Representation of Cato the Censor, from an 18th century edition of Plutarch’s Lives. Source: LIFE

Rutgers Classics turned out in force for the 2009 annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, 8-10 October, at the storied Doubletree Hotel in downtown Wilmington Delaware.

The conference program featured Liz Gloyn, a Rutgers Classics PhD candidate, presenting her talk “Life in Plastic, It’s Fantastic: Classical Reception and Barbie”. Gloyn, currently the holder of a University and Bevier dissertation fellowship, is now back to working on her PhD thesis on the ethics of the family in Seneca. But she has promised the RU Classics blog a peak at her “Plastic, Fantastic” conclusions—watch this space!

RU alumnae also made a considerable contribution to the papers at the meeting. Deborah Lemieur (Saint Joseph’s University), MA 2006 spoke on using Apollonius, King of Tyre as an intermediate Latin text. Marice Rose (Fairfield University), who completed her PhD in art history at Rutgers, spoke on how to use current events in archeology to encourage significant learning.

As if that wasn’t enough, Sarolta Takács, Dean of the SAS Honors Program and Professor of History at Rutgers, was elected CAAS First Vice President during the business meeting of the Association in its Saturday session.

Also seen: Katherine Wasdin, Rutgers Classics visiting assistant professor, and RU Classics graduate students Charles George and Kate Whitcomb. The 2010 CAAS meeting will be in Newark, NJ, right in Rutgers’ home territory—we look forward to seeing an equally strong turnout then!

But that’s not all. In Hamilton, Ontario, on 3 October 2009, Eleanor Jefferson, a second year graduate specializing in Roman history, presented a paper “United We Stand?: Cultural Negotiation in Cato’s Origines” at the McMaster University graduate student conference “Cross Cultural Influence In The Roman World.” The keynote speaker at that conference was Emma Dench of Harvard University, who spoke on “Roman and Local Conceptualizations of Time”.

Left to right: S. Takács, K. Wasdin, E. Gloyn, at the 2009 CAAS annual meeting

What’s new with Rutgers Classics Professor Emeritus William W. Fortenbaugh—founder of Project Theophrastus and of Rutgers University Studies in Classical Humanities (RUSCH)?  He writes,

“From September 10-12 a well-attended conference on the philosopher and musical theorist Aristoxenus was held at DePauw University.  The organizer and host was Carl Huffmann.“

“Thanks to his efforts, Project Theophrastus pulled off a first: there had never been a conference devoted entirely to Aristoxenus, but now there has been. The old boy must be pleased, and he will be even happier when the conference proceedings are published in RUSCH. Biography and musical theory will be well covered, and there will be a new and complete edition of the fragments together with an English translation and notes.”

The next biennial conference for Project Theophrastus is already scheduled for 24-27 July 2011. It will be held in Germany, at Trier, where it is being organized by Georg Wöhrle and Oliver Hellmann. The title of the conference is “Phaenias of Eresus and the Early Peripatos: Specialization and Differentiation in Research.”

Professor Fortenbaugh continues, “Papers focused on Phaenias will be most welcome, but presenters may also consider other members of the early Peripatos like Theophrastus and Aristoxenus. ‘Research’ suggests natural science, but presenters need not confine themselves to science narrowly construed. They may take an inclusive approach, so that other areas of research are covered.”

Persons interested in the conference should contact Oliver Hellmann: his email address is hellmann@uni-trier.de.

The Graduate Students of Rutgers University are pleased to announce “All Roads Lead From Rome: The Classical (non)Tradition in Popular Culture,” a graduate student conference on reception.

Liz Gloyn, Ben Hicks and Lisa Whitlatch are coordinating the conference with the help of Classics Graduate Student Organization co-presidents Eleanor Jefferson and Lane Worrall.  The Call for Papers is below, and we’re looking forward to an exciting event.

The conference will be held on April 9, 2010, and the keynote speaker will be Sheila Murnaghan (University of Pennsylvania).

Please check out the Facebook group “All Roads Lead From Rome” for further information.

