Matthew B. Roller

Johns Hopkins University: "Matthew Roller is a Romanist who is engaged with the literature, history, art, philosophy, and culture most broadly of the ancient Roman world. He is the author of Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome, which appeared in 2001 from Princeton University Press. This book examines the processes by which aristocrats of the early Imperial period negotiated the nature and scope of the Roman emperor's authority in the context of the emerging autocratic regime.

He is also interested in Roman foodways and in the history of the body. These interests are brought together in a monograph, Dining posture in ancient Rome: bodies, values, and status, appearing from Princeton University Press in Spring 2006. This book investigates the social practices and ideologies associated with the three bodily dispositions-reclining, sitting, and standing-that were available to Romans of different ages, sexes, and social statuses when dining."

See related post in "Academic Presentations On The Roman Empire".

Office: 118 Gilman Hall
Phone: 410-516-5095
E-mail: mroller@jhu.edu

Gregory Aldrete, University of Wisconsin, Green Bay

I noticed an article about Professor Gregory Aldrete of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, presenting a program about Roman oratory to a local group. He sounded like a very interesting and motivated scholar so I checked out his webpage:

"After earning my undergraduate degree from Princeton University and my Ph.D in ancient history from the University of Michigan, I joined the History Department at UWGB in 1995. I teach classes in History and Humanistic Studies including: Foundations of Western Culture I, Perspectives on Human Values: The Classical World, History of Ancient Greece, History of Ancient Rome, Topics in Ancient History, and Interdisciplinary Themes and Great Works courses.

My particular areas of research interest are the social and economic history of the Roman Empire, rhetoric and oratory, and urban problems in the ancient world. My major publications include a number of books, among them, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome, (Johns Hopkins 2006), Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins, 1999), Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii and Ostia (Greenwood, 2004), and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life in the Ancient World (Greenwood, 2004), as well as various chapters in books and articles. Currently I am writing a college textbook for use in Western Civilization survey classes which is under contract with McGraw Hill. I have been fortunate enough to have held a number of fellowships which have enhanced my understanding of the ancient world and made possible research trips to Italy to view museum collections and archaeological sites. Most pleasant of these were two NEH fellowships which allowed me to spend several summers at the American Academy in Rome. Recently, I was also awarded a full-year NEH Humanities Fellowship for 2004-2005 which enabled me to spend the year finishing my book on floods. In the summer of 2006 I will attend an NEH seminar at UCLA that will investigate using high-tech three-dimensional virtual reality models of ancient Rome as aids to teaching and research.

I firmly believe in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the ancient world which combines history, philology, archaeology, and art history and which uses both textual and physical evidence. For me, some of the most exciting moments of my research, such as examining 1,500 year old manuscripts at the Vatican Library, have involved physical evidence, and I have tried to incorporate this approach into my teaching as well, by bringing artifacts such as coins into the classroom and by always emphasizing the close reading of a variety of primary sources. As a teacher, my goals are to convey to my students a bit of the enthusiasm for and fascination with the ancient world that I feel, and to show some of the connections between that world and our own."

Contact Info:

Office: 369 Theatre Hall
e-mail: aldreteg@uwgb.edu
phone: (920) 465-2467

Mailing address:
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
2420 Nicolet Dr., Theatre Hall 331
Green Bay, WI 54311

I think he makes a very formidable looking legionary as well! He has some great pictures of his students undergoing Roman army training too!

Jane Biers Retires from Missouri University

Former Adjunct Professor and Director, Museum of Art and Archaeology
Roman Archaeology, Curator of Ancient Art
Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

"Archaeology has taken Jane Biers many places in her life; from the forgotten Roman outposts of England, where she witnessed her first excavations, to the sprawl of Athens, where she met her husband, to the fledgling young museum of an American university town, where she carved out her place in the world.

When she stepped down as interim director of MU?s Museum of Art and Archaeology last month, Biers was retiring for the second time from a university career that spanned more than 3½ decades.

It was language that first drew Biers, 67, down the winding career path that would lead her to Columbia ? not the romance of digging up ancient treasures, nor the adventurous crack of a bullwhip. In the late 1950s, she was growing up in Oxford, England, where Latin was a required part of high school-level curriculum.

"It wasn't that I always wanted to be an archaeologist," Biers said. "It's just I sort of progressed from Latin to learning (ancient) Greek to learning ancient history."

She was in the right place at the right time: a town home to one of the oldest and most reputable universities for the study of classical literature, philosophy and history ? or ?Greats.? Biers attended Oxford University for her undergraduate degree. At Oxford, she was granted the opportunity to work at important new dig sites: St. Albans, once home to the Roman city of Verulamium, and Fishbourne, a first-century villa likely inhabited by the local Roman puppet king."


Research

As an archaeologist, Jane Biers? research interests have been focused on Roman Baths. Her most recent publication on the subject can be found in Corinth, the Centenary, 1896-1996, Corinth v. 20. As curator of ancient art at the Museum of Art and Archaeology from 1974-2000, she has, however, been involved in a number of other research projects. Her most recent publications are Testament of Time: Selected Objects from the Collection of Palestinian Antiquities in the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri-Columbia (2004), which she edited with James Terry. She was also the editor of A Peaceable Kingdom: Animals in Ancient Art from the Leo Mildenberg Collection, Part VI (2004).


mailing address:
Museum of Art and Archaeology
1 Pickard Hall
Columbia, MO 65211-1420

phone: 573-882-5075
fax: 573-884-4039
email: BiersJ@missouri.edu