Tolly Boatwright
My Agrippina the Younger: A Dangerous Woman in Early Imperial Rome is now in production with Oxford University Press. I was fortunate to give a run through of my last chapter on Agrippina’s afterlife first to the department (thank you for the excellent questions and comments!) and then to the University of Washington, Seattle as the Daniel P. Harmon Lecturer in the Department of Classics, at the end of April 2025. Two articles appeared since the last issue of PHEME, “Hadrian in Syria and the East” (in The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Syria and the Near East, ed. R. Raja, OUP), and “Representing Native Women in Roman Art” (in Empires and Indigenous Peoples: Comparing Ancient Roman and North American Experiences, eds. M. Maas and F. Yarbrough, University of Oklahoma Press). Despite my retirement since August 2020, my love for Rome, the Pantheon, and all things classical still burns brightly!
Rex Crews
This past spring was a busy one for the elementary Latin crowd. A strong group of Latin 102 students are headed forward with some prospective majors among them. We were able to begin offering an off-cycle Latin 101 sequence, which we hope will attract more and more students. We also launched a campaign with Duke Communications to attract more students to the study of Greek and Latin. We have two new graduate instructors in Latin, Daniel Orr and Anna Cambron, and I am very much looking forward to mentoring them as they bring the joy of Latin to a new class! This summer I have been working on revamping our "Refresher Latin" course and planning ahead for 300-level course in Vergil for the Spring of 2026, as well as working on some material related to the Roman legal handbooks De officio proconsulis.
Lauren Ginsberg
This year has been full of opportunities to learn. As I’ve mentioned before, I am part of a cohort of Humanities Scholars from the Ivy+ consortium who were selected to train as Mellon Leadership Fellows. The Mellon Foundation strongly feels that there aren’t enough humanists in top administrative positions at R1 institutions and so they funded a generous grant to different consortia to train some. As Duke’s fellow, I finished up a year of training programs and, in 2024-25, embarked on a yearlong 50% administrative appointment in our Graduate School reporting directly to Suzanne Barbour, Dean of The Graduate School and Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, while working on projects related to creating cultures of mentoring & belonging as well of equity in access to graduate education. Mentorship has been well studied (and those studies well funded!) in STEM-structured programs in the US but there is a real lacuna in what we know of best practices for mentoring in humanities and social science graduate programs which have different strengths and pressures. So one of my roles was to study this problem and another was to be the voice of the humanities when helping design Duke’s own strategies. I have now concluded my two year Mellon Leadership Fellowship as of June 30th and have to say that it was one of the most rewarding periods of my career. I was led to that work by the success of our Bridge Program and I’m certainly returning to full-time faculty life with a new toolkit for advocating for the Humanities.
My Wired Video continues bring journalists to my inbox. I was excited to get to talk about gladiators with the Washington Post and NPR (even if NPR edited me to say something I didn’t say!) about Gladiator II. It’s been really fun to get to share nerdy glee with the wider world and also to challenge some common assumptions about the Romans outside the classroom. In this same vein, the videos for the 2023 NEH Seminar on the Performance of Roman Comedy are now out for anyone to check out. Word of warning: our remit was to stage the most challenging (read: usually upsetting) scenes from surviving Roman comedy in addition to creating interpretive materials and lesson plans for teachers to use. I’m proud of the work we did - especially in using 90s Nerd Tropes for our modern take on Chaerea in the Eunuchus - and hope it will help teachers at all levels use theater as a site of learning about the Romans.
I’ve spent this summer stepping back from my administrative work and preparing for a glorious year of research leave ahead. I kicked this off with a conference I co-organized in Thessaloniki, Greece on the theme of Ages of Nero: Reality and Reception. We brought together scholars from many disciplines including literature, history, archaeology, musicology, film studies, art history, religious studies, and more to consider reflections and receptions of Rome’s most notorious emperor. It was a week full of Nero-nerdery which would make my Age of Nero students quite happy. We’re now planning on editing a volume out of some of the papers which should be a timely intervention into why certain ideas about Nero continue to fascinate us - and what the historicity of those ideas even is.