Now here’s the CFP…

The aim of this conference is to bring together papers that consider the many ways that classics informs the world around us.

What is reception? Where does it fit within the discipline? Where do we find Classical influence in modern culture? How do modern uses of the ancient world change the way we think about antiquity?

The Classics Graduate Student Organization at Rutgers University is delighted to invite submissions for papers that explore and expand ideas of classical reception from graduate students in the fields of classics and related fields, such as film studies; comparative literature; English; cultural studies; history; American studies; women’s and gender studies; philosophy and art history.

The organizers especially encourage papers that examine forms of reception in popular culture, broadly construed, such as song lyrics; modern literature; modern art; architecture; furniture and decorative objects; toys; poetry; theatre and performance; politics and political rhetoric; computer and video games; texts (lost) in translation; opera; the history of classical scholarship; science fiction; uses of the classics in education; television; fashion design; YouTube; comics and cartoons.

Papers should last twenty minutes; abstracts are limited to 300 words. Please specify in your cover e-mail whether you will need any presentation aids, such as a projector.

The deadline for abstracts is 30th November 2009. Abstracts and queries should be sent to lizgloyn@eden.rutgers.edu. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by 31st December 2009.

Appian Way (1965). Credit: Gjon Mili/LIFE

Kristen Baxter at the Rutgers Geology Museum, March 2009.

Kristen Baxter, a fifth-year graduate student pursuing her PhD in Classics at Rutgers, will be spending the 2009-10 academic year studying as a Regular Member at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA).

Baxter also has been awarded the American School’s Martin Ostwald Fellowship to allow her to pursue her studies. The Fellowship provides a stipend plus room and board at Loring Hall on the School grounds and waiver of School fees. Kristen is the second Rutgers Classics graduate student in two years to win a Fellowship to the ASCSA; Sean Jensen held the Michael Jameson Fellowship at the American School for 2008/9.

While at the ASCSA, Kristen will be involved in a variety of activities. She will tour the major sites and museums of Greece and the islands, as well as travel to Turkey and Sicily. Plus will be taking courses on the sites and monuments of Athens and Attica, Greek Sacred Law, and Stone Tool Technology. Kristen also hopes to participate in the school’s archaeological excavations.

Having successfully completed her coursework and qualifying exams, Kristen is also currently working on her dissertation under the direction of Professor Timothy Power. Here she illuminates some aspects of the religious functions of Pindar’s epinician odes through an examination of the ways in which Pindar employs prayers within them. Throughout there is a focus on the close reading of particular odes.

Kristen Baxter received her undergraduate degree from Villanova University. At Rutgers, Kristen has taught both Latin and ancient Greek, as well as Expository Writing.

“I look forward to my time in Athens”, she tells the RU Classics Blog, “not only as an opportunity to visit the great sites of the ancient world, but as a chance to gain a better understanding of the Greek world, which may serve as a resource in both my scholarship and teaching.”

Temple of Athena Nike at Athens, ca. 1935. From the RU Classics collection of lantern slides.

OK, we know that there have been no posts on the RU Classics Blog for like six or seven weeks…that’s because we’ve been researching for some big future features on Rutgers alums Lane Cooper (Class of 1896, and son of one of Rutgers’ more important classicists),  Ozzie Nelson ‘27 and Mr. Magoo. Oh, and it’s summer.

So it was a genuine piece of great news to get this engaging postcard from our distinguished 2008 Ph.D. (and former University Trustee) Ryan Fowler.  Here Ryan offers a lyrical, richly illustrated portrait of his first full-time teaching position, at Iowa’s Grinnell College—with a few remarks on his next stop, which is another outstanding Midwestern small liberal arts institution, Knox College in Galesburg Illinois.

“One never knows what will catch the eye of a potential employer. I have a relatively odd set of teaching skills, but some of the skills desired by the Classics Department at Grinnell (such as the ability to teach Ancient Philosophy and Logic 101) had not even been mentioned in the American Philological Association placement listing. It is impossible to anticipate anything in the academic job process, but apparently there seemed to be a fit, and I was hired.

