Faculty

P. Lowell Bowditch is the current Department Head of Classics. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1992. She has been at the University of Oregon since 1993 and has taught a wide range of language and literature courses on epic, tragedy, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and the Augustan era.

Professor Bowditch’s research focuses on the interface between the literature and socio-political relations of Augustan Rome. Currently, she is writing a book on love elegy and Roman imperialism. She is the author of Horace and the Gift Economy of Patronage (Los Angeles and Berkeley 2001) and of articles on Tibullus, Propertius, Horace, Ovid, and issues of translation. Recent publications include: “Horace and the Pyrrhatechnics of Translation,” Classical World,104.3 (2011) 355-62; “Tibullus and Egypt: A Postcolonial Reading of Elegy 1.7,” Arethusa, 44.1 (2011) 88-121; “Horace and Imperial Patronage,” in ed. Gregson Davis, Companion to Horace. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. (2010) 53-74; “Palatine Apollo and the Imperial Gaze: Propertius 2.31 and 2.32,” American Journal of Philology, vol. 130.3. (2009) 401-438.

Curriculum Vitae

A native of Italy, Dr. Calhoon holds a Laurea in English and German from the University of Torino and a PhD in Classics from the University of California, Irvine. She has taught a wide variety of language courses (Latin and Italian) at all levels, as well as courses on Roman women, Greeks and barbarians, classical mythology, and Roman culture.

Her research focuses on the relations between the classical world and other cultures, with an emphasis on Romans and northerners, and also on the cultural significance of women in Roman literature and politics. Her doctoral dissertation, Livia the Poisoner, dissects the intersection between the public image of the empress Livia and the sinister private activities attributed to her by political rivals, a theme further expanded in Dr. Calhoon’s ongoing study of poison and desire in Roman literature. The article «The Dynamics of Sacrifice in Livy 1.57-59» in Helios 24 examines Livy’s representation of Lucretia as the ritual scapegoat, while «the River, the City and the Forest», (in preparation) discusses the colonization of natural spaces on the Column of Trajan, the sculptural representation of the empire’s Heart of Darkness.

Curriculum Vitae

David Chamberlain holds a BA from Oxford and a PhD from UC Berkeley.  He teaches Greek and Latin at all levels, lectures on Tragedy, Epic, Sex and Gender and Plato (but not all at the same time), and has developed new courses on “Ancient Athletics” and “The Ancient World in Film” for the department.  He has published articles on Herodotus and has strong interests in the intersection of technology and learning.

Professor Eckerman received his PhD in Classics from UCLA in 2007, his MA in Classics from UCLA in 2002, and his BA in Classics and Economics from UC Davis in 2000. While a graduate student, he was Virginia Grace Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and a guest in the Philologisches Seminar in Tuebingen. He taught at UCLA for one year before coming to Eugene. At the University of Oregon, he teaches a broad range of courses, including Greek and Latin courses at all levels as well as classes in translation such as epic poetry and tragedy.

He has published some two dozen articles and book reviews on various aspects of Greek literature and society, primarily on Greek lyric poetry and ancient geography. Though his research has included Greek epigraphy and papyrology, his particular interests lie in epinician poetry, Panhellenic sanctuaries, and contemporary geographic theory. His research generally derives from interpreting Greek and Latin texts in ways that they have not been previously read, and thereafter teasing out the social, literary, and cultural repercussions of his readings. In addition to continuing to work on archaic Greek lyric, he plans to begin a book on imperial Greek epic poetry in the not too distant future.

Curriculum Vitae

Personal Website

One of this country’s leading scholars of ancient Greek art, Jeffrey M. Hurwit received a combined A.B.-M.A. degree in Classical Languages and Literatures from Brown University in 1971 and a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from Yale University in 1975. He taught at Yale from 1975 to 1980, when he became assistant professor of Art History at the University of Oregon. He was promoted to associate professor in 1984, and to full professor in 1990. He has held a co-appointment in the Classics Department since 1987.

The recipient of many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987-88, Professor Hurwit is the author of numerous works on the art and civilization of Archaic and Classical Greece. Among the more influential of his publications are the articles “Reading the Chigi Vase” [Hesperia 71 (2002), 1-22] and “The Kritios Boy: Discovery, Reconstruction, and Date” [American Journal of Archaeology 93 (1989), 41-80], and his books The Art and Culture of Early Greece (Cornell University Press, 1985,) The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles (Cambridge University Press 2004). He is also co-editor of (and a contributor to) a collection of essays entitled Periklean Athens and its Legacy (University of Texas Press 2005).

