This past Thursday 30 April, the Graduate School—New Brunswick announced the winners of its twelve University and Louis Bevier Dissertation Fellowships for the 2009-2010 academic year.
One of just four Rutgers graduate students in the Humanities to be chosen as a Bevier Fellow was Classics graduate student Elizabeth Gloyn, for her dissertation “Seneca and the Ethics of the Family”.
Liz Gloyn, who received her first two degrees (BA Hon., M.Phil.) from Newnham College Cambridge, is finishing up her year as a member of the inaugural class of Rutgers Scholar-Teachers at Rutgers-Newark, where she has spent the spring semester teaching Latin 102 and Gender & Sexuality in the Ancient World.
“Although I’ll miss teaching,” Liz said, “I’m looking forward to working on my dissertation through the coming academic year. I’m about to begin work on my third chapter, which will examine Seneca’s views on marriage.”
Gloyn has other academic plans for the upcoming year. She will be presenting a talk at the 2010 American Philological Association meeting in Anaheim, during a workshop entitled “New Ventures in Classics Pedagogy: The Challenge of Teaching about Rape”.
She also hopes to find time to work on her pet project, the reception of the Classics in collectible Barbie dolls. You can see two amazing examples here and (especially) here.
But before all of that, Gloyn plans to take a well-earned break over the summer vacation, “spending time both back in the UK and in Aruba.”
Commemorative centenary lamp from Old Queen’s, built in 1809, and which celebrated its 200th anniversary this past week
The Bevier Fellowship is in memory of Rutgers classicist Louis Bevier Jr. (1857-1925). He was a descendant of Louis Bevier, a Huguenot who settled in New York state in 1665 and was one of the twelve patentees of the New Paltz Palatinate.
Louis Bevier, Jr., graduated from Rutgers College in 1878, and then studied for three years at Johns Hopkins University. His dissertation, on “The Genuineness of the First Antiphontean Oration”, written under the great Basil Gildersleeve, was just the fourth in the Hopkins Classics program to be awarded a Ph.D.
After traveling and studying in Europe (Leipzig and Bonn, also at the infant American School of Classical Studies at Athens), Bevier became an instructor in Modern Languages and Latin at Rutgers, and in 1893 was elected Professor of Greek. His Brief Greek Syntax (1901) found itself reprinted by Caratzas in 1981.
Bevier was deeply interested in promoting college athletics and in 1905 was one of the principal founders of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (formerly the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States), when the burning issues of the day were student football injuries and summer baseball for pay. In 1912 Bevier became the second-ever Dean of Rutgers College, a position he held until his death in 1925.
As it happens, this very day (5 May 2009) is the 84th anniversary of Bevier’s death at his home at Bishop Place in New Brunswick.
From The New York Times, 6 May 1925
rutgersclassics.com 