Department of Classics Newsletter

This year two more Classics faculty members were awarded honors for excellence by the Boulder Faculty Assembly. Eckart Schütrumpf was honored with the coveted BFA Excellence in Research Award and Peter Knox with the Excellence in Service Award. This makes Classics the most decorated department on the entire Boulder Campus in per capita recipients for BFA awards. It should be noted that, although Classics has garnered four such awards in the last three years, they are by no means easy accomplishments. Each year only four recipients are chosen for each of the three categories (service, teaching and research) from among the more than 1000 eligible faculty and staff around the campus. Classics's success in winning so many awards thus speaks volumes about the quality of the faculty this department can boast.

Every year in the impressive career of Professor Eckart Schütrumpf has been productive, but this past academic year may stand out as preeminent, for this year has brought him his highest honors, having recently been awarded a prestigious Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Research. Schütrumpf spent the 2000-2001 AY on sabbatical, after receiving a highly competitive UCB Faculty Fellowship. He devoted much of his time to finishing the fourth and final volume of his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. Volumes I and II were published in 1991, and volume III was published in 1995. Volume IV will hopefully be published within a year. All previous commentaries of similar scale on the Politics are over a hundred years old. In volume IV of his commentary, Schütrumpf examines Aristotle’s best state, a topic concerning which Aristotle takes issue with Plato’s concepts in both his Republic and Laws. Since Aristotle was very familiar with both of these works by Plato, Schütrumpf identifies points at which Aristotle follows the Platonic tradition and points at which he establishes new ground. He also offers new ideas about Aristotle’s incorporation of information from medical writers of his time and notes the manner in which Aristotle uses numerous medical concepts, even for non-medical issues. His commentary on Aristotle’s Politics has not, however, been Schütrumpf’s sole focus this year. He gave talks at Rutgers University in October and at the University of Vancouver in January. In the fall he published the conference proceedings from the 1996 conference he organized on Dicaearchus, which was held in Boulder. He also published a monograph on Aristotle and the Austrian-American political scientist Eric Voegelin in addition to a number of other papers and reviews.

Peter Knox was an obvious choice for the Excellence in Service Award. Since his arrival at CU not quite a decade ago, Knox has chaired two departments (Classics since 1994 and Comparative Literature temporarily in 2001), chaired the Arts and Sciences Council (1999-2000), helped develop the Center for the Humanities and the Arts (1996), sat on the Vice Chancellor's Cabinet for Research, Scholarly and Creative Work (2001-present), served on six other departmental committees and nine university committees, served as editor of the quarterly Classical Journal since 1998, co-organized the annual meeting for the Classical Association of the Middle West and South in 1997, co-organized the symposium for the Denver Center's blockbuster Tantalus in 2000, chaired the external review committee for Harvard's Department of Classics, and served as the North American representative for the Fédération internationale des associations d'études classiques. Indeed, this dizzying list reflects only a fraction of the service activities in which Peter has been involved. And he has done all of this while continuing to publish outstanding work in the field of Roman poetry and while working actively with undergraduates, graduates and colleagues on the daily business of education: teaching, advising, counseling and mentoring. As Prof. Christopher Braider of French and Italian commented, "It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine a better or more selfless citizen of our college and university."