Kirk Ambrose

In fall 2023, Professor Kirk Ambrose was selected as a 2023-4 Distinguished Research Lecturer. This prestigious award, one of the highest honors bestowed on the CU Â鶹ӰԺ faculty, recognizes colleagues with a distinguished body of academic and/or creative achievement and prominence, as well as contributions to CU's educational and service missions. 

Kirk delivered his Distinguished Research Lecture, "The Authentic and the Counterfeit in Medieval Art," on Tuesday, Nov. 28, 4:00-5:00, to a packed house in Chancellor’s Hall and Auditorium (CASE building).

To view the recording of Kirk’s stimulating lecture, click .

The abstract of his talk is below:

Authenticating relics was a foundational activity during the Middle Ages in Europe, for it was widely understood that these earthly remains of saints offered a vehicle for the divine to work miracles, from healing the sick to punishing—and even killing—enemies of the Church. Because possessing a venerable saint’s bodily remains could bolster the prestige and financial fortunes of institutions, the temptation to invent fake claims could be great. Indeed, the years between 1000 and 1150 have been dubbed the “golden age of medieval forgery.” To explore how institutions bolstered their claims to possess authentic relics in this period rife with fakes, Professor Ambrose's lecture will focus on the case of the monastery of Sainte-Foy, Conques, in France. He will examine how this community used the visual arts to advance their claims, as well as to condemn those who engaged in counterfeiting practices.

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Dimitri Nakassis

The Department is thrilled to announce that Professor Dimitri Nakassis has been named a College Professor of Distinction, an honorific title awarded by CU’s College of Arts and Sciences that is “reserved for scholars and artists of national and international distinction who are also recognized by their college peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent.” This well-deserved honor recognizes the many outstanding contributions that Dimitri has made in research, teaching, and service, at the national and international levels. Please join us in offering Dimitri hearty congratulations!

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CU Classics is delighted to announce that our own Diane Conlin (Associate Professor Emerita) has been awarded the 2021 Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award by the ! Please join us in celebrating our excellent colleague. We are grateful that all of her hard work has been recognized.

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Diane Conlin Awarded Emeritus Status!

The Department of Classics is delighted to announce that our colleague Diane Conlin has been awarded the title of Associate Professor Emerita by the College of Arts and Sciences, effective August 23^rd, 2020! This honor is well-deserved for Diane’s many contributions of every kind to the Department over the years and for her ongoing research on Roman art in the age of the Flavian emperors. Congratulations, Diane!

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We are thrilled to announce that Professor Beth Dusinberre will be named a CU Professor of Distinction, an honorific title awarded by CU’s College of Arts and Sciences that is “reserved for scholars and artists of national and international distinction who are also recognized by their college peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent.” This is an enormously important and well-deserved recognition of the many outstanding contributions that Beth has made in research, teaching, and service, at local, national and international levels. Please join us in offering Beth many congratulations!

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The Department of Classics congratulates Isabel Köster on her successful comprehensive review and reappointment!

Isabel Köster (Ph.D. Harvard 2011) studies the history and literature of the Roman Republic and early Empire with a special interest in matters of religion. Her publications include articles and chapters on divine punishment, various aspects of Ciceronian invective, and, most recently, the emperor Caligula’s flamingo sacrifices. She is currently completing her first book, Roman Temple Robbery: The Literary Construction of a Heinous Crime.

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The Department of Classics congratulates Sarah James on her tenure and promotion to Associate Professor!

Sarah James (Ph.D. UTexas Austin 2010) studies the archaeology of Hellenistic Greece, particularly of the northeast Peloponnese from the 3rd-1st centuries B.C. Her numerous publications treat the economies and socio-cultural histories of this region through the lens of ceramics, including her 2018 book Corinth VII.7 Hellenistic Pottery: The Fine Wares (ASCSA Princeton). As a field archaeologist, she has directed excavations at the ancient Greek cities of Corinth and Sikyon and co-directed a pedestrian survey of the northwestern Argolid plain (the Western Argolid Regional Project). Her new research project focuses on the activities of Greeks and Romans in the eastern Adriatic, with excavations starting in 2021 on the island of BraÄŤ, Croatia.

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The Department of Classics congratulates John Gibert on his promotion to Full Professor!

