ungrateful son Nero two decades later. After Ponza we continued to the Bay of Naples, where Nero actually succeeded in killing her near Bauli and Bacoli, where now the Phlegraean supervolcano threatens. (Alas, a mild bout of Covid precluded last year’s announced visit to Agrippina’s Umbrian home in Mevania.)
Other research and (a kind of) teaching have continued this last year. I submitted “Julio-Claudian Women, War, and the Military” to Ancient Women and War in the Mediterranean World (eds. E. Carney and S. Müeller; Brill). I gave an illustrated guest presentation on Hadrian to Michele Salzman’s UC-Riverside graduate seminar on the principate. And I remain involved with the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, though mostly as a keeper of its institutional memory. In summer 2026 the Centro will celebrate in Rome its 61st anniversary. This may seem an odd number to honor, but we figured it was better to avoid Rome’s Jubilee Year in 2025, our proper 60th celebration. In 2026 we can enjoy Rome’s upgrades for the 2025 Jubilee while skipping the flood of Jubilee tourists that year. Everyone who studied at the Centro is invited! I’m happy to provide more information about the Gala, or to chat with anyone who has time to keep in touch.
Lauren Ginsberg
2023-24 was an exciting year for me for a few reasons. First and foremost, I enjoyed taping a session for Wired’s TechSupport series in response to the viral “how often do men think about the Roman empire” discourse of the Fall. The episode’s Youtube count is now over 2M viewers which probably makes it the broadest audience I’ll ever reach with wacky facts about ancient Romans - and it made my students laugh which is what really matters. Tune in for thoughts on socks-with-sandals and stay for discourses about people who want to love autocrats!
My research and scholarship has taken me in some exciting directions. My main project remains my academic biography of Claudia Octavia, Nero’s first wife whom the emperor divorced, accused of treason and executed. What is super interesting to me about her is that, despite the silence of the ancient sources like Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio on many episodes of her life, we can tell that she was extremely beloved by the Roman people who rose up in protest on her behalf and risked their lives in doing so. She was, it seems, a real ancient Princess Di figure. So part of my biography will attempt to explore how she became this focus of popular devotion and why we do her a disservice when we only pay attention to her death. This project was born out of a podcast I did back in 2021 for HistoryHit (Divorced, Murdered, Survived: Wives of Nero) around the British Museum’s controversial Nero exhibit and it’s exciting for me to feel the connection between public facing work and scholarly writing. I’ve also finally started publishing in earnest on Nero’s reception in modern popular culture. Last Spring I finished a chapter on the representation of Neronian Rome in a 1953 ad for Jergens Lotion which encouraged me to learn all about the intersection of pop-psychology, the birth of advertising theory, and women as consumers in mid-century America. This new direction also complements my recent teaching: I am a longtime collector of print ads featuring Nero (eBay for the win!) and began using them in a final reception project for my Age of Nero course in 2023 with great student feedback. I hope to build more on this work at an upcoming conference that I am organizing in Thessaloniki Greece on The Ages of Nero in May 2025.
Finally, a bit outside the ancient world, I was proud to be selected as Duke’s Mellon Leadership Fellow, a program funded by the Mellon Foundation which included a year of equity-based leadership training with co-fellows from the Ivy+ Faculty Advancement Network during 2023-24 and this year will place me in a 50% administrative position with The Graduate School to work on projects related to equity, inclusion, and mentoring at the graduate level. I’m excited for what I’ll learn and come away with from this experience.
William Johnson
Harry Potter was the “Boy who Lived” during dark times, and in the crisis of July 2020, I was the professor who became dean during dark times. For that reason, I’ve absented myself from PHEME for the past years. Just a week back (on June 30) I stepped down as Duke’s Schiff Dean of Humanities and the Arts. It’s been quite the ride. I am now working, hard, on the adjustment to a life without constant meetings. I’ll get there.
Like all of Duke’s divisional deans (and unlike our peers), I have remained a professor in practice and mindset as well as in title. These last years have been too … involved … to allow teaching a class, but I’ve worked on tutoring, dissertation committees, and several collaborations, most importantly with our postdoc, Nick Wagner. As Dean, I found it impossible to complete the book project that was well advanced in Spring 2020 —and to which I finally now return! I did however manage smaller projects. Andy Armacost in the library and Nick Wagner and I produced a born-digital database capturing all known details of the provenance of the 1400 Duke papyri (unfortunately, with accessibility limited to researchers only, due to rights issues).
Under development but now well along are two other born-digital projects, the Greek Bookrolls project and the Early Codices project, both large-scale collaborations with Nick Wagner. I also produced five articles and one data set during the four years:
1)2023. "Reading for Efficiency in Ancient Rome: The Case of Pliny the Elder." Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 15.3: 15-23.
2) 2023. "Scribal Tools of the Trade: Bone Rules, Dividers, and Lamps as Writing Aids." Segno e Testo 21: 1-26, Tav. 1-6.
3) 2023. "The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Classicist's View," chapter in The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ancient Media Culture, ed. Travis Williams and Chris Keith. In the Brill series Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah. Pp. 488-505.
4) 2023. “Typological Catalogue of the ancient Roman Scribal Tool Known as a Bone Rule.” Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 11.1: 1-7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/joad.97 Data paper for the data set following.
5) 2022. Johnson, William A., "Bone Rules Catalogue", Harvard Dataverse, V7, DOI: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/SCV3ZB.
6) 2022. "Trifle reprised: British Library School Tablet Add MS 34186(1)(2)." BASP 59 (2022) 205-220.
My new Oxford monograph series (co-edited with Chris Keith), Cultures of Reading in the Ancient Mediterranean, somehow launched well during the pandemic, with the first two volumes now out (one already a prize winner) and two more under contract. Long ago, I was invited to give the Danziger Lecture at Chicago, which had been scheduled for May 2020. Years later, and after a change of topic, I did at last present: • 2022 May. "Not the Pharoah’s Curse: Tales of Greek Literary Papyri and Colonial Entanglements," Sigmund H. Danziger Jr. Distinguished Lecture at University of Chicago. Finally, I had the interesting and fun news that one of my books (Ancient Literacies, Oxford 2009) has been contracted for translation and publication for an Arabic edition by Dar Almuheet Publishers, UAE.
As always, you’ll find fuller details at my website: profwilliamjohnson.com.
Erika Weiberg
2024 was a big year for me. My first book, Demanding Witness: Women and the Trauma of Homecoming, was published in February by Oxford University Press. Demanding Witness investigates how the trauma of female characters is represented and received in four Greek tragedies about homecoming. Through discussions of modern trauma concepts alongside historical and literary analyses of these plays, my book examines how and why female characters’ expressions of psychological pain are hotly contested, silenced, and suppressed by other characters and sometimes by the plot of the play itself.
You can get a discounted copy of my book from Oxford University Press with the discount code AUFLY30: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/demanding-witness-9780197747322?q=erika%20l.%20weiberg&lang=en&cc=us
The department celebrated the publication of the book with a book launch party in April. Professors Naomi Weiss from Harvard Classics and Darren Gobert from Duke Theater Studies delivered responses to the book and there was even a cake with the cover of the book imprinted in the icing! It was so lovely to celebrate this achievement with my colleagues, friends, and academic family.