My first shock was the moving situation. I was living in Park Slope, Brooklyn commuting by subway or train to Brooklyn College (not bad) and The College of New Jersey in Ewing (very bad: look at a commuter’s map; its about 80 miles one way, through NYC and all of NJ). I asked about college housing: one house was left, a “rather expensive” four bedroom two story with hardwood floors, renting at $600/mo.

I was paying $1400 to share a small two-bedroom at the time. My commute would be “about a two minute walk.” A greater shock, perhaps, would be the population difference: from Brooklyn (many, many people) or New Brunswick (50,172) to an isolated town of 9,105 residents (around 1,589 of whom are students).

One of my first experiences at Grinnell was the Farmer’s Market, which is located on one of the two downtown streets.

As the sun was setting, neighbors who knew everything about each other (good and bad) milled about, and the East-West train slowly crawled by a few feet away. Professors, recently arrived students, and other residents from the town collected around the local fare. This was as pure a Midwestern small town moment as I could imagine, and I savored it.

The campus is, as it should be in the center of Iowa, idyllic (the North/South train runs through campus.

Modern buildings (such as the new Noyce ‘49 building…

…yes, that Robert Noyce) were surrounded by grass greener than I had imagined.

I enjoyed these scenes as long as I could until winter came, which would bring many feet of snow, impressive winds, and a day that would register on the local bank thermometer as -20 °F.

But I had been at Rutgers and Brooklyn College: I knew something about snow and cold. In fact, I knew nothing of what winter was capable of–ever heard of “Thunder Snow”? Neither had I.

There were some odd comforts to the area. About 30 minutes away, in a town of 300 was the Ladora Bank Bistro, a giant marble bank dedicated in 1920 (defunct by 1931) that served Riesling and Cabernet to farmers, business people from Iowa City, professors from various Iowa institutions, and students out on dates. If you haven’t seen a giant of a farmer (covered from head to toe in oil or green hay, except for a perfectly clean outline of his safety goggles) order “a dry Chenin Blanc and a mushroom torte,” then you have not yet experienced the New Midwest.

Teaching would prove to be rather different than previous gigs. My average class size would be going from a (reported) 14:1 at Rutgers to 10:1 at Grinnell, and I did have small classes, ranging from 6 in Advanced Greek to 20 students in Logic 101. But gone were the days of anything resembling a lecture; I found very quickly that I was encouraged not to do it, and further that the students would not tolerate it. The discussion-based method here, when done well, feels like teaching without a net. Begin a class with a notion, some statement: if it is a good one, excellent discussion will flow with some minor directing; if it doesn’t spark anything, there could be utter silence and stillness.

A new experience for me would be the application of an (informal) honor code (cf. Oberlin College for an infamous formal version). I found that students were, on occasion, giving incorrect responses for problems that were answered in the back of the textbook (Robert Paul Churchill’s Logic). After asking someone in office hours, I was told that looking in the back of a book was a form of cheating. The same was said for Wikipedia and a number of other undergraduate stand-bys.

Overall, I found Grinnell students personable and engaged. In Hum 101 (a “greatest Greek hits” course) we began watching adaptations of tragedies on Thursday evenings. They didn’t like Thursdays (it is both a study night and a party night: often at the same time), so they voted unanimously for 10am Saturday morning viewings. Enjoying a pot of coffee I would make in the department and local fresh donuts, we watched a dozen films over the rest of the semester.

Our final Saturday together we pulled out the big guns: when Von Trier’s 1988 Medea ended I had the most interesting experience—14 of us all sat in silence in a darkened theater with the sun shining through the cracks between the shades, there in a little town in the middle of Iowa, collectively moved by the image of two small innocent bodies swaying from the bare tree.

I will move relatively soon from this visiting position to the next: a last-minute spot at Knox College. I know relatively little about my new employer, except that it is generally considered to be a sibling school and is in the same consortium and conference as Grinnell. With fewer students (1,340 or so) and an excellent reputation, the character of the students remains to be seen. I do know that Knox does have a somewhat elaborate official honor code. And this time the house I am renting is a pleasant $500 a month.”

