Distinguished Service Awards for 2007
The APA owes an immense debt to Roger Bagnall. He has an extraordinary gift for making organizations work. While he has served the organization and the profession in many ways, two achievements are especially significant for us. As Secretary-Treasurer from 1979-1985, he created the present structure of divisions under vice-presidents. As the profession grew and the APA had more to do, it needed an organizational structure that would be flexible, rational, and manageable. It was Roger Bagnall, with help from George Kennedy and Michael Putnam, who did most of the hard work of devising it and making it a reality. It is thanks to this structure, along with the generosity of the members who work within it, that the APA can offer its impressive range of services. The APA's organization is democratic and easy to understand, and it shares the workload well.
Professor Bagnall's other achievement is especially significant for us now, in 2008. When he became Secretary-Treasurer, the APA had a very small invested fund. He recognized that this endowment was insufficient for the work that the Association wanted to take on and so obtained our first NEH challenge grant, led our first capital campaign, and not only raised the necessary funds, but, just as important to our long-term financial health, saw to it that they were invested successfully. Without this endowment, the APA would have accomplished much less than it did since 1985, and it certainly would not have been able to turn the Secretary-Treasurer's position into our current full-time Executive Director's job. Perhaps more important, without this endowment, we would not have the resources necessary to conduct the current capital campaign to raise the Endowment for Classics Research and Teaching for the future of our field.
Prof. Bagnall served on the Finance Committee from 1985-1988, as a Director from 1988-1991, and on the Development Committee from 1991-1992. Always, he has given the APA the rich benefits of his organizational skills and understanding of how a non-profit can operate thriftily and effectively.
He has combined these outstanding services to the APA with others—such as his work in preservation and as an advisor to l'Année and the DCB—with distinguished administrative service at his own institution, Columbia University, where he was Chair of Classics from 1994 to 2000, as well as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1989 to 1993. He has shown leadership not only as an administrator but as a scholar. Not only has his scholarly work been of a very high standard in itself, but he has demonstrated and fostered new approaches to papyrology that have profoundly changed that discipline. A professor of both Classics and History, he has taught and shown how the study of documentary papyri can be fully integrated into ancient history and how much it has to add.
As we prepare to transform the APA again, it is an appropriate moment to remember all that Roger Bagnall did for us.
A search for Elaine Fantham's name in l'Année philologique online yields 81 results: these start with a set of articles on Roman comedy in the early 70s. Yet Cicero appears already in 1973, and "Virgil's Dido and Seneca's tragic heroines" in 1975. The first book, Comparative Studies in Republic Latin Imagery, appears in 1972. In the late 70s, Cicero and rhetoric predominate for a while, but Horace, Ovid, Statius, and Seneca are all jostling for attention, and in 1982 the edition of Seneca's Troades comes out. All these interests continue, and Lucan and women in antiquity join them. Lucan II in the green-and-yellow in 1992 and Ovid, Fasti IV in 1998, Roman Literary Culture in 1996, The Roman World of Cicero's De oratore and Ovid's Metamorphoses in 2004, and Julia Augusti in 2006. This range of scholarship is obviously closely connected to teaching. The commentaries and introductory works are meant to help real students and readers, and through her books and articles we can often hear the echo of the living seminar. Her former students, from Indiana, Toronto, and Princeton, revere her. She is unfailingly helpful to colleagues throughout the world, but nobody could doubt the clear and sharp judgment that accompanies her amiability. It is this combination of wide learning, awareness of audiences, clarity, and wit that has made her so successful on NPR.
With all this, the catalogue of Elaine Fantham's services to the APA is exhausting even to read. It begins in 1976, when she served on a special committee on Basic Research Tools. This committee's work led to a number of very useful initiatives, including two of the APA's most important projects of the last few decades: the Barrington Atlas of the Ancient World and the Database of Classical Bibliography. Prof. Fantham served on the Placement Committee from 1980-83, was a director from 1987-90, was on the program committee from 1988-91, was VP for Research from 1992-96, and was President in 2004. Those are only the highlights. She has done more than any one person could be expected to do, and done it all well, with both wisdom and good humor. Even now she is a member of the Advisory Board for l'Année philologique and a very hard-working member of the Capital Campaign Committee. For thirty years of such dedication, our gratitude can hardly be an adequate response, but it could not be more heartfelt.