News

Congratulations to Dr Richard Marshall, a former lecturer here, who has recently taken up a new post as Lecturer in Classics at Newcastle University. Richard is a specialist on the scholarship of Republican and early Imperial Rome, with a particular research interest in Roman science and mathematics.

Congratulations to Professor (Emeritus) Brian Arkins, who is to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hopkins Society of Ireland. You can read several of Professor Arkins’ articles on Hopkins here, including his work on Greek themes in Hopkins; Style in the Poetry of Hopkins; and the Hopkins Scholarship of Norman White.

On 31 January 2020, Classics at NUI Galway held a special event to mark an extraordinarily productive year. The four members of our team launched no less than six books. We were delighted to welcome Prof. John Carey of University College, Cork to speak on the occasion of the launch. Left to right: Kate Quinn (Head of School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures), Michael Clarke, Jacopo Bisagni, Edward Herring, Pádraic Moran, John Carey (UCC). The six books are: Jacopo Bisagni, Amrae Coluimb Chille: a Critical Edition (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 2019) Michael Clarke, Achilles Beside Gilgamesh: Mortality and Wisdom in Early Epic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Edward Herring, Patterns in the Production of Apulian Red-Figure Pottery (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018) Edward Herring & Eóin O'Donoghue (eds.), The Archaeology of Death. Proceedings of the Seventh Conference of Italian Archaeology (Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology, 2018) Pádraic Moran, De Origine Scoticae Linguae (O’Mulconry’s Glossary): An early Irish linguistic tract, edited with a related glossary, Irsan (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019) Chris Stray, Michael Clarke & Joshua Katz (eds.), Liddell and Scott: The History, Methodology and Languages of the World’s Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019) These six books mark the coming together of the various research strands led by the four members of our Classics team: Jacopo Bisagni, Michael Clarke, Edward Herring, and Pádraic Moran. Beyond the happy chance that these works all came into the light of day around the same time, in combination they represent the shared research agenda that marks out Galway Classics among its national and international peers.  It is still too common for academics and their readers to think of the ancient and medieval world as a series of separate and competing cultures or civilisations, each with its own centre and its own language, traditions and world-view. Our preference is to model the ancient past in terms of connection, interaction and fluidity. Civilisation thrives on cross-influence and merger, despite the fact that individual peoples and empires tended (and still tend) to assert themselves by claims to uniqueness and to absolute contrast with each other. These themes run in different ways through all six books: Clarke argues that the foundational ancient Greek epic, the Iliad, emerges from and forms part of the multi-lingual poetry and wisdom literature of the ancient Near East, especially the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh. Herring explores the development in ancient Italy of artistic styles ultimately derived from Greece but infused with themes and aesthetics that look to those of the indigenous traditions of Italy itself. Bisagni edits and interprets the canonical expression of Irish Early Christian poetics, Amrae Choluimb Cille, showing that it is steeped in Biblical and Graeco-Roman modes of expression fused with those of its Celtic surface language. Moran gives us the first modern edition of one of the key works of medieval linguistic science, in which Irish monastic scholars explored the relationship between their own language and the three sacred languages of their world – Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Together with two edited volumes of essays, these monographs are milestones in our ongoing project of exploring the cultural past in terms of collision and cross-fertilisation: as a historian in a neighbouring field has put it, the challenge is “to restore a sense of messiness to the past”. Out of that awareness, we develop new understandings of the monuments of creativity that make the discipline of Classics worthwhile.

The second issue of Western Classics, a newsletter from staff and students in Classics at NUI Galway, is now available to download on our Newsletter page.

We were proud to celebrate the launch on 8 Oct 2018 of two books by Edward Herring: a monograph Patterns in the Production of Apulian Red-Figure Pottery and a volume of papers from the Seventh Conference of Italian Archaeology (co-edited with Eóin O'Donoghue). Special guest at the event was Prof. Mike Edwards (Roehampton). See photos on Facebook.

We are delighted to welcome five new PhD students to Classics at NUI Galway this year: Paula Harrison, Maria Chiara Marzolla, Elena Nordio, Mary Sweeney and Harry Tanner. See details of their projects here: http://www.nuigalway.ie/classics/postgrad/students/

Congratulations to Eóin O'Donoghue, a PhD graduate of NUIG Classics and former lecturer here, who is to take up a new post as lecturer in Classics at King's College, London. Best of luck Eóin!

