At this year’s meeting, the Classical Association for the Middle West and South, the largest regional conference for Classical Studies in the United States, honored two Duke Classical Studies Graduate Students with major awards.
Sinja Küppers is the graduate student winner of this year’s Rudolph Masciantonio CAMWS Diversity Award. Each year the awards committee selects one graduate student and one undergraduate student whose work towards diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as their own identities help the field of Classical Studies build a more inclusive future. This award recognizes Sinja’s extensive work on DEI, especially her work as co-founder of Duke F1RSTS, a program aimed to support first generation graduate students. As Sinja herself notes, her commitment to creating broader pathways into and through higher education stems from her own experiences as a first generation student.
Michael Freeman is the winner of this year’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Presentation. His paper, “the Body of the Scribe,” combines archaeological evidence alongside embodied scribal knowledge, preserved especially from the Ethiopian Ge’ez scribal tradition (continuous in the region since the 4th century CE and employing many of the same tools and techniques that were used in Roman Egypt) to show that ancient Mediterranean scribes built their craft, their production of manuscripts, and the design and use of all their others implements and techniques around their most important tool: their bodies. This stems from Michael’s wider research which re-centers scribes’ labor, their practices, and their voices.
Congratulations to you both on these impressive achievements!
