Susan Ford Wiltshire | |
---|---|
Born | 1941 |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Texas, Austin (BA), Columbia University (MA), Columbia University (Ph.D.) |
Thesis | Poetry in the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius (1967) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Classical Studies |
Sub-discipline | Latin Poetry,Classical Reception |
Website | https://susanfwiltshire.com/ |
Susan Ford Wiltshire (born 1941) is an American classical scholar,poet,and essayist. Her academic work focuses on Latin poetry,particularly that of Vergil,and Classical Reception Studies,particularly in the early United States and the American South. President Bill Clinton appointed Wiltshire to the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities,on which she served from 1997–2002. [1]
Wiltshire received her Ph.D. in Greek and Latin from Columbia University in 1967. Her doctoral thesis was entitled "Poetry in the Consolatio Philosophiae of Boethius." [2] Wiltshire received a master's degree from Columbia in 1964 and her BA in Latin from the University of Texas,Austin in 1963. [3]
Wiltshire taught Classics at the University of Illinois,Urbana-Champaign for two years before becoming the director of the Honors Program and Assistant Professor of English at Fisk University in 1969. In 1971 she became Assistant Professor of Classics at Vanderbilt University,where she became Full Professor in 1989. [4] She retired in 2007. Besides serving on the advisory council of the National Endowment for the Humanities,Wiltshire received numerous fellowships,including a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and two research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as awards for her teaching and service at Vanderbilt and an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from Kenyon College in 1998. [5]
Wiltshire has written three academic monographs,a memoir of her brother's AIDS diagnosis and eventual death, [6] and several books of essays,fiction,and poems. Her first book was Public and Private in Vergil's Aeneid (1989),which assesses how the poet maintains the tension between personal and civic life that is essential for the common good. Also among her notable publications is her book Greece,Rome,and the Bill of Rights, which traces the influence of Greek and Roman civic ideals on the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution (1992). [7] Classical Nashville:Athens of the South (1996),which Wiltshire and co-authors Christine Kreyling,Wesley Paine,and Charles W. Waterfield,Jr. published for the bicentennial of the state of Tennessee,surveys the influence of Classical architecture on many of Nashville's buildings,such as the War Memorial Auditorium and that city's full-scale replica of the Parthenon. [8] A special issue of the Southern Humanities Review that Wiltshire edited collected essays on "the Classical Tradition in the South." [9]
Wiltshire played an active role in advocating for women's equity at Vanderbilt. This activism led to the establishment of Vanderbilt's Women's Studies program in 1973 (now the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies). [10] Every year,this department awards two prizes in Wiltshire's honor for undergraduate and graduate essays on "a topic concerning gender,race,ethnicity,class,and/or sexuality." [11] Wiltshire recounted the strategies she and her colleagues employed in her essay "A Letter to my Daughter:How We Made Our Mark on Women’s Equity at Vanderbilt." [10]
Publius Vergilius Maro,usually called Virgil or Vergil in English,was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature:the Eclogues,the Georgics,and the epic Aeneid. A number of minor poems,collected in the Appendix Vergiliana,were attributed to him in ancient times,but modern scholars generally regard these works as spurious,with the possible exception of a few short pieces.
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem that tells the legendary story of Aeneas,a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy,where he became the ancestor of the Romans. Written by the Roman poet Virgil between 29 and 19 BC,the Aeneid comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas' wanderings from Troy to Italy,and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins,under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.
Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet,scholar,and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period,he wrote over 800 literary works,most of which do not survive,in a wide variety of genres. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy,known as Callimacheanism,which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and,through them,on all subsequent Western literature.
Robert Fagles was an American translator,poet,and academic. He was best known for his many translations of ancient Greek and Roman classics,especially his acclaimed translations of the epic poems of Homer. He taught English and comparative literature for many years at Princeton University.
The Appendix Vergiliana is a collection of Latin poems traditionally ascribed as being the juvenilia of Virgil.