John Gibert (BA Yale, PhD Harvard) is interested in archaic and classical Greek poetry, especially Homer and drama, and in particular the tragic playwright Euripides. His edition of Euripides’ Ion with introduction, Greek text, and commentary appeared last year in the series Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, popularly known as the “green and yellow.” He is the author of Change of Mind in Greek Tragedy and co-author, with Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp, of Euripides: Selected Fragmentary Plays II, as well as numerous articles, chapters, and reviews on Greek literature and culture, which remain the focus of his current work. At CU, he has supervised Honors theses, MA theses, and five PhD dissertations, and he has taught classes on over 30 different topics, including Greek and Latin at all levels and lecture courses on Greek Mythology, Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece, and Greek and Roman Epic, Tragedy, and Comedy. He has served the Classics Department as Chair, Associate Chair for Graduate Studies, and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies. He enjoys participating in theatrical productions, most recently as dramaturge for the CU Theatre & Dance Department’s production of Euripides’ Hecuba in 2018. His daughter Sophie Gibert created the illustration accompanying this story.

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Jackie Elliott has won a College Scholar Award, which she will use to support the completion of the following two projects:

1. A short, introductory volume on Early Roman Poetry, for Brill’s Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry series. This volume will offer an overview of current scholarship and interpretive trends in the area of early Roman poetry, laying out key questions about the Roman literary record at its origin, and registering the oddity of the fact that a literature developed at Rome at all, when this is by no means a necessary feature of ancient societies. It will detail the pre-literary written record at Rome, as best we can access it, and seek to explain how this record underwrites the features of language that emerge in the fragments of Roman poetry as we encounter them, from the date our record begins (239 BCE). It will engage issues of definition and periodicity; lay out the record itself of early Roman poetry, in its unavoidable relationship to prose, and explain the conceptual framework according to which the ancient world categorized and understood that record; it will explain the sources of our knowledge of that record and the ways that these complicate our access to it; and it will define the consequences of those complications for the task of the editor who sets out to present the record of early Roman poetry to the more general reader. 

2. A monograph: The History of Cato’s °ż°ůľ±˛µľ±˛Ô±đ˛ő.&˛Ô˛ú˛ő±č;°ä˛ąłŮ´Ç’s&˛Ô˛ú˛ő±č;Origines (“Origins”) was by any account a remarkable work. Written by one of the leading Roman statesmen of the mid-second century BCE, it was the first prose history of Rome in Latin and was subsequently construed as the foundation of the tradition of Roman historical writing. The work exists today only as a series of fragments quoted in the works of later authors of antiquity. Not least for that reason, the Origines presents us with a series of interpretive puzzles, the answers to which define the parameters of our reconstructions of the history of Roman historical writing and its place in the intellectual life of the Roman Republic and the Empire that followed. Underlying these puzzles, and relevant to our response to each of them, is the question of the ancient transmission, circulation and reception of the Origines: that is, who read the work, in what contexts, how they interpreted it, and why and how they chose to quote it and thus to pass it on to other readers. This history of ancient readers and of ancient reading is in fact traceable: though the surviving evidence only puts us in a position to tell a small part of the full story of a work’s ancient circulation and reception, such a history is, in fact, the aspect of the work that our challenging evidence best allows us to address. If carried out in detail, it can provide an invaluable guide through the intricate maze of our ancient evidence, able to illuminate perspectives yet to be explored while also showing why established interpretive avenues or indeed broad assumptions about a given work mislead. This project on Cato’s Origines first undertakes such a detailed history of the work’s ancient transmission and reception; this then informs an exploration of larger questions about Cato’s self-positioning as author and relationship to his contemporary and subsequent audiences, with glances across to counterpoised genres, such as epic, that also sought to address the relationship of the Roman past to the Roman present as contemporary audiences experienced it.

One of the larger questions at issue in the conversations this project engages is that of the role literature played in spreading the sense of a cohesive Roman identity across an at-this-time increasingly far-flung Roman sphere of influence. It is sometimes argued or assumed that pride of place in this function would have gone to works of Roman prose history. The findings of this project to date regarding how and by whom works of history were read do not support that notion; the public genre of epic is, in the view these findings afford, a far stronger candidate for celebrating Roman collective achievement and for promoting an understanding, able to permeate the strata of Roman society at large, of what it meant to be Roman.

Jackie will first work on these two projects in Berlin as a Humboldt Foundation fellowship recipient (2020-21); she will complete them during her fall 2021 sabbatical and her spring 2022 tenure of the College Scholar Award.

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