But my primary focus this year remains my biography of Nero’s first wife, Claudia Octavia. I’m in an intensive writing phase now and hope to turn in a complete draft in this upcoming year. I’ve recently become fascinated with a class of object called ‘phalerae’ which were small round pictorial badges of honor worn with pride by lower-level soldiers up to the Centurion class. Claudius was the first Roman emperor to put a daughters on these badges, meaning little Octavia’s toddler face was distributed far and wide across the Roman military. How cool is that?
https://romancomedy.pubpub.org/
William Johnson
In 2024-25, I had the luxury of my first sabbatical in many years, on my way to retirement. I had a lovely year concentrating exclusively on my research goals. (Well, I did also take a trip to go snorkeling in Barbados. Marvelous!) I managed to complete a highly technical book (Punctuation, Iota Adscript, and Nu-movable in Ancient Literary Bookrolls), which despite its restricted audience should be fundamental for papyrological research for many years to come. The product of thirty-five years of off-and-on work, the book has just been published (July 2025) in the Trismegistos series, TOP 10.
I also completed an article co-authored with our postdoc Nick Wagner, working with papyri from Egypt but also the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is a close study of the 40 surviving papyri with Jewish and Christian content written in bookroll format. (Christian literary papyri are usually in codex format.) Among other conclusions is our exciting discovery of a trans-mediterranean community of scribes, presumably Jewish, who had definite ideas about the proper look and feel of Septuagint manuscripts on papyrus in and around the first century BCE. That piece is under review.
Also the product of many years of work, and coming out this August, is a born-digital project, the Ancient Books Website. That joins a long tradition of open-access tools for papyrological research, where Duke has long been a leader. Phase I will provide scholars with detailed data on the physical and scribal features of about 500 surviving bookrolls, dating from the 4th century BCE to the 4th century CE. Phase II, scheduled for release in 2026, and co-authored by Nick Wagner, will provide similar data for about 200 of our earliest codices (that is, those for which a pre-Constantine date is claimed).
Finally, just this month (July) I also had published, after a long delay, a piece written for a general audience, “From Bookroll to Codex” (ISAW Papers 29.2). That essay is for anyone who wants an overview of the early history of books written in ancient Greek.
As always, if you want more detail or to find links to the above, look me up at profwilliamjohnson.com.
Erika Weiberg
After my reappointment was approved, I have had the privilege of being on research leave for the past academic year. I’ve used the time away from teaching to kickstart a new book project on trauma for Bloomsbury’s Ancients and Moderns series. The book will investigate how ancient Greek and Roman ideas of emotional injury have influenced modern concepts of trauma, as well as how modern trauma concepts have conditioned contemporary understandings of ancient texts and material culture. As a preview of that work, I’ll have an essay forthcoming in the Bloomsbury Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Classical Reception on Hanya Yanagihara’s controversial novel, A Little Life (2015), and its use of mythological allusion in its depiction of a “trauma hero.” My research leave hasn’t been all work, no play, though! I’ve also gotten the chance to do some travel to Japan, Croatia, France, and Greece, rowed in my first regatta with a novice rowing team, and enjoyed reading quite a few novels. I’ll be ready to get back into the classroom this fall and can’t wait to teach another group of beginning Greek students!
Shirley Werner
As a former American Fellow to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich, I contributed a statement to be posted on the new Friends of the Thesaurus linguae Latinae (friendsoftll.org)—check out this beautiful website! Fellows were asked to look back at what we learned at the TLL and to evaluate its importance to our professional and personal development since then. My statement focuses on the ways in which the TLL has contributed to my increased appreciation of some of the subtleties of Horatian poetry, as well as to a more precise understanding of a particular development in the history of ideas. In Epist. 1.19, Horace draws links between the imitation of human behavior, the invention or reinvention of artistic models, and the representation of life in poetry within a conceptual nexus that I have called “mimesis.” A careful reading of the TLL articles on mimesis (and its Latin translation, imitatio) reveals, rather surprisingly, that the use of “mimesis” as a convenient term for this nexus is an anachronism from both an Aristotelian and a Horatian perspective. Awareness of the conceptual gaps in this developing history of ideas makes Horace’s linkage in the epistle between human imitation, artistic reinvention, and representation in poetry all the more fascinating.
