�ֲ���ý has announced eight faculty promotions, including tenure awards and full professorships, effective Aug. 1 for the 2018–19 academic year.

The promotions were recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees.

Malcolm Hill is vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at �ֲ���ý College.

“One of the joys of working at �ֲ���ý is to be surrounded by exceptionally talented and creative people. This year’s tenured and promoted faculty provide outstanding examples of the consequential scholarship and creative work going on at �ֲ���ý,” said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“As leaders in their respective fields and through their continuing hard work, these faculty offer our students unparalleled opportunities in the classroom, and give us all an opportunity to engage with the important ideas of our time.”

Meet the eight newly promoted professors, learn their research fields, and discover why they teach.

Promotions to associate professor with tenure

+Associate Professor of Religious Studies Ali Humayun Akhtar

Ali Humayun Akhtar has been promoted to associate professor of religious studies. (Michael Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Jonathan Cavallero

Jonathan Cavallero has been promoted to associate professor of rhetoric, film, and screen studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of German Raluca Cernahoschi

Raluca Cernahoschi has been promoted to associate professor of German. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of German Jakub Kazecki

Jakub Kazecki has been promoted to associate professor of German. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of Mathematics Katharine Ott

Katharine Ott has been promoted to associate professor of mathematics. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

+Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams

Larissa Williams has been promoted to associate professor of biology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Promotions to full professor

+Professor of Politics Stephen Engel

Stephen Engel has been promoted to professor of politics. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Lisa Maurizio

Lisa Maurizio has been promoted to professor of classical and medieval studies. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The inaugural induction ceremony for Eta Sigma Phi, a national honor society for classics students, involved everything you might expect of a community of Latin and Greek scholars: candles, olive branches, and recitations in the voices of Plato and Homer.

What it signified was something greater: a growing community of enthusiasts of antiquity.

The idea of creating a chapter of Eta Sigma Phi first arose when Isa Barrengos ’19 and Caroline Barnes ’19, both classical and medieval studies majors, were looking for ways to connect outside their classes with others who enjoyed Greek myths, Roman politics, or ancient literature.

Students in the CMS major are “very into it,” Barrengos said. “We found ourselves talking about liminality and Artemisian rituals, and we thought, we should make a club.”

Eta Sigma Phi seemed like the perfect vehicle for creating such a community of classics students. The national organization suggests that a college should have a classics club before applying to create a chapter.

As it turned out, the �ֲ���ý Classics Club already existed, though its level of activity had “waxed and waned” over the years, said Lisa Maurizio, professor of classical and medieval studies.

So in January, Barrengos and Barnes revived the club. Soon after, they successfully petitioned Eta Sigma Phi to create a chapter of the honor society, with Barnes as Hipparchus (chair), Barrengos as Chrysophlax (treasurer), and Maurizio as adviser.

Caroline Barnes ’19 of Sarasota Springs, N.Y. is inducted into Eta Sigma Phi, the national classics honor society, on Sept. 27 in the Muskie Archives. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Reviving the club, it turned out, extended the classics community still further. While the dozen students inducted into Eta Sigma Phi in the Muskie Archives on Sept. 27 had to have a B average in three Greek or Latin language courses, anyone — from a fluent reader of Plato’s Greek to a fan of the Percy Jackson series — can join the Classics Club.

The club has big plans for the year, including film screenings, a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and a presentation by a local ancient coin collector.

CMS majors who do meet Eta Sigma Phi’s requirements have the added benefit of joining a national community of students and scholars of classics, with translation contests, scholarships, and a national conference.

“If you go into graduate school for classics or even if you’re just interviewing for a job, you can say, ‘Not only was I a classics major, but I was a serious classics major. I was committed to it, and this is how I can show you,’” Barrengos said.

Both the society and the classics club give students a way to connect with CMS majors outside class — to talk about literature, politics, culture, and myths of antiquity.

“The students are hungry for intellectual engagement,” Maurizio said. “They are striving to create conversations about the way classics intersects with the modern world outside of classes as well as within classes. I see both the Classics Club and Eta Sigma Phi as fostering a community in which those conversations can take place.”

A replica of the Agamemnon Death Mask hangs in the Pettengill Hall office of Associate Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies Lisa Maurizio.

“When I look at the mask,” she says, “I think of the way knowledge and beauty from thousands of years ago get passed on — through mistakes, imitations, and education; through teachers and students who remember the past and in doing so remember each other.”

Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College

To that point, “Agamemnon Death Mask” is a misnomer, Maurizio explains. Made of gold, the real mask was found in a Mycenaean grave in 1876 by the “notorious” archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who “claimed it belonged to the legendary Greek king Agamemnon.” The mask actually dates from around 1550–1500 B.C.E., an earlier period than Agamemnon’s, so it’s not his. “But the name stuck,” she says.

The replica mask once belonged to Professor Emeritus of History John Cole, who, upon retiring and moving out of his Pettengill Hall office, gave it to then-student Andrew Carranco ’14, taught by Cole and Maurizio as a double major in history and in classical and medieval studies.

In the spirit of his academic majors, Carranco decided that history is “something to be shared” and that the mask would “find a better home” with his major department, so he gave it to Maurizio.

