He sold cars at a Honda dealership, had a career in hotel management (night auditor), and has popped up here and there as an author, exhibited photographer, and musician (playing pretty much everything).
David Danbeck (Rutgers ’08) also founded a new venue for the dissemination of classical scholarship, The Pinax: A Journal of Classical Studies. Danbeck and his journal are soon to move to New Haven, where this September he will start graduate studies in Classics at Yale University.
The Pinax is a refereed journal published online twice yearly and consists of scholarship, reviews and opinion—all written by undergraduates. The inaugural January ’08 issue featured articles written by juniors and seniors at Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard (bis), Rutgers, and Stanford.
As for its scope, “The Pinax publishes papers on all topics concerning the history and legacy of ancient mediterranean culture”, writes Danbeck. “The Journal is committed to fostering an environment which is conducive to the open exchange of ideas among emerging scholars in all disciplines which inform our knowledge of Graeco-Roman culture.”
Danbeck himself focuses on Greek literature, “especially anything but the 5th/early 4th c… [I’m] wed to Archaic, flirt with Hellenistic, salivate over Imperial and Byzantine.” At Rutgers Danbeck completed the requirements for two separate Classics majors, in Greek and in Latin literature, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with highest departmental honors.
His Rutgers BA thesis treated the later reception of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women in the poetry of Gregory of Nazianzus. And he long has been at work on a new edition of the Catalogue, freshly examining and collating the relevant manuscripts and papyri. Danbeck lists as his “current obsessions: ‘Hesiodic poetry’, epithalamia, Fracastoro’s Alcon, and teaching my cat Henry to meow [Charlie Mingus’] ‘Nostalgia in Times Square‘ (a hint: you can teach your cat a tune by whistling).”
rutgersclassics.com 