Volume 5 - Number 3

Classics is pleased to welcome two new faculty this year, Peter Hunt and Beth Dusinberre, both of whom have previously existing, strong ties to the department and to Boulder. We invited each of them to introduce themselves to our readers.

From Peter Hunt
While I was working on my master's degree in Classical Antiquity at CU, I would often tell friends that my dream job would be here. But with only about five or ten openings in Greek History each year, I estimated that my chances of returning were slim. So it was with great joy that last summer that, after a long drive, I again saw Boulder spread out before me from the hill on Highway 36. Although the city has expanded considerably since I last lived here in the late eighties, Boulder remains beautiful. In fact, the west side of town and the mountain parks have barely changed and have certainly not lost their charm.

The path that brought me full circle back to Boulder has been a long and circuitous one. I received my Ph.D. from Stanford in 1994, but endured a couple of lean years before landing a one-year-job at Vassar College. In retrospect, the part-time teaching of those two years gave me the time - not to mention that fear provided the motivation - to start the expansion of my thesis into a book: Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians. (Cambridge University Press, 1998), which examines the participation of slaves in the warfare and argues that their role has been systematically underestimated. After my job at Vassar, I had a very enjoyable two-year position at Davidson College, from which I was offered the job at CU. Then the department here generously allowed me to take the fellowship I had won at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. Thus my return was delayed for a year while I worked on my new research project on fourth-century war oratory among the twelve fellows at the Center last year.

My teaching here has strengthened my sense of coming home. This semester I'm offering two courses that I took here as a graduate student: Alexander and the Hellenistic World and the Introductory Greek. As I look at these courses from the front of the classroom, I more fully appreciate their challenges and realize again what a superb job my teachers here, Professor Ernst Fredricksmeyer and Instructor Mark Bailey did with them. I'm also excited about trying something new, a lower-division course next semester on "War and Society in Ancient Greece." We'll be reading the Iliad and Thucydides to explore the relationship of warfare, social structure, and morality in Greece and also in more general terms.

I greatly enjoy being back in Boulder. My colleagues have been extremely welcoming with convivial dinners and barbecues throughout the summer and early fall- and even a cake when I was recuperating from an appendectomy. The department is growing and full of high spirits and new ideas. And, although it's been a hectic semester, getting used to a different place, different students, and new courses, I've still had enough time to enjoy Boulder. My apartment is near Baseline and Broadway and I can bike to work on the new path which leads under Broadway to campus. As a rock climber, I love the fact that I can bicycle to Flagstaff to go bouldering, through I must say the ride seems distinctly longer and steeper than it did twelve years ago. Or I can drive straight down to Eldorado Springs Canyon for longer rock climbs. Even Boulder's growth into a city brings many pleasures: there's a used book store, Wild Oats Market, a discount movie theatre, and, last but not least, the pastries of Le Francais just across the street. What more could one ask for?

From Beth Dusinberre
I grew up in Boulder, playing cello and Boulder Junior Soccer (badly) and desperately wishing I had a horse; I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. I learned how to read from a book of illustrated Greek myths, loved Greek literature and art as I got older and decided I wanted to learn Greek as soon as possible. I got my start studying classical languages in the CU Classics department. At the same time, I grew increasingly interested in cross-cultural interactions. Working with recent immigrant children while helping teach kindergarten during summer vacations and with older students in the English as a Second Language department at Boulder High showed me some of the problems tackled by people coming to the US from very different cultures. After graduating from Boulder High in 1986, I went to Harvard, where I was torn between a desire to major in Classics and one to major in Geology. I continued working with recent immigrants in the Boston area even as I grew increasingly involved with classical languages and music; these interests all had to do with human communication and seemed to me fundamentally linked. Less obvious to me was how exactly Geology might tie in with it all.

Flummoxed, I took a year off and went to live and work in West Berlin. Experiencing first-hand the necessity of adapting to a different culture and language affected my impressions of academic work on interculturalism. When I returned to the US, I decided to change my major. My love of ancient art finally led me to opt for Classical Archaeology. This was a field that combined literary, art historical, philosophical, historical, and epigraphic approaches with a study of the material record left by ancient human actions and it would let me pursue literary, aesthetic and scientific paths at once to explore ancient cultures. It would include work in dusty libraries and also travel and meeting new people, learning new lifeways and experiencing new places and outlooks. Perfect!

The summer after I graduated, in 1991, I went to dig in Turkey for the first time, having worked already in Greece. The moment I set foot in the Istanbul airport, I knew I was going to love the country. The people were helpful and friendly, and the city itself was such a rich palimpsest of bygone and ongoing actions. I took the overnight bus to Sardis, the capital city of ancient Lydia and a modern village on the Izmir-Ankara highway, making use of place names plus my three works of Turkish, ("Hello?" "Please?" "Thank you?"), and settled in to work under the warm and generous auspices of the expedition. I learned more Turkish ("Let us dig!" "Let us not dig!" "Today is very hot!"). I learned to supervise a trench. After digging through about two feet of wall without noticing, I learned to distinguish collapsed mudbrick from mudbrick in situ, and what the chronologies and social significance of broken potsherds indicated for the history of the area. Particularly exciting were the scope and breadth of the questions raised by Sardis: the mingling of Lydian, Greek, and other influences made for thriving multi-culturalism.

Graduate school at the University of Michigan offered the opportunity to take classes in new fields. Courses on the ancient Near East opened up whole new intellectual vistas for me, and Sardis fell into place as a nexus of the multiple cultures of Anatolia. Greece, and regions to the east, notably Persia. After a hefty dose of anthropology, I wrote my dissertation on Sardis as a regional capital of the Persian Empire. I also began working at several other sites in Turkey, Greece, and Egypt, traveled in Syria, and spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. In 1997 I moved back to Boulder, married Edward Dusinberre of the Takacs quartet, and finished my dissertation.

Since then, I have been teaching in the Humanities department at CU and the History of Art department at Michigan, have had a postdoc at the Smithsonian in Washington DC to work on the archives left by an early archaeologist of the Near East, Ernst Herzfeld, have raised a puppy; have written my dissertation a zillion times to turn it into a book manuscript, have begun several new projects including an introductory textbook on ancient Near Eastern art with a DVD component, have had a child, and have watched my older brother die of cancer at the age of 32. It has been an eventful time.

I am utterly delighted now to be a member of the CU Classics department, to be part of the exciting directions it is moving and the educational possibilities it represents. I will be teaching the intro to Greek archaeology and a course on Greek cities and sanctuaries in the spring; I hope to meet you then if not before.