While men may have dominated public life in ancient Greece and Rome, women nevertheless played active roles in religious rituals.

In ancient times, says �ֲ���ý classicist Lisa Maurizio, “women were significant actors in funerary practices. We know women composed and chanted songs for those rites. Many scholars argue that through their laments they influenced the tradition of epic poetry,” such as the works of Homer.

Women’s lament is one of the topics that international scholars will take up at �ֲ���ý next week as the college hosts the conference Women’s Ritual Competence in the Ancient Mediterranean April 25–27.

The conference looks at a variety of women’s ritual activities, such as lamentation, prophecy, magical incantation, prayer, weaving and sacrifice.

“Competence” in the conference title, she adds, refers to the fact that the women in question were “participants in and constructors of the divine — how the divine was understood, imagined and worshipped.”

The conference will bring together classicists in a variety of disciplines: archaeology; art history; philology, the study of literary language; and epigraphy, the study of ancient inscriptions, especially on stone.

Maurizio’s co-organizers are Esther Eidinow, a historian of ancient Greece at the University of Nottingham in England, and Matthew Dillon, a professor of the humanities at the University of New England — not the UNE in Maine, but the school in Armidale, Australia, northwest of Sydney.

�ֲ���ý presenters at the conference are:

Rhetoric professor Stephanie Kelley-Romano, with “Symbolic Ritualization of Reproduction/Reproductive Anxieties in Alien Abduction Narratives”; Maurizio herself, whose talk is titled “Delphic Oracles: Occasional Verse and Ritual Competence”; and a colleague in classical and medieval studies, Laurie O’Higgins, who will discuss the ritual and symbolic dimensions of Penelope’s “web” — the robe Odysseus’ wife wove by day and unraveled at night .

Presenters at the �ֲ���ý event include experts in ancient textiles, writings on stone and statuettes from Italy.

Lisa Maurizio.

“We’re interested in a range of types of ancient evidence, not just literary texts,” Maurizio says. “We look at how these objects were used in the social world — how they indicated status, how they moved from person to person.

“For example, women in antiquity often gave soft gifts, like textiles, and dedicated them to gods and goddesses. Men often exchanged hard objects, such as metal weaponry.

“If you begin to look at these items beyond their immediate use, they give you insight into much broader social processes and structures.”

For more information about the conference, please contact Lisa Maurizio at lmaurizi@bates.edu. The conference is made possible by support from The Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation.

The Memory of Salt, a play written by Lisa Maurizio, associate professor of classical and medieval studies at �ֲ���ý College, will be performed at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 21 and 22, in the college’s Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall.

The public is invited to attend at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8391.

The story of a mother’s quest to bury her child, The Memory of Salt takes place in the aftermath of the Greek conquest of Troy (although the play’s simultaneous debut with the Brad Pitt film is coincidental).

“It looks at the question of desire and the degree to which it makes us human and binds us to one another,” says Maurizio, “or entraps us and compels us to do things that are perhaps not very good.”

The play features choreography by the incoming head of the �ֲ���ý dance program and music by faculty and a resident scholar involved with the �ֲ���ý gamelan, a type of Indonesian musical ensemble. In theatrical terms, Salt borrows from two traditions: ancient Greek and Japanese “noh” drama.

But it represents the culmination of a collaboration among Maurizio, director John Ambrosino — a 2001 �ֲ���ý graduate and founder of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble — and the late Ellen Seeling, a theatrical designer and associate professor of theater at �ֲ���ý.

The three shared a “vision of world theater,” said Maurizio, and earlier collaborated on which Maurizio wrote, Seeling designed and Ambrosino directed last year, both at �ֲ���ý and in Boston with his own company to good reviews.

In particular, Maurizio, Seeling and Ambrosino were intrigued by the stylized aspects of ancient Greek theater and noh, traditions that emerged from very different cultures and historical periods but had in common a variety of formal devices or practices.

“Both began in outdoor theaters,” Maurizio says. “They began in religious festivals, they used all-male actors wearing masks, they involved music and dance, they have choruses, and they have only one to two protagonists.”

Maurizio credits the creative vision of her colleagues for the inspiration to write the piece. In particular, she says, “this play could not have happened without Ellen and I collaborating together three or four years ago” on other projects.

In the spirit of that collaboration, faculty from other areas contribute to the Salt production. Carol Dilley, visiting assistant professor of dance, provides choreography, while the music is created by visiting Fulbright scholar Joko Susilo, working with the �ֲ���ý College Gamelan Mawar Mekar, led by Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma of the music faculty.

The Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation provided significant funding for the project. Ambrosino’s participation is supported by the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at �ֲ���ý.

The public is invited to attend at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8391.

The story of a mother’s quest to bury her child, The Memory of Salt takes place in the aftermath of the Greek conquest of Troy (although the play’s simultaneous debut with the Brad Pitt film is coincidental).

“It looks at the question of desire and the degree to which it makes us human and binds us to one another,” says Maurizio, “or entraps us and compels us to do things that are perhaps not very good.”

