New Ancient Art Galleries at the Yale University Art Gallery

An extensive new gallery of ancient Greek and Roman art and a special gallery devoted to the ancient city of Dura-Europos will be completed and available for visits and classes by appointment this fall. The new galleries will open to the public on December 12, 2012. For further information please contact the Gallery’s curators of ancient art, Susan Matheson or Lisa Brody.

Undergraduate

After graduation, Adam Chodorow (B.A. '87) obtained a J.D. and M.A. in history from UVA, studying under Elizabeth Meyer ('79, '88), another Yale Classics Department alum. He then went on to practice law in San Francisco for 12 years, ending up at Pacific Gas and Electric Company. In 2001, he hit the reset button and found his way back into academia. After obtaining an LL.M. in tax from NYU and clerking on the tax court, he landed at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, where he teaches tax and business law. While the connection between classics and tax law is admittedly tenuous, he has not entirely abandoned the ancient world, having written a number of articles that explore biblical taxation and religious tithing. He has also written on the taxation of virtual income (think video games) and other, more mundane tax topics. In 2009/10, Adam spent a year in Chengdu, China, on a Fulbright grant. He counts Gordon Williams as his most inspirational teacher. One day, he’ll get back to reading Latin and maybe even some Greek. No, really…

Ellen Massey, (’08) writes: “Since I last wrote into the Newsletter, my fiance Seth Leonard and I have completed our global circumnavigation under sail aboard our 38-foot cutter "Heretic." We sailed from St Helena island in the South Atlantic to Ascension Island (another British protectorate) where we were lucky enough to witness baby green turtles hatching under a full moon. From there we spent 26 days at sea out of sight of land making the 3000 mile crossing of the Atlantic to Barbados. Luckily we had beautiful weather, sustaining only one night of a gale. We then spent a month sailing up the Lesser Antilles, calling at Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Antigua, and Barbuda, before sailing the 1000 miles to Bermuda. From Bermuda we had a week-long passage (800 miles) to Bar Harbor, Maine where we cleared immigration on June 27, 2010, thus coming full circle around the world. A day later (after we had caught up on sleep!) we were welcomed back to Blue Hill, our home port, with cannon fire! We have now sold "Heretic" and moved to Geneva, Switzerland where I will soon complete an intensive French language course, and where I am at work on a book about the sailing experience. Seth and I were married on July 15, 2011 here in Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Ellen Massey.

James Romm, (’80) will soon see the publication of his first work of ancient history aimed at a wide audience. It is titled "Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the War for Crown and Empire" and will be released by Knopf on October 11. It will be featured as a Main Selection by the History Book Club in the Fall. James is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College. He has just finished a year as a Birkelund Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library. See the book at Amazon.com here.

graduate

Gilbert Lawall, PhD 1961, retired from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2001, where he had created a Department of Classical Studies with a unique Master of Arts in Teaching program in Latin and Classical Humanities. He co-authored the widely used Ecce Romani Latin program and Athenaze: An Introduction to Ancient Greek. He has written on Pindar, Euripides, Theocritus, Apollonius, Herodas, Seneca, and Juvenal and has edited or co-edited numerous editions of Greek and Latin works for use in schools, colleges, and universities. He initiated the New England Classical Newsletter, which he edited and distributed for CANE for many years. He served as President of the ACL, Secretary-Treasurer of CANE, Chairman of the AP A Editorial Board for Textbooks, and Member of the APA Board of Directors. He received numerous awards for distinguished teaching, leadership, and service to the profession. Most recently he coauthored Love and Betrayal: A Catullus Reader and Carpe Diem: A Horace Reader. He currently lives half the year in Amherst, Massachusetts, and spends the other half of the year managing a landmark 39-acre farm on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire his beata arva. (The Department would like to add that Professor Lawall has been a generous contributor to graduate education at Yale, and we have named our Graduate Travel

Eric Varner, PhD 1993, has recently seen his article "Reconfiguring Roman Portraits: Theories and Practices," appear in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. He is currently finishing his book manuscript, Grotesque Aesthetics: Transgression and Transcendence in the Age of Nero and also recently completed two short forays into the world of Late Antiquity, "Maxentius, Constantine and Hadrian: Images and the Expropriation of Imperial Identity," which will appear in an edited volume under the auspices of the Danish Academy in Rome and "Roman Authority, Imperial Authoriality and Julian's Artistic Program," which will appear in N. Baker and S. Tougher, eds., Julian: Emperor and Author (Wales Classical Press) forthcoming in February 2012. In May, he presented a paper entitled, “Fluidity and Fluctuation: the Shifting Dynamics of Condemnation in Roman Imperial Portraiture,” at the Fluide Körper-Bodies in Transition Conference held at Morphomata Internationales Kolleg, University of Cologne. In October, he will deliver the keynote address ("Sex, Lies and Politics: the Portraits of Rome's 'Bad' Empresses') for the opening of the Yale- Mt. Holyoke collaborative exhibition Reconstructing Antiquity at the Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum. He also continues to breed and show Scottish Terriers, all worthy successors to Titus, his dog during graduate school who always loved visiting Phelps.