My four-year commute to Europe, and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) in particular, is over! I am tremendously grateful to my hosts there and the Max-Planck Society who made it all possible. I am winding up our highly successful project on memory in ancient Rome, Memoria Romana. We've sponsored 31 grantees and organized several international conferences and workshops; see the home page for details. A goodly number of publications are forthcoming. It has been a busy and productive time - what an opportunity! It's been wonderful, too, to see that my two former project assistants at UT and several of our dissertation grantees have landed good tenure-track jobs - not a given these days, esp. in the humanities.
Now I'm back at UT full time, and happily so. Back in the arena with 250 students in an intro course on Greek civilization (yes, our tests are mostly essay - critical abilities are a good thing to develop) and a (much smaller) third-year Latin course on love elegy ;) Some excellent students in both classes. Book #10, Augustus: introduction to the life of an emperor (Cambridge University Press) is off and running in both print and electronic formats and #11, Memoria Romana: memory in Rome and Rome in memory is going to press this month (March 2013) as a supplement volume of Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome.
All in all, then, life is very good and all the more so because of wonderful family on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from 90 years (mother) to 2 (one of my canine grandsons in L.A.), with everyone else happily in between - my wonderful (hominid) grandchildren Alex, Zoe, and Nick in particular. I am indeed blessed.