Thanks so much Ryan, from everyone at RU Classics!  We hope that you get to teach at least one course in the Knox College Old Jail!

From the archives: Ryan Fowler in his native San Francisco, APA Annual Meeting, January 2004

The oldest extant Rutgers diploma: Simeon DeWitt, class of 1776. Credit: Thomas Frusciano, SC/UA

What a Commencement Week for Rutgers Classics. One (especially well-deserved) PhD, two MPhils, five MAs, and fourteen Classics majors and thirteen minors who received the BA degree.

21 May Rutgers College/SAS joint Commencement

Plus, for the University, a particularly enlightened choice of honorary degree recipients. The group included fashion designer Marc Ecko, businessman and social activist Alfred C. Koeppe (Newark Alliance), artist Faith Ringgold, jazz luminary Sonny Rollins, and social psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo.

20 May pre-Commencement with the honorary degree recipients. Above: Faith Ringgold. Below: Philip Zimbardo

At the traditional breakfast for these honorees, Sonny Rollins chose to keep celebratory words at a minimum, and instead took out his horn to play an inspired solo version of “The Folks Who Live on the Hill”.

Sonny Rollins takes the Jerome Kern songbook one step beyond

Marc Ecko doubled as Commencement speaker, impressively toting along his own Teleprompter system for the occasion. His (surprisingly effective) topic? The wisdom of “Row Row Row Your Boat”.

Ex-RU Pharmacy student Marc Ecko, founder of Marc Ecko Enterprises

Special congratulations are due to new Classics PhD Christopher Marchetti. Chris wrote his dissertation on “Aristoxenus’ Elements of Rhythm: Text, Translation, and Commentary“, under the direction of Thomas J. Figueira.

For six years now Marchetti has been based at the Flint Hill School (Oakton VA), as Upper School Classics Teacher. Before that he taught for a full eleven years in NJ at the Princeton Latin Academy. In 2001 he authored a textbook Elementary Ancient Greek that still sees use in schools today. This June Chris presents at Royal Holloway, London, at the 9th Annual RHUL/APGRD Postgraduate Symposium on the Reception of Ancient Drama. In July he will participate in the conference “The Look of Lyric: Greek Song and the Visual” at the European Cultural Centre in Delphi.

Chris Marchetti, Rutgers Classics PhD 2009

RU Classics faculty members Serena Connolly (Yale blue) and Timothy Power (Harvard crimson)

But that’s not even the half of it…!!!

In spring 2005 the Classics departmental faculty voted to revive the Master of Philosophy degree in Classics. It is available to doctoral candidates in the program who meet the M.Phil. requirements of the Graduate School-New Brunswick, but with additional (demanding) stipulations. This academic year saw the first two students to meet all the requirements and receive the degree: Elizabeth A. Gloyn and Benjamin Wesley Hicks.

Academic procession takes ceremonial shortcut through Old Queen’s

Receiving the Master of Arts in academic year 08/09: Classics graduate students Naomi G. Gutierrez, Eirikur Gauti Kristjansson, Guy P. Smoot (now at Harvard University, Department of Comparative Literature), Jeremy Christian Thompson (now at University of Chicago, Department of History), and Lisa Ann Whitlatch. These five students deserve our warm congratulations.

And equally warm congratulations are owed to our undergraduate majors in Classics who graduated in 08/09: David Apigo, Benjamin Brophy, Joseph Darocki, Tova Genesen, Rachel Greiff, Dennis Hou, Jad Kaado, Nevean Khalil, David Nelson, Dimitri Nessas, Dan Notarmuzi, Alex Potts, Robert Santucci, and Jessica Shao.

Graduating with departmental Honors: Jad Kaado’09

Of course, our compliments to our undergraduate minors in Classics: Elizabeth Anderson, Gregory Campisi, Kellen Clarke, Austin-Lei De Pinto, Paul Farrugia, Emily Ferejohn, Brian Gorman, Heather Holgate, Erini Kabourakis, Adam Session, Yelena Shagalova, Michael Strassler, and Eric Zales.

