Home and Overview

Hello! I am Andrew Scholtz, Associate Professor of Classics in the Department of Middle Eastern and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (MEAMS, formerly Classical and Near Eastern Studies), here at Binghamton University. My research and teaching encompass a broad range of interests, including Imperial Greek literature and culture, competition and and the emotions, Greek and Latin rhetoric, and critical theory as a lens through which way to view such things (see my selected works page, itself still a work in progress). But what I aim for more than anything is merging my teaching with with scholarship — in other words, bringing students into a closer connection with the frontiers of knowledge. I want to guide students toward thinking creatively and critically, just as I try to do in my own work.

Parthenon, me
Me at the Parthenon, Athens, 1995

I wasn't always a classicist. In fact, I went to college for music — cello-performance, to be exact. However, by the time I received my Bachelor of Music degree from Boston University, a fascination with ancient culture and language and had already taken root. After receiving my bachelor's, I went on to take a master's degree in cello-performance, though I had by then begun the study of Latin. Later, I took up Greek; travel in Italy further intensified my interest in things classical. Finally, in the fall of '89, I entered the Ph.D. program in Classical Languages and Literatures at Yale University, taking my degree in ancient Greek in the fall of '97. After Yale, I taught for two years at Wabash College, then for a year at Yale before taking up my current position at Binghamton University in the fall of 2000.

Scholarship

At the beginning of my scholarly arc I focused on gender, sexuality, desire, and how they resonated in literature produced under the classical Athenian democracy. More recently I have begun to study the rivalrous emotion in the ancient Mediterranean. Those interests have led to a publication, "The Unwelcome Guest: Envy and Shame Materialized in a Roman Villa," TAPA 151.2 (2021), and form the basis of my current book project, Tangled Webs: How Emotion, Competition, and Sense-Making in the Roman Imperial East.

Concordia Discors, book

I have written on critical theory and its application to literature produced under the classical Athenian democracy (book Concordia Discors, Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, 2007), on erotic imagery in political contexts (chapter in book = article "Friends, Lovers, Flatterers, Transactions of the American Philological Association"; "Perfume from Peron's," Illinois Classical Studies), and on cult to Aphrodite at a Greek trading post in the Nile Delta (article "Aphrodite Pandemos at Naukratis," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies).

Teaching

Colosseum
Colosseum, Rome

These scholarly interests translate into teaching that explores the intersections of culture, politics, and literature in the ancient world. In so doing, my goal is three-fold: (1) to bring students into contact with the values and attitudes that animated the politics, literature, art, and thought of the ancient Greeks; (2) to explore how ancient Greece relates to the culture with which we live today; (3) to to guide students through the intricacies of critical thinking and effective writing and presenting. I teach ancient Greek and Latin language at all levels. In my language teaching, I am committed to providing students with a firm grounding in the basics, and to working with them in improving their reading and comprehension skills, but I also consider it important to convey to students a sense of the cultural, historical, and intellectual context within which the languages were used.

© Andrew Scholtz | Modified 21 March, 2022