Convention
The Society holds its annual convention in January, meeting jointly with the Archaeological Institute of America. About 400 scholarly papers are delivered at the Society's meeting, which is also the site for interviewing for college and university positions and for the meetings of the many committees and affiliated groups. It is also the occasion for the presentation of Society awards [5] for teaching at both pre-collegiate and collegiate level, for projects that bring classics to a wider public (outreach), and of the Goodwin Award of Merit, which recognizes a recently published book.
At every meeting, an Outreach Division conducts two events that are open to the general public. One is a special panel that is of interest to non-specialists. Topics have included the movie Troy, Classics and Contemporary Fiction and the HBO series Rome and Classics and Comics. The second is the staged reading of a classical or classically themed play, by the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance. The productions have been: The Invention of Love (Tom Stoppard, directed by Mary-Kay Gamel, produced by Judith Hallett), The Heavensgate Deposition (based on Apocolocyntosis by Seneca the Younger, adapted by Douglass Parker, directed by Amy R. Cohen, produced by Thomas Jenkins), The Golden Age (by Thomas Heywood, directed by C. W. Marshall), Iran Man (based on Persa by Plautus, directed by Mary-Kay Gamel), Thespis (by W. S. Gilbert and A. S. Sullivan, with new music by Alan Riley Jones, directed by John Starks, produced by John Given), The Birds (by Aristophanes, directed by Thomas Talboy), Cyclops (by Euripides, directed by Laura Lippman and Mike Lippman), Thersites (perhaps by Nicholas Udall, directed by C. W. Marshall), Thesmophoriazusae (by Aristophanes, directed by Bella Vivante), The Jurymen (by Katherine Janson, directed by Amy R. Cohen) and Alcestis (by Euripides, translated by Mary-Kay Gamel, directed by Gamel and Mark Damen).
Activities
Through its divisions of Research, Education, Publications, Professional Matters, and Program, the Society conducts a variety of activities to support and disseminate knowledge of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. For example, it operates a Placement Service, gathers statistical information about the demographics of classicists, hears complaints of violations of professional ethics, provides advice and funding for major research projects (such as the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World), and publishes monographs, textbooks and software. The Outreach Division produces a newsletter, Amphora, [6] for non-specialists, and the electronic newsletter The Dionysiac, [7] which gives information about performances of classical plays and other events related to ancient performance.
Aristophanes, son of Philippus and Zenodora, of the deme Kydathenaion, was a comic playwright or comedy-writer of ancient Athens and a poet of Old Attic Comedy. Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete. These provide the most valuable examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy and are used to define it, along with fragments from dozens of lost plays by Aristophanes and his contemporaries.
The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by the Athenian playwright Euripides during his final years in Macedonia, at the court of Archelaus I of Macedon. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and which Euripides' son or nephew is assumed to have directed. It won first prize in the City Dionysia festival competition.
The Cambridge Greek Play is a play performed in Ancient Greek by students and alumni of the University of Cambridge, England. The event is held once every three years and is a tradition which started in 1882 with the Ajax of Sophocles.
Thomas Robert Shannon Broughton, FBA was a Canadian classical scholar and leading Latin prosopographer of the twentieth century. He is especially noted for his definitive three-volume work, Magistrates of the Roman Republic (1951-1986).
Friedrich W. Solmsen was a philologist and professor of classical studies. He published nearly 150 books, monographs, scholarly articles, and reviews from the 1930s through the 1980s. Solmsen's work is characterized by a prevailing interest in the history of ideas. He was an influential scholar in the areas of Greek tragedy, particularly for his work on Aeschylus, and the philosophy of the physical world and its relation to the soul, especially the systems of Plato and Aristotle.
Richard John Alexander Talbert is a British-American contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and is currently Research Professor in charge of the Ancient World Mapping Center. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and ideas of space in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a Chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Peter Meineck is Professor of Classics in the Modern World at New York University. He is also the founder and humanities program director of Aquila Theatre and has held appointments at Princeton University and University of South Carolina.
Martin Ostwald was a German-American classical scholar, who taught until 1992 at Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania. His main field of study was the political structures of Ancient Greece.
Anthony Philip Corbeill is an American professor of classics. He is currently the Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. He was formerly a professor at the University of Kansas.
Judith P. Hallett is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita of Classics, having formerly been the Graduate Director at the Department of Classics, University of Maryland. Her research focuses on women, the family, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in Latin literature. She is also an expert on classical education and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Helene P. Foley is an American classical scholar. She is Professor of Classical Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and a member of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia. She specialises in ancient Greek literature, women and gender in antiquity, and the reception of classical drama.
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz is a classical scholar, specialising in ancient Greek literature and intersectional feminism.
Ruth Scodel is an American classicist. She is the D.R. Shackleton-Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. Scodel specialises in ancient Greek literature, with particular interests in Homer, Hesiod and Greek Tragedy. Her research has been influenced by narrative theory, cognitive approaches, and politeness theory.
Kathryn J. Gutzwiller is a professor of classics at the University of Cincinnati. She specialises in Hellenistic poetry, and her interests include Greek and Latin poetry, ancient gender studies, literary theory, and the interaction between text and image. Her contribution to Hellenistic epigram and pastoral poetry has been considered particularly influential.
Peter T. Struck is professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the co-founder with Sarah Igo of the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. He sits on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Shelley P. Haley is the Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College, New York, and President of the Society for Classical Studies. She is an expert in applying Black feminist and critical race approaches to the study and teaching of Classics.
Ruby Blondell is Professor Emerita of Classics and Adjunct Professor Emerita of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington; prior to retirement, they were the Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities also at the University of Washington. Their research centres on Greek intellectual history, gender studies, and the reception of ancient myth in contemporary culture.
Gilbert Norwood was a British classical philologist and essayist.
Kristina Milnor is Professor of Classics in the Department of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She specialises in Latin literature, Roman history, feminist theory and gender studies.