Brienne Cignarella’10, a double major in Classics and Art History in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), has won a Henry Rutgers Scholars Award, which recognizes 15 outstanding theses for the academic year.  Each award carries with it a cash prize of $1,000.

All Rutgers SAS students who are completing a department-based honors thesis or an Interdisciplinary Honors Thesis are designated as SAS Paul Robeson Scholars. And all SAS Paul Robeson Scholars are eligible to be considered for the Henry Rutgers Scholars Award. SAS Honors Dean Sarolta A. Takács announced the prize earlier this month.

Brienne Cignarella in RU Special Collections/University Archives, working with the Rutgers collection of Roman Republican coins

Cignarella, who hails from Hopewell NJ, wrote an unusually ambitious thesis entitled “Simulacra Database Management System: An Object-Oriented Approach toward Knowledge Retrieval.”  In essence, what Brienne has done is used the numismatic collection of Princeton University to formulate a new descriptive ontology for coins—or indeed for any type of object.

Cignarella presented her thesis in April in a poster presentation at Rutgers’ Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates, and before that, at a highly competitive juried international conference, the 2009 CAA [= Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology]. That was held in Williamsburg VA from 22 through 26 March.

The CAA is one of the premier venues for presentation of work on computer applications to the humanities, with many of the leaders in this rapidly emerging academic field appearing on the program. The Aresty Research Center provided support for Cignarella to participate in the event.

For the CAA conference, Brienne submitted a paper based on her thesis to a grueling jury process of three referees.  The work was accepted for the 26 March session “The Semantic Web: 2nd Generation Applications”.

In the paper, Brienne Cignarella outlined the conceptual model and major components of her new ontology, which is stored in a system of classes and properties. That is typical of object-oriented databases. But what is novel here is the choice of object, and the sophisticated querying system, which has applicability well beyond coin databases.

The jurors called her “clearly written” abstract “a valuable contribution that should be of great interest to the CAA community”, while urging her to investigate “interoperability…beyond the walls of a single institution”.

In fact, Brienne is doing precisely that, for this summer she will start the work of organizing—at least conceptually—Rutgers’ impressive Roman coin collection (housed in Alexander Library Special Collections) along the standards that she developed for the Princeton coins. Her thesis adviser T. Corey Brennan remains involved in the project.

This term Cignarella took a graduate level seminar in numismatics at Princeton University, with Alan Stahl, a world-renowned expert on ancient and medieval coins, and Curator of the Princeton collection. She also was elected at Rutgers to Phi Beta Kappa.

Brienne is contemplating graduate study in ancient studies, with the eventual aim of entering the rapidly emerging field of electronic humanities.

Aes grave from the pre-Hannibalic period: a rare variant as (Crawford 35/1 = Sydenham 71) in the Rutgers Roman Republican coin collection

Andrea De Giorgi surveys Seleukia Sidera (aka Claudiocaesarea)

Looking for a heads-up on what to expect from Rutgers Classics in 09/10?

Well, for a start, Andrea De Giorgi (re)joins us next September as a visiting assistant professor. In 2006/7 Andrea held a postdoctorate fellowship in the department and also taught two large lecture courses on ancient religions. He then spent 2007-2009 teaching in the Department of Classics at Case Western Reserve University. At Rutgers in 2009/10 he will offer a range of courses in Roman social history and visual culture, as well as in Latin literature.

Andrea De Giorgi on the Douglass Campus of Rutgers University

Andrea De Giorgi was educated in Classics at the Università di Torino and received his PhD at Bryn Mawr, in its Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. Andrea’s dissertation—a study of the city and country of Roman Antioch on the Orontes—will appear shortly as a monograph. He’s also co-editing two works: the new Oxford Historical Atlas of the Classical World, and a study on Hellenism in Cilicia.

