Kudos (prior to May 2022)

Please note: Kudos are now featured as Department of Classics News Stories. 

Updated: May 2022

The recent achievements and accolades of members of our community.

Faculty

  • Seth Bernard’s Falerii Novi Project, investigating a Roman town in central Italy, was featured in the Italian national newspaper Il Messaggero! You can find a link to the article here and receive updates on the project Twitter. Congratulations to Seth and the team!
  • Martin Revermann is the 2022 recipient of the Annual Desmond Morton Research Excellence Award, recognizing his outstanding achievement in research and scholarly activity. Please join us February 16th at 1:00 PM when Professor Revermann will deliver his virtual talk, “The Theatre of Science.” 
  • Seth Bernard has been awarded a 12-month Chancellor Jackman Faculty Research Fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute for 2022-23 for his project “At the Origins of Roman Labour: The Making of a Slave Society in Italy, 500-200 BCE.” Congratulations, Seth!
  • Erik Gunderson’s The Art of Complicity in Martial and Statius, is just out from Oxford University Press. A critique of the politics of praise, it merits our supreme and sincere praise.
  • Kenneth Yu has won a Connaught New Researcher Award. Way to go, Kenny!
  • Hearty congratulations to Seth Bernard and Sarah Murray, recipients of SSHRC Insight Grants! Seth’s project is “An economic history of the Roman conquest of Italy, 500 – 200 BCE” and Sarah’s is “Terrestrial and Underwater Archaeological Survey in Threatened Coastal Landscapes: The Case of Porto Rafti, Eastern Attica, Greece”. Major kudos to both of them!!
  • Seth Bernard did an interview on constructing the city of Rome in the republican period on the podcast Ithaca Bound. 
  • Kudos again to Seth Bernard, who has won a SSHRC Connection Grant to support his international conference “Climate and the Roman Conquest of Italy.” This exciting interdisciplinary event is scheduled for October 1-2. Watch the Department of Classics events page for more information.
  • Sarah Murray was interviewed on the BBC radio program “The Conversation,” on the role of women in ancient history and how modern-day gender biases influence the way we look at women’s lives in ancient societies.
  • Hot off the press is Kate Cooper’s new volume, New Approaches to Ancient Material Culture in the Greek & Roman World (Brill, 2020). It includes chapters by Sarah Murray and Phil Sapirstein (Art History) and former colleague Dimitri Nakassis, as well as Kate herself. Congratulations, Kate and contributors!
  • Kudos to Sarah Murray for winning a highly-competitive five-month NEH fellowship to work on her next book at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens next year. Her project is titled: “A Social Archaeology of Metal Production in the Early Iron Age Aegean".
  • Professor Boris Chrubasik from the Department of Historical Studies was selected for the UTM Annual Research Prize in the Humanities for his outstanding contributions to the study of the political and cultural history of the Eastern Mediterranean from the Achaemenid to the late Hellenistic periods. Congratulations, Boris!
  • Congratulations to George Boys-Stones who will spend 2021-22 as a Faculty Research Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, where the annual theme is Pleasure. His project is entitled, “Pleasure and Personal Identity in Greek and Roman Thought: Rethinking Ancient Eudaimonism”.

Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows

  • Postdoctoral fellow Niek Janssen will be starting a three-year position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Amherst College this autumn (2022). Many congratulation, Niek! (05/11/2022)
  • Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Peter Osorio – he will be starting a tenure-track job at the University of Maryland, College Park in September of 2023! (05/11/2022)
  • PhD student Don McCarthy has been awarded a John Lundon Memorial Fellowship to spend some time in Italy this summer taking part in an archaeological dig and traveling to Capua to look at a series of Latin inscriptions. Congratulations, Don!
  • Congratulations are in order for Claudia Paparella – she has been awarded the Joseph W. and Maria C. Shaw Graduate Scholarship to support her archaeological research at the site of Falerii Novi, Italy! (04/04/2022)
  • PhD Candidate Adam Barker represented the department at the Human Crime and Divine Punishment conference hosted by Trinity College Dublin. He presented his paper “Garden of Horrors: Anti-Theism in the World of Columella” – congratulations, Adam! (04/04/2022)
  • Congratulations to David Sutton, who defended his dissertation, “Ut Ameris, Ama: Intimacy, Desire, and the Ideal of Pares Amici in Martial’s Rome,” on April Fool’s Day! (04/01/2022)
  • PhD candidate Vittorio Bottini will present his paper on the interaction between Babrius’ Mythiambi and the iambic tradition on June 4th, 2022 at the University of Graz International Conference “Et in cothurnis prodit Aesopus nouis. On the interaction between ancient fable and literary genres”. (03/07/2022)
  • PhD candidate Drew Davis has won the Crake Doctoral Fellowship in Classics at Mount Allison University for 2022-2023. An amazing accomplishment – congratulations, Drew! (03/03/2022)
  • Naomi Neufeld’s “Sport and Festival” course was the subject of a glowing write-up published in the Faculty of Arts & Science News and picked up by U of T News.
  • Flavia Vasconcellos Amaral has published two new papers: “Pequena poética dos ‘autoepitáfios’ e dos epitáfios para poetas” [The poetics of Self-epitaphs and Epitaphs dedicated to Poets] in: F. Rodrigues Jr./B. B. Sebastiani/ B.C. Silva (edd.) A Poética Calimaquiana e a sua Influência na Poesia Epigramática. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2021, p. 59-78 and “A Ekphrasis nos epigramas fúnebres enigmáticos gregos” [Ekphrasis in funerary enigmatic epigrams] in: W. Grizoste/F.B. dos Santos (edd.) Recepção e Ekphrasis no Ensino de Letras Clássicas. Parintins: Editora UEA, 2021, p. 11-33.
  • Check out Kat Apokatinidis’ guest post “When Greece is not Ancient: Colonialism, Eurocentrism and Classics” on the blog Everyday Orientalism.
  • Anass Dakkach and Jack Hase have received SSHRC Doctoral Fellowships. Congratulations to you both!! The Department is proud of your success.
  • Vittorio Bottini is the recipient of the CAMWS Benario Award to attend the London International Paleography Summer School at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of London. Well done, Vittorio!
  • Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Flavia Vasconcellos Amaral on the publication of her article,”Epigramas fúnebres dedicados às mulheres bêbadas,” in Camila D. Souza and Maria Aparecida O. Silva (org.) Morte e vida na Grécia Antiga. Teresina: EDUPRI, 2020, p.198-227.
  • Jesse Hill and Gianmarco Bianchini were recipients of the 2021 SCS Outstanding Student Awards. Look for Jesse’s article on Catullus 116, forthcoming in TAPA 151.1, spring 2021, and read Gianmarco’s latest publications: “The triclinium of the ‘Casa del Moralista’ and its inscriptions: CIL IV, 7698 = CLE 2054,” in SEBarc 18. 85-105; “CLE 1109 (Roma): un sogno in forma poetica,” in Espacio, Tiempo y Forma. Revista de la Facultad de Geografía e Historia. 213-232; “La réception épigraphique d’Ovide à Pompéi: CIL, IV 1595 = CLE 927,” in Présences ovidiennes. Caesarodunum 52-53 bis. Clermont-Ferrand. 115-127; and “Quod peto, si colitis Manes … Nuove proposte di integrazione ad AE 1982, 69 (Roma),” in ZPE 213. 105-107.
  • Congratulations to Tiphaine Lahuec, winner of the 2019-20 James William Connor Prize in Greek Composition

Undergraduates

  • John Liao, an undergraduate in Classics, was awarded a Critical Digital Humanities Initiative Grant to help explore digitization possibilities for Kenneth Yu’s project on the logic and functions of Greek book titles. Amazing! Congratulations, John! (02/02/2022).
  • Sheena McKeever has been awarded the 2020 Harry C. Maynard Scholarship in Classical Studies by the Ontario Classical Association. The scholarship is awarded on the basis of academic excellence in Classics and on an essay competition on the topic of the importance and relevance of the study of the ancient world in the twenty-first century.  Congratulations, Sheena!
  • Senators Jac, John, and Leah have launched a new ClassU podcast, Sermo Vulgaris, that aims to make Classics more accessible and tackle challenging questions about antiquity in a fun and engaging way. [Warning: NSFW, as the name might suggest!]. We congratulate them and thank them for their on-going outreach efforts.
  • Jakob Barnes won first place in the 2020 Senior Greek CAC Sight Exam competition and Yilin Zhu won second place in the Senior Latin. Well done!!
  • Congratulations to all our 2019-20 Department Award Winners:
    • Sandy Forsyth – All Souls Historical Essay Scholarship in Ancient History
    • Keating Johnson – C. B. Farrar Undergraduate Scholarship in Classics
    • Kevin McCart Jakob Barnes – Chau/Chan Scholarships in Classics
    • Jennifer MacPherson – Dorothy Ellison Scholarship in Latin
    • Erica Venturo – Dorothy Ellison (4T8) Graduating Scholarship in Latin & W. B. Wiegand Prize in Ancient Greek
    • Erika Sakaguchi – Eric Trevor Owen Scholarship
    • Paul Ionescu – Graham Campbell Fellowship in Memory of Maurice Hutton in Classics

Alumni/ae

  • Recent PhD graduate David Wallace-Hare will be presenting his paper “Tree fables and ancient science literature” on June 3rd, 2022 at the University of Graz International Conference “Et in cothurnis prodit Aesopus nouis. On the interaction between ancient fable and literary genres”. (03/07/2022)
  • We were delighted to learn that former MA student Alison John has recently been elected to a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. Congratulations, Alison!