University of Michigan Press Blog

Q&A with Eugene Dwyer, author of Pompeii's Living Statues

In AD 79, Mt. Vesuvius erupted in two stages. While the first stage was incredibly destructive, it was the second stage, a so-called pyroclastic flow that inundated Pompeii with a combination of superheated gases, pumice, and rocks, killing tens of thousands of people and animals and burying them in ash and mud.

Pompeii's Living Statues is a narrative account, supported by contemporary documents, of the remarkable discovery of those ancient victims preserved in the volcanic mud of Vesuvius.

Eugene Dwyer is Professor of Art History at Kenyon College. Trained at Harvard and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, he has contributed articles to numerous volumes on Italian architecture and archaeology published by presses including Cambridge University Press, Getty Publications, and the University of Michigan Press.  He is the author of Pompeian Domestic Sculpture: A Study of Five Pompeian Houses and Their Contents.

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UM Press launches groundbreaking series with Bard Graduate Center

The University of Michigan Press announced today that it has formed a partnership with the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture, to produce a new series of books. The Bard Graduate Center Cultural Histories of the Material World Series will overcome the boundaries between academic disciplines and the boundaries between print and electronic media to tell the story of how human beings have shaped and interpreted the world around them.

“This is an important series, in an interdisciplinary area that has not received its publishing due, led by a board of outstanding scholars worldwide in a variety of fields,” said Phil Pochoda, director of the University of Michigan Press. “We are thrilled to be part of the exemplary research and the groundbreaking publishing practices that will define this project.”

The series will incorporate the perspectives of archaeology, anthropology, art and design history, economic and landscape history, the history of technology, and philosophy. It will marry the kind of careful attention to material culture once associated only with curators with the evolving cultural historical approaches to materiality across the range of the humanities and social sciences.

“This type of scholarly inquiry did not have an institutional home before the founding of the Bard Graduate Center,” said Peter N. Miller, Bard Graduate Center Dean. “And it did not have a publishing home before the launching of this series with the University of Michigan Press.”

The material in the series will not be limited to traditional print. Rather, it will include a variety of print and digital formats and offerings, ranging from traditional and short-run printing to a robust research Web site, interactive digital material, maps, image and document repositories, databases, discussion sites and stand alone digital monographs, all made widely available to assist scholars in experimenting with creating knowledge in whatever form they feel best enables them to discover and explore.

 

Fergus Millar, author of the UM Press book 'The Crowd in Rome,' is knighted

The University of Michigan Press is delighted to congratulate Fergus Millar, Camden Professor of Ancient History Emeritus at the University of Oxford, on the occasion of his being knighted in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honors, for service to scholarship.

Sir Fergus is the author, among many other books, of The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (University of Michigan Press, 1998), based upon his Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome.

Previously a Fellow of Brasenose College and Leverhulme Fellow at Oxford's Oriental Institute, Sir Fergus is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003), the recipient of the British Academy's Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies (2002), and Oxford's Conington Prize (1963), among many other awards and honors.

During his Ann Arbor sojourn as Jerome Lecturer and on subsequent visits, Fergus Millar has always been exceptionally welcoming to students at all levels, and unfailingly generous to his faculty colleagues, willingly sharing his time, knowledge, and enthusiasm for classical antiquity.

When asked by the BBC to comment on his knighthood, with characteristic self-effacement he stated that the honor was a "recognition of the subject that I do."

"Lead Burrito" Roman Tomb Find By UM Press Authors Could Contain Body of Gladiator or Christian Dignitary

Published: National Geographic.com, Christine Dell'Amore, March 29, 2010.

A 1,700-year-old sarcophagus found in an abandoned city near Rome could contain the body of a gladiator or a Christian dignitary, say archaeologists who are preparing to examine the coffin in the lab. Found in a cement-capped pit in the ancient metropolis of Gabii, the coffin is unusual because it's made of lead—only a few hundred such Roman burials are known. Even odder, the 800 pounds (362 kilograms) of lead fold over the corpse like a burrito, said Roman archaeologist Jeffrey Becker [co-author with Nicola Terranato of upcoming UMP release Roman Republican Villas, available June 2011]. Most lead sarcophagi look like "old-fashioned cracker boxes," molded into a rectangular shape with a lid, he said. The coffin, which has been in storage since last year, is about to be moved to the American Academy in Rome for further testing. But uncovering details about the person inside the lead coffin will be tricky.

The Colbert Report | The Information Master

by David Bell, originally appeared in The New Republic on October 7th, 2009

The Information Master by Jacob Soll

Soll is also the author of Publishing The Prince (2005)

"That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship."

Siraisi, Winner of 2008 MacArthur Fellowship

Congratulations to Nancy Siraisi, author of History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning, on being awarded a 2008 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

From the MacArthur website:
"The MacArthur Fellowship Program awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction. There are three criteria for selection of Fellows: exceptional creativity, promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishment, and potential for the fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work."

Read more about the program at: www.macfound.org

Read more about Nancy Siraisi at: www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.4537287/

Mary Jaeger, Featured Author on Duck Store

Mary Jaeger, author of Archimedes and the Roman Imagination is currently the featured author on the University of Oregon's book store website, The Duck Store. Check it out.

About Archimedes and the Roman Imagination:

The great mathematician Archimedes, a Sicilian Greek whose machines defended Syracuse against the Romans during the Second Punic War, was killed by a Roman after the city fell, yet it is largely Roman sources, and Greek texts aimed at Roman audiences, that preserve the stories about him. Archimedes' story, Mary Jaeger argues, thus becomes a locus where writers explore the intersection of Greek and Roman culture, and as such it plays an important role in Roman self-definition. Jaeger uses the biography of Archimedes as a hermeneutic tool, providing insight into the construction of the traditional historical narrative about the Roman conquest of the Greek world and the Greek cultural invasion of Rome.

Read more about the book at: www.press.umich.edu/titleDetailDesc.do?id=300517.