General Announcements

The Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment, inaugurated in Spring 1988, is given each year to between five and ten extraordinary undergraduate students. These students deserve campus recognition for academic endeavors that might not otherwise be celebrated.

The Deans' Award honors students for exceptional, tangible accomplishments in the following areas:

Lidwijde de Jong (PhD 2007) has received a coveted Visiting Research Scholarship at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World in New York for the academic year 2010-11. De Jong is currently Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

Click here for a PDF of the conference program.

The Stanford Classics Department is co-sponsoring the Ancient Explanation Conference to be held in the Stanford Humanities Center, 424 Santa Teresa Street on April 17 - 18, 2010. (Map here.)

Explanation is a default mode of today’s academic discourse, but can at different times be employed in a variety of different ways. This conference aims to explore the use of explanation in classical antiquity. What did the ancients explain? For what purposes were explanations made? And who could legitimately give them?

Michael Shanks and fellow archaeologists from Durham University (U.K.) broke ground last summer on a promising new dig near Binchester, the site of an old Roman fort that forms part of the Hadrian's Wall complex. 

The project attracted several Stanford Classics students--both grads and undergrads--and uncovered several more artifacts and structures than had been expected in the dig's first year. Plans are already underway to bring a larger group of students as well as interested members of the public to this summer's archaeological field school at the site. For more information, please email Michael Shanks.

 A PDF showing scheduled events in Stanford Classics and the Stanford Archaeology Center can be viewed or downloaded here. This bulletin will be updated as additional details become available for each event, and look for a new Events announcement tool coming to the website soon.

Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy (Princeton UP) was among five finalists for the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction by the National Book Foundation.

Professor of Classics and Drama Rush Rehm coordinated Stanford Summer Theater's "Electra Festival" with resounding success. The ambitious Festival included a full production of Sophocles' Electra, which Rehm directed, along with stagings of Aeschylus' Libation Bearers and Euripides' Electra, which were followed by post-show discussions led by Classics Professor Emeritus Marsh McCall. The Festival also featured a film series, "Tragic Heroines," and a daylong Continuing Studies symposium, "The Trojan War and Electra."

(Video and photos after the jump.)

Professor Walter Scheidel and Professor Peter Turchin (University of Connecticut) have published a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which they analyze Roman coin hoards to explain population changes in the Roman Republic during the first century B.C.E. A good summary of the report and its implications is available on Stanford's Human Experience website, and the findings have been cited by ScienceNOW, published online by Science magazine here, as well as The New York Times.