De Giorgi is also co-director of the newly established Isparta Archaeological Survey and is currently involved in the study and publication of the collections for Anazarbos (Cilicia) and Antioch on the Orontes at the Princeton Museum. Other than in Turkey, he has directed and participated in a variety of archaeological projects in Italy, Syria, Cyprus, UAE, and the Republic of Georgia.

Speaking of Georgia, but in this case the US Peach State…new visiting assistant professor Katherine Wasdin was born and raised in Bremen, Georgia, but has for many years now lived in New England. She was an undergraduate Classics major at Brown University (BA 2003), and will receive a fall 2009 PhD from the Department of Classics of Yale University.

Katherine Wasdin at the Old Queen’s building on the RU campus, with 1770 charter of the university

Wasdin’s Yale dissertation, “The Reluctant Bride: Greek and Latin Wedding Poems,” analyzes poems about and for weddings from the archaic Greek poet Sappho, through the Attic dramatists, Theocritus, Catullus, Statius, and all the way to Claudian, writing in the late fourth century of our era. Katherine’s particular focus in this ambitious study is on the development of imagery and the interplay between literature and culture.

Wasdin is also serving as co-editor for a collection of essays—to be published in the Yale Classical Studies series—on the reception of the Classics. That volume arose from a conference held at Yale in April 2007, that she co-directed. Though her dissertation topic is wide-ranging, Wasdin has particular interests in the literature of the Roman Empire, which she looks forward to teaching in the fall.

Andrea De Giorgi and Katherine Wasdin bring the total number of Classics faculty in the Rutgers department to nine for 2009/10.

Next year, Professor (II) Thomas J. Figueira—marking his 30th year in the Department—will offer his celebrated courses in Classics and in History. Joining him are assistant professors Emily Allen (new for 2009), Leah Kronenberg, and Timothy Power. Visiting assistant professor Matt Fox continues in the department for a third year, this time with special responsibility for Classics teaching and program development in Rutgers’ Division of Continuous Education and Outreach.

Serena Connolly will be on leave for 2009/10, on a Mellon Fellowship for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. On 1 July 2009 Corey Brennan is taking up a temporary position on the staff of the American Academy in Rome (the post of Andrew W. Mellon Professor-in-Charge) that runs through June 2012.

Azzan Yadin, associate professor in Jewish Studies and a member of the Rutgers graduate faculty in Classics, will serve as acting chair in the department for 2009/10.

Teaching assistants are RU Classics graduate students Andriy Fomin, Charles George, Eleanor Jefferson, Rachel Loer, and Constantin Pop.

From left: Azzan Yadin, Timothy Power, Serena Connolly, Emily Allen. Credit: L. Kronenberg

This past Thursday 30 April, the Graduate School—New Brunswick announced the winners of its twelve University and Louis Bevier Dissertation Fellowships for the 2009-2010 academic year.

One of just four Rutgers graduate students in the Humanities to be chosen as a Bevier Fellow was Classics graduate student Elizabeth Gloyn, for her dissertation “Seneca and the Ethics of the Family”.

Liz Gloyn, who received her first two degrees (BA Hon., M.Phil.) from Newnham College Cambridge, is finishing up her year as a member of the inaugural class of Rutgers Scholar-Teachers at Rutgers-Newark, where she has spent the spring semester teaching Latin 102 and Gender & Sexuality in the Ancient World.

“Although I’ll miss teaching,” Liz said, “I’m looking forward to working on my dissertation through the coming academic year. I’m about to begin work on my third chapter, which will examine Seneca’s views on marriage.”

Gloyn has other academic plans for the upcoming year. She will be presenting a talk at the 2010 American Philological Association meeting in Anaheim, during a workshop entitled “New Ventures in Classics Pedagogy: The Challenge of Teaching about Rape”.

She also hopes to find time to work on her pet project, the reception of the Classics in collectible Barbie dolls. You can see two amazing examples here and (especially) here.

But before all of that, Gloyn plans to take a well-earned break over the summer vacation, “spending time both back in the UK and in Aruba.”

