Barbara Tsakirgis was invited to give a paper entitled "Décor, Deposits and Descriptions: an Analysis of Space in the Hellenistic Houses at Morgantina in their last century," at Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, at a conference on "Hellenistic houses and their functions," on Thursday, April 4.  Read More...

Max Goldman was invited to lecture at Rhodes University on Wednesday, March 20. The lecture was titled "Performers and Prostitutes in the Classical Athenian Symposium," and it discussed the status and role of female aulos players, moving beyond prostitution to examine the ways in which the female aulos players appear both in Athenian art and literature.  Prof. Goldman challenges a normative connection of the symposium to the prostitution of the performers, arguing that when it occurred, it took place away from the social world of the andrōn.  Read More...

Barbara Tsakirgis was invited to lecture at Texas A&M University on the creation of the first Nashville Parthenon, on Wednesday, March 20.  Read More...

David Petrain presented a paper entitled "Into the woods and under the water with Hylas: Some reflections on mythic structures," in a conference on "L'epyllion et le mythe," at the École normale supérieure in Lyon, France.  Read More...

 Barbara Tsakirgis was invited to lecture at Columbia University in New York City on Thursday, 20 September.  Professor Tsakirgis presented on “The Athens of the South: William Bell Dinsmoor and the Design of the Nashville Parthenon.”  Dinsmoor was both a professor at Columbia University and a long-time professor at the American School in Athens.  He was the world’s leading authority on the architecture of the ancient Athenian temple, and when the Nashville based architect Russell Hart was designing and building the permanent replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, he invited Dinsmoor to share his deep knowledge of the ancient building.  The lecture explored how the design of the Nashville Parthenon benefitted from this scholarly input and how Dinsmoor came to use his experience in the design of the Nashville replica as he thought about and wrote about the original Parthenon.  Read More...

Barbara Tsakirgis has been named by Governor Bill Haslam to a five year term on the Tennessee Archaeological Advisory Council  Read More...

Professor Barbara Tsakirgis has been elected to a four-year term as vice-chair of the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.  The American School, America’s first overseas research institution, was founded in 1881 by the Archaeological Institute of America and serves as a base for U.S. scholars conducting research in Greece.  Several current Vanderbilt faculty, including Profs. Mireille Lee, Joseph Rife, Betsey Robinson, Tsakirgis,and Bronwen Wickkiser, have been associated with the American School while they have worked on their research projects in Greece.  Professor Tsakirgis’ duties as vice-chair will include her working closely with the chair of the Managing Committee, Professor Jenifer Neils of Case Western Reserve University.    Read More...

David Petrain presented a paper at the conference "Double stories – double lives: Reflecting on textual objects in the pre-print world," at Yale University (13 – 15 April 2012). His paper is entitled "Texts in two and three dimensions: Magic squares on the Tabulae Iliacae and elsewhere".  Read More...

 Bronwen Wickkiser delivered the keynote address at the annual Tennessee Junior Classical League convention in Murfreesboro, TN on Friday, April 13, 2012.  Read More...

This summer, Barbara Tsakirgis was the recipient of a Franklin Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a learned society founded by Benjamin Franklin.  With funding from the Society, Profess Tsakirgis was able to travel to numerous ancient sites to study firsthand the ancient Greek houses.  Her travels took her to both western Greece, where she conducted research at both Kassope and Orraon, and to northern Greece, where she studied the houses at Stageira, Argilos, Abdera, Maroneia, and Mesembria Zone.  Professor Tsakirgis will use the results of her research as comparative material for the ancient Greek houses she is publishing from the American excavations in and around the ancient Athenian Agora (town square and marketplace).  Professor Tsakirgis thanks the Society for their generous support and for their recognition that the ancient buildings are like ancient texts; they need to be examined firsthand so that any conclusions reached are based on the original material.  Read More...