General Announcements

 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 Sir Geoffrey Lloyd will give the annual Lorenz Eitner Lecture on November 18th. More details about the event are available here. Lloyd is Senior Scholar in Residence at the Needham Research Institute. He was Professor of Classics at Cambridge University until his retirement in 2000.

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. Their findings have been cited by ScienceNOW, published online by Science magazine here. The story subsequently ran in The New York Times.

Dr Patrick Hunt, who was a Lecturer in Classics for a number of years between 1994-2008, has been chosen out of hundreds of nominees as a National Lecturer for 2009-2010 by the Archaeological Institute of America, traveling on the A.I.A. speakers’ circuit across the country.

Recent Classics post-doc and noted Chinese archaeologist  Hsin-Mei Agnes Hsu is slated to host a new documentary series on China's early feats of engineering. "Ancient Man Made Marvels" is a co-production of the Science Channel, the China Intercontinental Communication Center, and Discovery Networks Asia. Dr. Hsu spent 2007-2008 on a postdoctoral fellowship in Stanford Classics, working with Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel on a project sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.

Kara Cooney, who was affiliated with the department while serving as an IHUM Fellow a few years ago, hosts a new comparative archaeology series for the Discovery Channel. "Out of Egypt" premiered in August 2009. Published under the name Kathlyn M. Cooney (but called Kara by everyone), Cooney is an Assistant Professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture at UCLA. She earned her PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Johns Hopkins University in 2002.

The Spring 2009 departmental newsletter includes an address from the department chair and two years' worth of faculty updates, along with student and alumni updates, featured research projects, and more. To download the full newsletter as a PDF--just click here. Design: Macworks Graphics Studio, Menlo Park, CA. Printing: Shoreline Printing and Graphics, Mountain View, CA.