The Fellowship of the McMicken College: Three Professors Awarded NEH Grants

McMicken College of Arts and Sciences distinguished itself as a leader in the field of research after three of its professors recently received National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) fellowships.

Professor of History, Ann Twinam, Ph.D., and Classics professors Kathryn Gutzwiller, Ph.D., and Dr. C. Brian Rose, Ph.D. will use the grants to continue research during the 2004 to 2005 school year.

“Receiving the NEH is such an honor because it’s extremely competitive,” Twinam said. “I’m working on a huge project that could take five or six years to complete. It was critical to get the year off for research.”

Dr. Twinam’s project entitled “Sexuality, Illegitimacy, and Family in the Hispanic World: 1476-1800” will systematically explore gender relations, sexual mores, and illegitimacy from the late Middle Ages through the Enlightenment.

The project will act as a follow-up to her award winning book Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America.

Since 1998, Twinam has amassed a wealth of peninsular legitimation petitions and decrees during trips to Spain. The largely unexplored documents will form the core of her research. The proposed project will address three themes; the long term change in Spanish patterns relating to sexual mores, illegitimacy, and marriage practices; Spanish trends within Mediterranean, European, and American societies; and a Trans-Atlantic contrast between empire and colony, the old world and the new.

Dr. Gutzwiller will also look to the past as the focus her upcoming project entitled, “The Poetics of Anthology: An Edition and Commentary for the Epigrams of Meleager”

Specializing in the Hellenistic period of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, she will examine in detail the most important figure in the history of Hellenistic epigram, Meleager of Gadara. According to Guztwiller, epigrams were originally verse inscriptions placed on tombstones as dedications, but in the third century B.C., poets began to cultivate the form in a more literary manner. The project will more narrowly focus on content from her most recent book entitled Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context.

“My project, a critical edition, translation, and commentary for the epigrams of Meleager, is designed as the first step toward remedying past neglect of this important poet,” she explained. “In addition, current interest in the phenomenon of “being Greek under Rome” has created a need for the type of edition/commentary that I am undertaking, in which a thorough reevaluation of the text is combined with a new focus on the cultural context of the poems.”

Dr. Rose will use the NEH to continue his 15-year excavations of the city of Troy. The project, “The Archaeology of Troy in the Greek, Roman and Byzantine Periods,” will compile all of the information so far obtained and provide the first reconstruction of life at Troy from ca. 1200 B.C. through 1300 A.D.

“NEH has been especially good to the UC Classics department- our faculty members have received fourteen NEH grants in the last decade,” he said. “Much of our department's success in Classics and archaeology has been dependent on them.”

Some of the highlights of his fieldwork include the discovery of well-preserved, ancient sarcophagus, a cache of gold jewelry hidden for 2,500 years and a headline-grabbing statue of Roman Emperor Hadrian. His work also revealed the fact that Troy existed as a major city in the ancient world for much longer than previously believed.

“The NEH grant will make it possible for me to finish my book on Greek and Roman Troy, which will contain a synthesis of the last fifteen years of excavation there,” he said. “This is really a dream come true.”

Article by Christine Charlson