UPDATE: The Faculty of Philology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum awarded me an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree on December 9, 2011 - only the third such degree it has conferred in the last 50 years. As you can see, the ceremony was very spirited, including the world premiere of a Neolatin musical/play, Pietas in peregrinos (1703), wherein Dido comes to a happy end (she is holding a bouquet of flowers here and looks quite happy, as do we all). I cannot say enough about the wonderful synergy that university and the people there have provided for me and my Max-Planck Award project. I am deeply honored and grateful.
It feels good to be pushing just one envelope instead
of three. The Max-Planck Award has been great,
but I had signed a book contract with the Cambridge
U.P. just a few months earlier and was in the middle
of a 3-year project with the SBL on the
contextualization of the New Testament with the early
Roman empire, focus on the imperial cult. Now
these two projects are done; the
imperial cult proceedings were published in time for the SBL meeting in San Francisco,
and book #10, Augustus: introduction to the life
of an emperor (in the new Key Figures of
Classical Antiquity series) is in
production, probable publication date is August (of course) 2012.
So there remains a full professional life with the
ongoing Max-Planck
Award project Memoria Romana;
see the home
page for details and, for entertainment, the
media clip
(which won an award!) and the faculty
spotlight at a UT basketball game
(they won that one). Having reached a total of 31
grantees, we are not accepting any further
applications. Work with the existing grantees, incl.
workshops, is continuing and rewarding—what a
productive and stimulating group they are! (but then I
had a certain part in choosing them :). I can now
devote more emphasis to publications, some resulting
from conferences under the aegis of the project. Our
recent conference at the American Academy in
Rome, endnoted by Daniel Libeskind,
was a huge success (and a ton of work before then).
Similarly, work at and from my European base, the
Ruhr-Universität Bochum, has been a great
experience in an active and dynamic environment. I am now working
with its entrepreneurial International
Center for Research in the Humanities on two
conferences on religious pliuralism. They are part of
the new collaborative program, effected last year,
between
UT's Dept. of Religious Studies and the Center.
I am truly fortunate to have the opportunity to build
up and work on new projects at this point. Back at UT for the spring semester, teaching Greece and Rome in Film and graduate seminar on the Augustan age.
And finally, as always, there are my wonderful
grandkids, Alex, Zoe, and Nick, who make it all
worthwhile. The two grandsons in Hollywood look a
little different, but they are a lot of fun, too.
Seriously, I truly have a lot to be thankful for,
including wonderful family on both sides of the
Atlantic. Few people are so blessed, especially these
days.