Frederick M. Ahl is a professor of classics and comparative literature at Cornell University. He is known for his work in Greek and Roman epic and drama,and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome,as well as for translations of tragedy and Latin epic.
Barry Bruce Powell is an American classical scholar who is the author of the textbook Classical Myth. Trained at Berkeley and Harvard,he is a specialist in Homer and in the history of writing. Powell is currently the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Kathleen M. Coleman is an academic and writer who is the James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. Her research interests include Latin literature,history and culture in the early Roman Empire,and arena spectacles. Her expertise in the latter area led to her appointment as Chief Academic Consultant for the 2000 film Gladiator.
Rachel Hadas is an American poet,teacher,essayist,and translator. Her most recent essay collection is Piece by Piece:Selected Prose,and her most recent poetry collection is Ghost Guest. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship,Ingram Merrill Foundation Grants,the O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library,and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Elaine Fantham was a British-Canadian classicist whose expertise lay particularly in Latin literature,especially comedy,epic poetry and rhetoric,and in the social history of Roman women. Much of her work was concerned with the intersection of literature and Greek and Roman history. She spoke fluent Italian,German and French and presented lectures and conference papers around the world—including in Germany,Italy,the Netherlands,Norway,Argentina,and Australia.
In philology,a commentary is a line-by-line or even word-by-word explication usually attached to an edition of a text in the same or an accompanying volume. It may draw on methodologies of close reading and literary criticism,but its primary purpose is to elucidate the language of the text and the specific culture that produced it,both of which may be foreign to the reader. Such a commentary usually takes the form of footnotes,endnotes,or separate text cross-referenced by line,paragraph or page.
Shadi Bartsch is an American historian and professor of classics at the University of Chicago. She has previously held professorships at the University of California,Berkeley and Brown University where she was the professor of classics from 2008 to 2009. From 2015 to 2024 she was the Director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (IFK) at the University of Chicago.
Meyer Reinhold was an American classical scholar and also a specialist in Jewish studies. He was co-author or editor of 23 books. With his wife Diane he had two children,Helen Reinhold Barrett,later Dean of the Graduate School at Tennessee State University,and,Robert Reinhold,who,until his premature death in 1997,was a reporter for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
The Doctor's Building is a six-story commercial building in Nashville,Tennessee that was constructed in 1916 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Richard Oliver Allen Marcus Lyne,also known as R. O. A. M. Lyne,was a British academic and classicist specialising in Latin poetry. He was a tutor in classics at Balliol College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford.
Philip Lindsley (1786–1855) was an American Presbyterian minister,educator and classicist. He served as the acting president of the College of New Jersey from 1822 to 1824,and as the first president of the now-defunct University of Nashville from 1824 to 1850.
Eleanor Winsor Leach was the Ruth N. Halls Professor with the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. She was a trustee of the Vergilian Society in 1978–83 and was second and then first vice-president in 1989–92. Leach was the president of the Society of Classical Studies in 2005/6,and the chair of her department (1978–1985). She was very involved with academics and younger scholars –directing 26 dissertations,wrote letters for 200 tenure and promotion cases,and refereed more than 100 books and 200 articles. Leach's research interests included Roman painting,Roman sculpture,and Cicero and Pliny's Letters. She published three books and more than 50 articles. Leach's work had an interdisciplinary focus,reading Latin texts against their social,political,and cultural context. From the 1980s onwards,she combined her work on ancient literature with the study of Roman painting,monuments,and topography.
Michèle Lowrie is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the college at the University of Chicago. She is a specialist in Roman literature and political thought.
Karl Watts Gransden was a British poet and an editor,translator,scholar,and teacher of Latin and English literature. He spent his career at the British Museum and the University of Warwick.
Sharon Lynn James was a Classicist and Professor of Classics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was an expert in Latin poetry,women and gender in antiquity,New Comedy,and Italian epic.