News and Information

The Carl Schlam Memorial Lecture

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The Lecture

The lecture traces the development of the idea of a poetic career not (as more usual) through the Vergilian tradition, but by focusing on Ovid and the origins of prose fiction in European literature, especially Apuleius and Boccaccio.

The Speaker

Dr. Alessandro Barchiesi is Professor of Latin Literature, Università degli Studi di Siena (sede di Arezzo), and the Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies at Stanford University. He is one of the most outstanding scholars on Roman literature and culture, especially poetry. His new work includes editing a multi-authored commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies.

The Lecture Series

The Carl Schlam Lecture Fund was established by family, colleagues, students and friends to recognize and honor Prof. Carl C. Schlam, who taught Classics at The Ohio State University from 1967 to 1993. It commemorates Prof. Schlam's collegiality and delight in the sharing of ideas among scholars, whether privately or in larger groups. This he demonstrated by his frequent and participatory presence at lectures across the university, which he genuinely viewed as a community of scholars. He is affectionately remembered for his amazing range of intellectual interests, his kindness and helpfulness to students and colleagues, his pride in his family's accomplishments, and the joys of a good conversation.

Carl Schlam was born in New York October 23, 1936. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School, he earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at Columbia University, where he had the good fortune to work closely with Professors Moses Hadas and Gilbert Highet, whose interests, scholarship and styles influenced him greatly. While working toward his doctorate he served as instructor at Case Institute of Technology, the Monclair Academy, Barnard School for Girls, and Rutgers University, and was appointed assistant professor of Classics at The Ohio State University in 1967, a year also distinguished by his marriage to Helena Frenkil. He attained the rank of professor in 1986, having served as Visiting Professor at Haifa University in 1975-76. His death of cancer after a long illness came on December 25, 1993.

His dissertation on "The Narrative Structure of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius" was to prove the foundation of his principal research activity, resulting in two seminal works on Apuleius, Cupid and Psyche: Apuleius and the Monuments (1976), and The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: On Making an Ass of oneself (1992). His sensitive reading and careful presentation did much to encourage reevaluation of The Metamorphoses as a well-written and carefully constructed work of quality. Apuleius led to later Latin, the Italian Humanists and Neo-Latin. A skilled bibliographer, he served his fellow-scholars and the direction of Apuleian studies well with bibliographic surveys in the Classical World (1971) and Lustrum (2001, Band 42), a work splendidly augmented and seen to press by his collaborator and colleague Ellen Finkelpearl.

Professor Schlam was an active and regularly productive member of the major classical organizations: the American Philological Association, the Archeological Institute of America, the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, as well as the Ohio Classical Conference, the Greater Columbus Latin Club, and the Societas Internationalist Studiis Neolatinis Provehendis. At Ohio State he was a strong supporter and participant in the activities of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He was a frequent presenter at conventions and congresses of classical, post-classical and neo-Latin groups.

Previous Carl Shlam Lectures

Date	Lecturer	Title
1994	David Konstan (Brown University)	"Homeric Friendship"
1995	Marilyn Katz (Connecticut Wesleyan)	"Women and Democracy in Ancient Athens"
1996	Harold Gotoff (University of Cincinnati)	"Comprehending Cicero"
1997	Ross Kraemer (University of Pennsylvania)	"Why is Asenath a Woman? Constructing Gender in an Ancient Novel"
1998	Duncan Kennedy (University of Bristol)	"A Sense of Place: Rome, Empire, and History Revisited"
1999	Peter Rose (Miami University)	"Theorizing Athenian Imperialism and the Athenian State: The Case of Mytilene"
2000	Sander M. Goldberg (University of California, Los Angeles)	"Cicero and the Comedians"
2001	Mark Griffith (University of California, Berkeley)	"Enslaved to Dionysos: Satyrs, Audience, and Aeschylus' Proteus"
2002	Carole Newlands (University of Wisconsin, Madison)	"The 'Other' John Gower and the First English translation of Ovid's Fasti"
2003	Josiah Ober (Princeton University)	"The Moral Authority of the Past: Precedent, Amnesty, and Thucydidean History"
2004	Ellen Finkelpearl (Scripps College)	"Toward a New Apuleius"
2005	Erich Gruen (University of California, Berkeley)	"Identity Theft in the Ancient Mediterranean"
2006	Walter Burkert (University of Zurich)	"East and West: Ancient Variations of a Eurasian Conflict"
2007	Richard Thomas (Harvard University)	"The Streets of Rome: Bob Dylan and the Classics"
2008	Martin L. West (All Souls College, Oxford)	"Odysseus Re-routed"