elliott

Congratulations to Jackie Elliott!

Anonymous — Tue, 26 May 2020 16:05:53 +0000

Congratulations to Jackie Elliott! Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2020 - 10:05

Jackie Elliott has won a College Scholar Award, which she will use to support the completion of the following two projects:

A short, introductory volume on Early Roman Poetry, for Brill’s Research Perspectives in Classical Poetry series. This volume will offer an overview of current scholarship and interpretive trends in the area of early Roman poetry, laying out key questions about the Roman literary record at its origin, and registering the oddity of the fact that a literature developed at Rome at all, when this is by no means a necessary feature of ancient societies. It will detail the pre-literary written record at Rome, as best we can access it, and seek to explain how this record underwrites the features of language that emerge in the fragments of Roman poetry as we encounter them, from the date our record begins (239 BCE). It will engage issues of definition and periodicity; lay out the record itself of early Roman poetry, in its unavoidable relationship to prose, and explain the conceptual framework according to which the ancient world categorized and understood that record; it will explain the sources of our knowledge of that record and the ways that these complicate our access to it; and it will define the consequences of those complications for the task of the editor who sets out to present the record of early Roman poetry to the more general reader.
A monograph: The History of Cato’s Origines. Cato’s Origines (“Origins”) was by any account a remarkable work. Written by one of the leading Roman statesmen of the mid-second century BCE, it was the first prose history of Rome in Latin and was subsequently construed as the foundation of the tradition of Roman historical writing. The work exists today only as a series of fragments quoted in the works of later authors of antiquity. Not least for that reason, the Origines presents us with a series of interpretive puzzles, the answers to which define the parameters of our reconstructions of the history of Roman historical writing and its place in the intellectual life of the Roman Republic and the Empire that followed. Underlying these puzzles, and relevant to our response to each of them, is the question of the ancient transmission, circulation and reception of the Origines: that is, who read the work, in what contexts, how they interpreted it, and why and how they chose to quote it and thus to pass it on to other readers. This history of ancient readers and of ancient reading is in fact traceable: though the surviving evidence only puts us in a position to tell a small part of the full story of a work’s ancient circulation and reception, such a history is, in fact, the aspect of the work that our challenging evidence best allows us to address. If carried out in detail, it can provide an invaluable guide through the intricate maze of our ancient evidence, able to illuminate perspectives yet to be explored while also showing why established interpretive avenues or indeed broad assumptions about a given work mislead. This project on Cato’s Origines first undertakes such a detailed history of the work’s ancient transmission and reception; this then informs an exploration of larger questions about Cato’s self-positioning as author and relationship to his contemporary and subsequent audiences, with glances across to counterpoised genres, such as epic, that also sought to address the relationship of the Roman past to the Roman present as contemporary audiences experienced it.

One of the larger questions at issue in the conversations this project engages is that of the role literature played in spreading the sense of a cohesive Roman identity across an at-this-time increasingly far-flung Roman sphere of influence. It is sometimes argued or assumed that pride of place in this function would have gone to works of Roman prose history. The findings of this project to date regarding how and by whom works of history were read do not support that notion; the public genre of epic is, in the view these findings afford, a far stronger candidate for celebrating Roman collective achievement and for promoting an understanding, able to permeate the strata of Roman society at large, of what it meant to be Roman.

Jackie will first work on these two projects in Berlin as a Humboldt Foundation fellowship recipient (2020-21); she will complete them during her fall 2021 sabbatical and her spring 2022 tenure of the College Scholar Award.

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Congratulations to our Faculty Award Winners!

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 06:00:00 +0000

Congratulations to our Faculty Award Winners! Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/29/2020 - 00:00

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Jackie Elliott wins Humboldt fellowship for Berlin

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 17:32:54 +0000

Jackie Elliott wins Humboldt fellowship for Berlin Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/10/2017 - 11:32

Jackie Elliott is extremely grateful to be the recipient of a Humboldt fellowship for experienced researchers, which will take her to Berlin for the 2017-18 academic year. During that time, she will work on a relatively new project, on the second century satirist, Lucilius. Jackie appreciates the help of RAs Reina Callier and David Chu, who have done much to date to make the project successful. Her academic host in Germany will be Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schmitzer of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Jackie very much appreciates his support of the project too.

Jackie will continue to serve as Chair until the end of June 2017. During her absence, John Gibert will serve as Chair of the Classics Department. Jackie will return to her term as Chair in July 2018. Please feel free to contact her throughout her research leave at Jackie.Elliott@colorado.edu.

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Jackie Elliott - Winner of the 2015 Goodwin Award

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Dec 2015 17:57:56 +0000

Jackie Elliott - Winner of the 2015 Goodwin Award Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/10/2015 - 10:57

Goodwin Award - Jackie Elliott

In the world of Greek philology, the beginnings are the wellspring of everything to follow: the ocean of Homeric poetry flows through and around every subsequent expression of creative thought in Greek literary tradition. The scholars who devote themselves to the Homeric tradition look back to two monumental texts, preserved and obsessively reread through the centuries, and offering limitless opportunities to find new meanings in them and in the literary culture they have endowed.

In Latin philology, the situation is quite different: we begin with fragments. Through assiduous labor and accumulated learning, scholars over the centuries have managed to identify, classify, and understand the verbal remains of early Latin literacy and the even rarer bits of early literary language. Unlike the ocean of Homer, these fragments produce at best a trickle, temperamental and random in its flow, from what was once a fresh spring of youthful creativity. Only the great scholarly editions of fragments produced over the last century and a half have allowed us to make some sense, however scant, of the literary origins that would lead eventually to Livy, Virgil, and the other surviving representatives of a remarkable creative past.

The single figure regarding whom questions of interpretation are perhaps most fundamental is Ennius, who with his Annales inaugurated an authentically Roman epic tradition. Fragments of this great work survive scattered throughout the extant corpus of Latin texts, both pre- and post-Virgilian, and are substantial enough—but barely so—to make clear the formative influence of Ennius on Virgil. Ironically, the significance of this influence is also indirectly responsible for the disappearance of Ennius’ great poem from the literary record; thus, while the centrality of Ennius to precise features of Virgil’s diction and style can be clearly seen, far less clear is the nature of Ennius’ poem itself.

In a remarkable book that combines painstaking scholarship with brilliant intuition, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales (Cambridge, 2013), Jackie Elliott dissects the intricate layers of learned opinion that have surrounded not only Ennius and Virgil but also their receptions. The result is a work both meticulous in its acuity and daring in its willingness to take on the question of how little we really know, but how much we may with caution be able to infer, about the content, organization, sophistication, and ideology of the Annales. Near the beginning of the book, she advises her readers as follows: “This study will have served its purpose if to any extent it promotes the open toleration of ambiguity among the community of interpreters who have a stake in what we find to say about the fragments of Ennius’ Annales.” On behalf of this community of interpreters, the SCS is proud to award the Charles Goodwin Award of Merit to Jackie Elliott for her groundbreaking achievement, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales.

Barbara Weiden Boyd, Chair
Fritz Graf
Mark Griffith
Sheila Murnaghan

https://classicalstudies.org/awards-and-fellowships/2015/goodwin-award-jackie-elliott

Jackie Elliott's book, *Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales* (Cambridge 2013), is being recognized by a Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit! Three Goodwin Awards are granted annually for an outstanding contribution to classical scholarship published by a member of the Society for Classical Studies during the three years before the current calendar year.

This is a magnificent achievement -- many congratulations, Jackie!

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