The play features choreography by the incoming head of the �ֲ���ý dance program and music by faculty and a resident scholar involved with the �ֲ���ý gamelan, a type of Indonesian musical ensemble. In theatrical terms, Salt borrows from two traditions: ancient Greek and Japanese “noh” drama.

But it represents the culmination of a collaboration among Maurizio, director John Ambrosino — a 2001 �ֲ���ý graduate and founder of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble — and the late Ellen Seeling, a theatrical designer and associate professor of theater at �ֲ���ý.

The three shared a “vision of world theater,” said Maurizio, and earlier collaborated on Tereus in Fragments, which Maurizio wrote, Seeling designed and Ambrosino directed last year, both at �ֲ���ý and in Boston with his own company to good reviews.

In particular, Maurizio, Seeling and Ambrosino were intrigued by the stylized aspects of ancient Greek theater and noh, traditions that emerged from very different cultures and historical periods but had in common a variety of formal devices or practices.

“Both began in outdoor theaters,” Maurizio says. “They began in religious festivals, they used all-male actors wearing masks, they involved music and dance, they have choruses, and they have only one to two protagonists.”

Maurizio credits the creative vision of her colleagues for the inspiration to write the piece. In particular, she says, “this play could not have happened without Ellen and I collaborating together three or four years ago” on other projects.

In the spirit of that collaboration, faculty from other areas contribute to the Salt production. Carol Dilley, visiting assistant professor of dance, provides choreography, while the music is created by visiting Fulbright scholar Joko Susilo, working with the �ֲ���ý College Gamelan Mawar Mekar, led by Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma of the music faculty.

The Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation provided significant funding for the project. Ambrosino’s participation is supported by the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at �ֲ���ý.

Tereus in Fragments: A Lost Play of Sophocles, a dramatic version of one of the more disturbing myths from ancient Greece, premieres on the �ֲ���ý College stage in performances at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 16 and 17, and 2 p.m. Sunday, May 18, in Gannett Theater, Pettigrew Hall, 305 College St. Admission is $6 for the general public and $3 for students and senior citizens.

Lisa Maurizio, an assistant professor in the �ֲ���ý classics department, has written a tragedy based on the myth of Tereus, his wife Procne and her sister Philomela — a story of love, memory, betrayal, revenge and divine intervention.

For Maurizio, Tereus began as a collaboration with Ellen Seeling, an assistant professor on the theater faculty who was scheduled to direct but has withdrawn due to illness. Maurizio, who collaborated with Seeling on a 2001 production of Prometheus Bound, says that working with this talented, imaginative designer and director has “totally transformed” her capacity for interpreting ancient tragedies.

John Ambrosino, a student of Seeling in the class of 2001 and the founder and artistic director of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble, is filling in for Seeling as director of the all-female, all-student cast. “She has basically taught me everything I know of the theater,” Ambrosino explains, “and I consider her my greatest mentor in modern theater.”

In Tereus, Ambrosino’s style is distinguished by the use of stylized gestures and line readings, as well as supporting effects like percussion and shadow puppetry, to throw Maurizio’s content into high relief. “The characters are not human; they’re archetypes,” Ambrosino says.

“There’s an otherworldliness to the play,” he says, that begs not to be interpreted in a naturalistic style.

In Greek myth, Tereus and Procne are married and have a son, Itys. When Procne asks to see her sister, Philomela, Tereus fetches her — but on the voyage back, rapes Philomela and cuts out her tongue. Philomela nevertheless is able to inform her sister of Tereus’ treachery by weaving images of it into a tapestry and giving it to Procne.

In retaliation, Procne and Philomela kill Itys, cook the child and serve him to an unwitting Tereus. Tereus’ attempt to avenge himself prompts the intervention of the gods, who transform the three into birds: Procne into a nightingale, Philomela into a swallow and Tereus into a hoopoe (a Eurasian species named for its call).

Where Hollywood characters resolve bad situations through personal growth and hugs, the ancient Greeks were less optimistic about the human capacity to solve their dilemmas, Maurizio says. In their point of view, “human beings are profoundly limited in their understanding, and sometimes their emotions and desires lead them into places where they cannot save themselves.”

At which point the gods sometimes take pity and bail them out. “They don’t restore them, they don’t redeem them,” says Maurizio, “but they remove them from their suffering.”

The story was known to the Greeks as a play by Sophocles — of which only 57 lines now exist in scattered fragments — and to the Romans from Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Shakespeare borrowed elements from it for Titus Andronicus, and an adaptation by a British playwright premiered in New York last fall.

In addition to Sophocles’ fragments, Maurizio looked to Iranian women’s poetry and Japanese drama, a particular interest of Seeling’s, for her inspiration. For her, unlike other interpreters of this story, the issue of male violence is not its most dramatically compelling aspect. “What I more explored was the love story between two sisters, and the dangers of remembering and dwelling on the past when the present is destitute,” she says.

In addition, the symbolism of Procne and Philomela’s plight is a reminder that in ancient times — and even today, in some ways — “women’s lives, and their rhythms and their meanings, are still opaque because they’re not part of the public realm.”

For reservations and information, call the �ֲ���ý box office at 207-786-6161.