The tenth annual prospective graduate students weekend saw 19 strong candidates from Canada, Greece, the UK, Italy, and Austria, in addition to the US. They were presented with discussions of current research by faculty and graduate students, as well as the advantages of our department.
Philology graduate student Maria Gaki was awarded the Graduate School Dean's Dissertation Completion Fellowship for the 2020/2021 academic year. Gaki's dissertation is about the role of sound – particularly sweet sound, called euphony – in the ancient literary theory of the Hellenistic period. The most important source for the study of euphony is the treatise On Poems of an ancient Greek Epicurean philosopher, Philodemus. This treatise is a work of early literary criticism on poetry. Philodemus who wrote his work in the 1st century B.C., criticizes the theories of some earlier literary critics of the 3rd and 2nd century B.C., the euphonists. These critics dismissed the importance of the poetic content and argued that a poem should be judged primarily on the sound of the words, which should be selected and arranged properly to achieve a euphonious effect and “tickle the hearing”.
Gaki is the fifth Classics graduate student since 2014 to win this award. Other awardees include Christopher Miller, Christopher Motz, Kathleen Kidder, and Emily Egan.
Simone Agrimonti, a Ph.D. candidate in the UC Department of Classics, has received a Graduate Student Government Research Fellowship for interdisciplinary research. The award supports his dissertation project, “Interstate Arbitrations in Hellenistic Messenia.” This study examines a specific type of diplomatic interaction between Greek city-states and sheds new light on their use. Third-party arbitrations were not only an instrument of peace-keeping among the litigious city-states. Through them, ancient Greeks made powerful ideological statements about their communities and their political and cultural identity. Simone’s dissertation is the first scholarly project to focus on the traditionally-overlooked ideological aspects of these documents. This award will support his research by allowing him to travel to Greece during the summer of 2020. There he will visit several museums, archaeological sites, and mountainous areas (Messene, Olympia, Taygetos), to examine in person Greek legal documents inscribed on stone.
This year, the Graduate Student Government Research Fellowship is also funding another UC Classics dissertation project by Valia Tsikritea.
Curious about our course offerings for Fall 2020? Check out our Course Catalog website, which gives you a description of the class, as well as the time, days, instructor, and BoK codes. You can also sort by graduate or undergraduate level courses, Greek or Latin, and specific BoK codes.
Sarah Wenner, a Ph.D. Candidate in Classical Archaeology, recently accompanied the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Curator of South Asian Art, Islamic Art, and Antiquities, Ainsley Cameron, on a research trip to Jordan funded through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The museum, which houses the largest collection of Nabataean material outside of Jordan, has embarked on a multi-year project to reinstall their Ancient Middle East collections. The research trip included visits to Madaba, Petra, the Dead Sea, and Amman, as well as meetings with staff from the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, The Petra Museum, and The Jordan Museum. The group also climbed Khirtbet et-Tannur, a Nabataean temple excavated by Cincinnati-native Nelson Glueck, where they documented the current state of the temple.
Alice Crowe, a Ph.D. candidate in the UC Department of Classics, has received the Archaeological Institute of America’s Harriet and Leon Pomerance Fellowship in the archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean for the AY 2020-2021. The award supports her dissertation project, entitled “Beyond the Walls of the Labyrinth: A Site-wide Perspective on Final Palatial and Postpalatial Knossos,” which is a study of the Greek archaeological site of Knossos (Crete) in the 15th through 12th centuries B.C. Rather than focus on Knossos’ palace, where most scholarly attention has been directed, her dissertation looks at how the site in its entirety functioned, examining developments in both elite and non-elite parts of the city. She analyzes assemblages from the “mansions” and “villas” of Knossos’ city center and material discovered in more peripheral areas of the site, including surface finds collected by an intensive survey of the Knossos valley. During the Fall semester, she will use the award to fund her stay at the Knossos Stratigraphical Museum, where she will examine artifacts held in the museum’s storerooms.
Crowe is the third UC Classics graduate student in the last decade to win this award.
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