Classics Department Alumni News

 

Alumni, please send us your news.

Russell Pascatore

M.A., 2011

Russell has gone on to earn a highly competitive College Doctoral Fellowship in the Ph.D.program in classics at USC. He says, "At the University of Southern California, I look forward to focusing on the relations between the literary, philosophical, and political culture of the Roman empire . . . I am very thankful to you for the education I pursued with our department [UB Classics], in all its pedagogical aspects."

Theo Kopestonsky

Ph.D. 2009

Theo is a lecturer in the Classics department at the University of Tennesee, Knoxville.  She reports that all the language courses she took in graduate school have paid off, as she is teaching both Greek and Latin this year: "my Latin is being refreshed and I forgot what fun it is." Theo will be co-organizer of a Colloquium at this year's AIA meeting in Philadelphia entitled “Silent Participants: Terracottas as Ritual Objects.” (January 2012).

 

Jenny Muslin

M.A. 2009

Jenny is currently a Ph.D. student in Art and Art History at the University of Texas in Austin, where she is working with Professors Penelope Davies and John Clarke.  She delivered a paper at the 113th meeting of the AIA in Philadelphia:

Heu me miserum! The Rhetoric of Misericordia in Roman Depictions of the Fall of Troy. 

Jason Banta

Ph.D., 2006

Jason reports in from Texas:  "I am an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University, and this year became the associate editor of Intertexts. On the more personal side, I got married this summer. "  Congratulations,  Jason!

M. Barbara Reeves

Ph.D. 2005

Barbara, who is Assistant Professor of  Classics at Queen's University, directs the Humayma Excavation Project in the beautiful Hisma desert of Southern Jordan.  You can see a picture of the 2010 excavation team (with camel) here!

 

Allison Glazebrook

Ph.D., 2001

Allison is now chair of Classics at Brock University! Check out her recent publication, Greek Prostitutes in the Ancient Mediterranean, 800 BCE-200CE , co-edited with Madeleine M. Henry (University of Wisconsin Press).

Francesca D'Alessandro Behr

PhD., 2000

It is no surprise to anyone who knows her that Francesca won the Ross M. Lence Humanities Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Houston, where she is Associate Professor of  Classical Studies and Italian Studies. Here is a link to the enthusiastic   BMCR review of her book, Feeling History: Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion (Ohio State University Press).

Thomas Roche

Ph.D., 2000

I began in the PhD program, ancient history track, in fall 1993, having earned an MA in classics from the U. of VT in 1991, and then spent the next two years teaching public high school Latin.  My original desire was to obtain a PhD in order to become a liberal arts college professor, but the deteriorating status of the job market over the next few years convinced me to broaden my horizons.  Eventually, upon recommendation of a woman in the UB career counseling office, I decided to enrol at the UB Dept. of Information Science M.L.S. program, upon completion of my PhD.  I defended my dissertation in Dec. 1999 (advisor was Prof. Steve Dyson), and began the MLS program that January, completing it in a calendar year.  I then began a search for work which culminated in my appointment as a prep school librarian/ teacher in rural CT.  I have taught at several schools since then, and have been serving here at AICA since 2008.  Please feel free to ask me any additional questions you'd like-- I am eager to reestablish fruitful contact with fellow UB Classics alums and to offer any assistance I could to current UB students.

Thomas Virginia

Ph.D., 1999

This coming school year I will be teaching Latin I, II, III, and IV at Amherst Central High. I will also be teaching Latin to 6th and 7th graders at Christ the King School in Amherst. It will be my 27th year at Amherst and my 2nd year at Christ the King. My memories of the Classics Dept. at SUNY Buffalo are many. My 1st year of Graduate School (75-76) , the Classics Dept. was housed in the Spaulding Quad in the Ellicott complex. In the summer of 1976, several grad students, including myself, helped with the packing of books from the Goetz library and professors' offices, as we moved the Dept. to the 7th floor of the newly built Clemens Hall. Most of the professors who taught me are retired, but Tom Barry is still there and  I have good memories of his Survey of GK. Lit. course in the Fall of 1975. I also read Sophocles with Tom in the Fall of 1979. I have so many good memories of courses I took at Buffalo and the people who taught them that this letter would become overly long  if I tried to mention them all. A quick recap would include Dr. Westerink's Survey of Greek and Latin Philosophy; Dr. Peradotto's Hesiod Seminar; Reading Demosthenes with Dr. Kustas and Aeschylus with  Professor Garton; Roman Historiography with Dr. Sherk; and the Archaeology of Ancient Israel with the late Sam Paley.