We are pleased to announce the launch of Western Classics, a newsletter from staff and students in Classics at NUI Galway. You can download the inaugural issue on our Newsletter page.

NUIG Classics students took a field trip to the UCD Classical Museum on 7 Feb 2018. Many thanks to Kaylin Bednarz and Stephen O'Brien for facilitating a very stimulating and enjoyable experience! See some photos here:https://www.facebook.com/ClassicsNuiGalway/posts/648016205322633

Announcing the Margaret Heavey Memorial Lecture 2018: Prof. Eleanor Dickey (Reading), "Ancient Latin Textbooks Rediscovered". Tuesday 6 March 2018, 7pm, McMunn Theatre (Concourse). All welcome!  

Brian Arkins' new book Death and Marriage: Greek and Roman Drama on 12 Jan 2018. In attendance were their excellencies Katia Georgiou, Ambassador of Greece, and Costas A. Papademus, Ambassador of Cyrpus.    (Thanks to Michael O'Connell for the image.)

We are delighted to welcome three new PhD students to Classics, Grace Atwood, Noémi Farkas and Erin McKinney, working on aspects of Hiberno-Latin and Old Irish/Latin code-switching.

Congratulation to Sarah Corrigan and Jason O'Rorke for successfully passing their PhD viva exams at the start of this summer.  (See our PhD students page for details on their work.)

2017 Margaret Heavey Memorial Lecture‘“Does the inner self exist?” ancient insights from Greece and India’  by Prof. Richard Seaford, University of Exeter  Time: Tuesday, 14th March,  6.15pm  Venue: Siobhan McKenna Theatre (Arts Millennium Building), NUI Galway.   All welcome.  Reception to follow.  This event is generously supported by the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies

‌The Classics Society would like to announce a lecture by Prof. Brian Arkins, entitled ‘The Modern Reception of Thucydides’.  The lecture will be on Wednesday the 22nd February 2017 at 6pm in the Siobhan McKenna Theatre in the Arts Millennium Building.

‌The Classics Society is hosting  Prof. Edith Hall, of King's College, London, who will give a lecture entitled ‘Hephaestus, Clubfoot and the Early History of Greek Comedy’.  The lecture will be at 6.30pm on 18 January 2017 in the Siobhan McKenna Theatre in the Arts Millennium Building.

Dr Joanna Day will give a lecture entitled ‘Entertaining the senses in Ancient Rome’ at 7pm on November 10th 2016 in the Siobhan McKenna Theatre in the Arts Millennium Building.

Prof. Douglas Cairns from University of Edinburgh on Wednesday, 12th October 2016 gives his paper entitled 'Word and Deed: Brendan Kennelly's Antigone'.  At 6pm in the Siobhan McKenna Theatre in the Arts Millenium Building.  

2016 Margaret Heavey Memorial Lecture‘The Enigmatic Aspects of the Hisperica Famina’Prof. Andy Orchard (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Pembroke College, Oxford)Time: Thursday 3 March, 5pmVenue: Charles McMunn Theatre (Arts/Science Concourse), NUI Galway. All welcome.

Classics graduate Jonathan O'Rourke has distinguished himself by being an overall winner in the Undergraduate Awards in the category Classical Studies & Archaeology. Well done Jonathan!  (23 Sep 2015)

Pádraic Moran (Classics) participated in a special seminar on glossing in early medieval manuscripts organised at the Laboratoire HTL (Histoire des théories linguistiques) at the Université Paris Diderot (Paris VII) on 12 December 2015. The seminar brought together experts in European and Asian glossing as part of a continuing collaborative research venture. One outcome from the event was the creation of a new Network for the Study of Glossing. [Pictured: Franck Cinato (Paris), Matthew Zisk (Yamagata, Japan), Alderik Blom (Oxford), Pádraic Moran.]

Congratuations to Adelia Greer for passing her PhD viva examination on her thesis 'Xenophon and the ancient Greek cavalry horse: an equestrian perspective'. Adelia was supervised by Dr Edward Herring, Dean of the College.