Professor Hurwit has frequently studied in Greece and Italy, and was twice selected to teach in the Northwest Council for Study Abroad program in Siena. A popular lecturer, he has spoken widely across the United States and Canada on his research. In 2000-2001 he was appointed to the Martha S. Joukowsky Lectureship for the Archaeological Institute of America, and in 2003 became the inaugural Dorothy Burr Thompson Memorial Lecturer at University of British Columbia. He has been a member of the editorial board of the College Art Association’s Art Bulletin and currently serves on the Publications Committee of the Getty Research Institute.

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Jaeger received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990, her M.A. in 1984 from UC Berkeley, and her B.A. in 1982 from Gustavus Adolphus College. Professor Jaeger chose an academic career in Classics because she loves Latin. She has been at the University of Oregon since 1990, with the exception of a post-doctoral year at Harvard (1993-4), and enjoys teaching both Latin and Greek, as well as lecture courses on topics in Greek and Roman culture.

Professor Jaeger is interested in the stories that Romans told about their past and the monuments that preserved that past. She is the author of Livy’s Written Rome (University of Michigan Press 1997), Archimedes and the Roman Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2008), and A Livy Reader (Balchazy-Carducci, 2011). Her most recent publication is “Blame the Boletus? Demystifying Mushrooms in Latin Literature,” Ramus 40.1 (2011).

Professor Nicols graduated from UC Berkeley, and did his PhD at UCLA. He has held regular appointments at the Universität Freiburg (Germany), at Stanford University, and at the University of Oregon. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Munich, Heidelberg, Cologne, Münster and Tübingen. He has also received  a number of grants from the DAAD, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.  In 2009 he received a Williams Fellowship for his teaching, and in 2010 the University’s Westling Award for service, and in the same year also a research award from the von Humboldt Foundation that took  him to the Universities of Münster and Munich.  The von Humboldt research award was renewed in 2012.  

Nicols became Professor Emeritus in June of 2011, and remains active in research (a forthcoming book), teaching and service.  He has accepted an invitation to work as a visiting professor and scholar at the Universität Tübingen in the spring of 2012. 

Professor Nicols has devoted much of his scholarly career to understanding how asymmetrical social relations serve to unify society and is especially interested in the practice of patronage and clientele in the Roman Empire. Current and forthcoming publications include, “The Practice of Hospitium on the Roman Frontier”, “Civic Patronage in the Roman Empire”, “The Crisis of the 3rd Century”, and “Civic Ritual and Civic Patronage”. 

Concurrently, he and his colleague James C. Mohr, serve as the editors of the Mapping History Project, a set of interactive historical maps the publication of which has been facilitated by Pearson Education and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Shankman earned his first B.A. in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969, a second B.A. in English from Cambridge University in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1977. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Classics in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon and Director of the Oregon Humanities Center; he is also a participating faculty member in the Comparative Literature program at Oregon. Before coming to Oregon, he taught at Princeton, Columbia, and Harvard.

His work in the Western classical tradition includes Popeís Iliad: Homer in the Age of Passion (1983) and In Search of the Classic: Reconsidering the Classical Tradition, Homer to Valéry and Beyond (1994). His Penguin edition of Popeís Iliad appeared in 1996. Some of his recent work, including (co-authored with Stephen Durrant) The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China (2000) and Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons (co-edited by Stephen Durrant, 2002), compares classical traditions. With Stephen Durrant and four others, he is the editor of The World of Literature (1999), an anthology of world literature from a global perspective, which contains some of his poetic translations from Chinese, Greek, and Latin. He is the author of Kindred Verses (2000), a chapbook of poems; his poem «On Rembrandt’s Sacrifice of Isaac (1635), in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia» is forthcoming in Literary Imagination. He recently completed a book-manuscript entitled Other Others: Levinas/Literature/Intercultural Studies. He is currently secretary of the Committee on Intercultural Studies of the International Comparative Literature Association. As the host of a cable-access TV show («UO Today») produced at the University of Oregon as an outreach effort of the Oregon Humanities Center, which he directs, he has interviewed nearly three-hundred guests.

Professor Wilson received his Hon. B.A. from the University of Western Ontario in 1985, his M.A. from the University of Toronto in 1986, and his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of California at Berkeley.

Prof. Wilson’s primary research interests lie in the history of science and the philosophical issues surrounding the organization of systematic knowledge in antiquity. He has published a book on Aristotle’s philosophy of science, «Aristotle’s Theory of the Unity of Science» with the University of Toronto Press in the Phoenix Supplement Series. He has also published on Speusippus and Galileo. He is currently working on a book on the theory of disciplinary boundaries in antiquity and the middle ages. He is also collaborating on an edition of an iatromathematical, astrological treatise of Ps-Galen. To see more information about hiw work go to his Curriculum Vitae.