Commemorative centenary lamp from Old Queen’s, built in 1809, and which celebrated its 200th anniversary this past week

The Bevier Fellowship is in memory of Rutgers classicist Louis Bevier Jr. (1857-1925). He was a descendant of Louis Bevier, a Huguenot who settled in New York state in 1665 and was one of the twelve patentees of the New Paltz Palatinate.

Louis Bevier, Jr., graduated from Rutgers College in 1878, and then studied for three years at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation, on “The Genuineness of the First Antiphontean Oration”, written under the great Basil Gildersleeve, was just the fourth in the Hopkins Classics program to be awarded a Ph.D.

After traveling and studying in Europe (Leipzig and Bonn, also at the infant American School of Classical Studies at Athens), Bevier became an instructor in Modern Languages and Latin at Rutgers, and in 1893 was elected Professor of Greek. His Brief Greek Syntax (1901) found itself reprinted by Caratzas in 1981.

Bevier was deeply interested in promoting college athletics and in 1905 was one of the principal founders of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (formerly the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States), when the burning issues of the day were student football injuries and summer baseball for pay. In 1912 Bevier became the second-ever Dean of Rutgers College, a position he held until his death in 1925.

As it happens, this very day (5 May 2009) is the 84th anniversary of Bevier’s death at his home at Bishop Place in New Brunswick.

From The New York Times, 6 May 1925

Lee Siegel. Credit: Jill Krementz

This Friday, 8 May at 1 PM, Rutgers Classics sponsors yet another mega-event: a guest lecture by cultural critic Lee Siegel. His topic? “Brother, Can You Seize a Diem: The Precious Worth of Useless Knowledge in Desperate Times”. It all goes down Friday at the Ruth Adams Building Room 207 (131 George Street), New Brunswick. [Note new location.] Special thanks to the office of the Vice President for Undergraduate Education at Rutgers-NB for making all this possible.

Siegel is the author of three books, most recently, of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (Random House 2008). He has also been the television critic for The New Republic, book critic for The Nation, art critic for Slate, staff writer at Harper’s and Talk, contributing writer for the LA Times Book Review, associate editor of ARTnews, and associate editor of Raritan. In 2002, Siegel received the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. He writes frequently for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

For academic year 2008/9 Lee Siegel has been a visiting professor in Rutgers’ Departments of American Studies, History, and Journalism and Media Studies in its School of Communication, Information and Library Studies. In the fall he taught Literary Criticism, and this current term a class on Screen Culture.

What can we expect Friday afternoon? “There’s been much handwringing lately”, writes Siegel, “about how the economic crisis is having a terrible effect on the situation of the humanities in higher education. This is somewhat hysterical since the word ‘crisis’ and the word ‘humanities’ are almost synonyms. The humanities are always in crisis because the world does not smile upon means that are ends in themselves, on instrinsic rather than extrinsic worth.”

“Now, at a time when the pragmatic verities are being put into question, humanists should rejoice”, argues Siegel. “Instead there seems to be growing despair. However, this institutional anxiety is really the result of an institutional arrogance. The ‘humanities’ are in ‘crisis’ because the humanities are not just woefully dependent on institutions, but pridefully allied with them. They have become inseparable from their institutions and have grown indifferent to their own sources in life..”

So what is to be done? Budgets may be cut, jobs may seem to be scarce, but certain people will always aspire to be free by making clarity of consciousness a vocation. At this moment, when clarity in any sphere of life is rare, all the humanities need do to flourish is to run up the flag of active contemplation, creative indolence, and urgent irrelevance–to speak confidently about their original, non-institutional nature. And this entail a different way of looking at culture, which I will attempt to do in this talk.”

Want to get to Ruth Adams Building? Campus buses: EE College Ave to Cook/Douglass; F College Ave to Cook/Douglass via George Street; also REXB Busch to Cook/Douglass Express; REXL Livingston to Cook/Douglass Express. Or see driving directions here.  Parking (metered) is best in the Parking Deck behind the Douglass Campus Center. For more details, see the Rutgers Classics homepage > Contact Us.

Lee Siegel visited Google’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters to discuss Against the Machine on 28 April 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series. You can view the event in its entirety below.