While my work for l’Année Philologique continues at its usual pace, there’s often something new to report. The SCS announcement for the webinar held on May 7, 2025 by our publisher, Brepols, observes that a lot about APh has changed in the last couple of years, from an improved search engine to expanded coverage of related fields like reception studies (for a recording of the webinar “Navigating the New L’Année Philologique Interface,” see about.brepols.net). To continue our outreach efforts, this year the SCS Program Committee accepted the submission “100 Years of L’Année philologique,” organized by Kirk Ormand, as a panel for presentation in the 2026 AIA/SCS Joint Annual Meeting, to be held in January in San Francisco. I’ll be presenting “Something New under the Sun: Reception Studies Scholarship in L’Année philologique.” Scholars in every discipline of the humanities—and a number of related disciplines, such as the history of law and of medicine—have long engaged with receptions of classical antiquity considered in the broadest sense. In most of the decades since its inception, however, APh has not considered this wider scholarship to fall within its defined scope. But the times they are a-changing. In response to demands from scholars across our interdisciplinary field, in 2020 the Joint SCS-AIA Task Force on the Future of Bibliography advised the American office to begin investigating a strategy for including such material. Lisa Carson, director of the American Office (AO), Mack Zalin, Chair of the Advisory Board of the AO, and I developed an initial conceptual model. Then, with the assistance of our European editorial partners, we implemented a methodology to allow the inclusion of scholarship that embraces reception studies as a legitimate area of study. My discussion aims to offer a glimpse into the vibrant scholarship that comes to light through inclusion of studies over the unexpectedly broad range of subjects (architecture, philosophical treatises, film and television, music, graphic novels, and more) having to do with the reception of classical antiquity and with the types of this reception (philological study, literary imitation, artistic influence, history of ideas).
Clare Woods
My first full year of chairing the department has been busy. It was an absolute delight to host two big celebrations in the Fall of 2024: "TollyFest", an afternoon of papers in honor of Tolly Boatwright's retirement, and the department's own Centennial celebration. For the latter, I delved into the archives and presented a keynote talk that traced the role of Classical Studies (and those that taught it) in the earliest days of Duke, when we were the Brown Schoolhouse and then Trinity College. Since I had invited a panel of emeriti to talk about more recent decades at Duke, I ended my talk in the 1960s and early 1970s, when many faculty were recruited that were still a big part of the department (some of them already emeriti) when I first arrived at Duke: Keith Stanley, Larry Richardson Jr., John Oates, Francis Newton, Peter Burian, and Kent Rigsby. Some of the stories I unearthed about alumni students during WWII are truly fascinating, and I hope to write these up. Watch this space! On a more somber note, we were all devastated to lose our beloved emeritus professor, Francis Newton. I'm so glad he got to share some of his many stories with us at the Centennial celebration.
I taught two courses this past year: a graduate seminar focused on Pliny the Elder's Natural History in F24, and History of the Book in S25. Pliny’s NH is a text that has loomed large in my life in recent years, and it was wonderful to share parts of it with students. We dipped into several books, familiarizing ourselves with Pliny's clipped and idiosyncratic Latin, and enjoying his "facts" and strange tales. A final project for the course involved students "adopting" a folio or two from Duke's early printed Pliny (Parma, 1476) and deciphering the various marginalia. I'm also happy to report that my own article on this heavily annotated Pliny volume is currently in press for Mediaevalia. Teaching undergraduate History of the Book (S25) is always a pleasure, not the least in watching students learn by making and doing. This year's students made pottery and explored pot sherds as containers for text; they made beautifully decorated manuscript and printed books - the printed book even had ingenious watermarks on their own handmade paper! The team working on modern/future books explored generative AI to produce a digital version of the Odyssey with visual and audio aids. Most striking with this iteration of the course were our ideas regarding present/future books thanks to developments in AI.
Finally, I really enjoyed participating in two programs for Duke alumni. In May, I was the faculty leader for an alumni trip to Spain. We walked stretches of the Camino, ending up in Santiago de Compostela. Along the way, I gave lectures on medieval pilgrimage, and on the illuminated manuscripts of northern Spain. In July, I took part for the second year running in the Forever Learning Summer Academy, teaching History of the Book to a dedicated group of alumni, and with the wonderful help of David Palko, graduate student in English.