Author Archives: Rebecka Lindau
Classics Library: Student Assistant Positions Available — Apply Now!
The John Miller Burnam Classics Library is looking to hire energetic, hard-working, and responsible student assistants.
The UC Classics Library is the premier classics library in the country thanks to its world-class collections and it is a destination library for national and international students and scholars.
We are seeking highly motivated student workers for fall semester openings. We offer employment of c. 10-15 hours a week. Unlike most jobs, we work around your class and exam schedules when planning the work schedule for each semester. Thanks to the variety of responsibilities and the excellence of the collections, working in the Classics Library can improve your research and library skills which are important for academic success as well as add to your CV and list of references.
In addition to being a valued member of an international and vibrant scholarly community and a distinguished library, you will be trained in varied and detail-oriented tasks ranging from staffing the circulation desk to shelving books, searching book lists against the library’s catalog, scanning documents, checking for broken web links, dusting shelves, and anything and everything a large and modern academic research library requires. We guarantee that you will not be bored, but because of our library’s important responsibilities and your limited work hours, you will be required to focus on the many tasks of the job rather than on personal social media or homework.
Because of the highly specialized nature of the Classics Library, we prioritize students with a background in Classical Studies and the Humanities in addition to students with western foreign language training, especially in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek in addition to in ancient Greek and Latin. Also, because of a limited budget, we prioritize students on a federal Work/Study grant although we do hire non-work/study students as well.
If this sounds like a good fit for you, please contact us to learn more and to set up an interview at your earliest convenience. Please submit your CV and application form (copy and paste the form into word) to:
Rebecka Lindau, head, rebecka.lindau@uc.edu
The library is located on the 1st floor of the Blegen Library building.
Select Classics Library Activities, 2023-2024
The Classics Library at the Cincinnati Reds Opening Day/Findlay Market Day Parade
Classics Library student worker Yo Shionoya, in a John Miller Burnam Classics Library t-shirt he had designed with an image of the Lupa and twins on an Urbs Roma commemorative coin minted during the reign of emperor Constantine and included in our Return of… exhibition (see below), held up the library’s cardboard cut-out of the Eden Park Lupa on a float representing the Italian American Community at the opening day of the Major League Baseball season. Rebecka was relegated to the streets. The atmosphere was electric and full of anticipation with some 200,000 Cincinnati baseball fans lining the streets in downtown Cincy. The float was featured on several local TV stations.
Continue readingGreek Refugees from Asia Minor: Exhibition and Presentations
On the day before Greek Independence Day, commemorating the start of the Greek Revolution on March 25, 1821, ca. 100 Greek American Cincinnati residents met for a day of remembrance of the so called Population Exchange following what in English is referred to as the Greco-Turkish War, lasting from 1919 to 1922 and ending with a treaty, the Treaty of Lausanne, signed by Greece and Turkey and also by Britain, France, Italy and others in 1923, establishing the current borders of Turkey and Greece, and stipulating the relocation of ca. 1.2 million Christian Orthodox Turks to Greece and ca. 400,000 Muslim Greeks to Turkey, upending the lives of so many who had never known any other country than the one in which they had been raised and the language they had spoken from birth.
Continue readingCelebration of Peter van Minnen, John Miller Burnam Professor of Classics
Classicists and supporters gathered en masse on Tuesday, February 20, to celebrate the work of Peter van Minnen, John Miller Burnam Professor of Classics and world-renowned papyrologist.
Continue readingToday, the John Miller Burnam Classics Library, in cooperation with the Klau Library of Hebrew Union College, commemorates the Bicentennial of the First Jewish Congregation in Cincinnati
On January 18, 1824, the first Jewish congregation in Cincinnati was formed, the first west of New York, making the Queen City a center of Judaism in the United States.
The first recorded Jewish man in Cincinnati was Joseph Jonas, a watchmaker, from Plymouth in England, who arrived in New York in October 1816 with the intent of making his way to the new city of Cincinnati. He left for Cincinnati from Philadelphia on January 2 in 1817 but did not arrive in Cincinnati until March 8, two months later, after a long and difficult journey traveling in horse carriage across the mountains and then on a flatboat (see below) south on the Ohio River.
Continue readingAphorisms, candies, and music in the Classics Library
On the last day of Chanukah, ten brave classics faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and library staff took a few minutes off from exams, papers, grading, and book purchasing to gather in the Classics Library to read aphorisms in Latin, Greek, Sinhala, Mandarin, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Swedish, and English out loud, picked from a bowl of faux parchment scrolls with some 40 aphorisms, and listen to music from around the world, arranged and performed by the Library’s resident musician Yo Shionoya, munch on candy and gingerbread cookies, and have a few well-earned laughs.
Continue readingThe Italian American Community was out in force at the Dedication of the New Lupa
Ceremony
On a gorgeous, albeit cold, November morning many Italian Americans, including a woman in her 90s who had attended the dedication of the original statue in the 1930s, a few Italian Italians, several Italophiles, and representatives from City Hall and Cincinnati Parks, some of Italian descent, channel 5, the Cincinnati Enquirer, and other press, gathered at Eden Park for the unveiling of the new Lupa statue with the original twin brothers Romulus and Remus on a marble base with gilded lettering announcing the gift of it from the Governor of Rome to the City of Cincinnati, the namesake of the Roman general Cincinnatus, in 1931 (not in place until 1932 as the “wrong” Lupa (a baby one) was initially sent). The governor in question was Prince Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi (Governor 1928-1935) who was sacked by fascist leader Mussolini, landed on Hitler’s “most-wanted” list, and aided Italian partisans and allies, e.g., welcoming the British Red Cross to operate from his palace.
Continue readingSeneca, Nero, Shostakovich, Stalin & Stoicism: “An Evening with Seneca”
Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BCE-65 CE) is a controversial figure in the political, literary, and philosophical history of Rome. Seneca was a remarkably versatile and prolific writer whose life was affected by several emperors from Tiberius to Nero. Claudius caused his exile from Rome and Nero his death. Seneca wrote a large collection of letters, full of memorable quotes (e.g., “If you live in harmony with nature you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich,” quoting Epicurus, 16) and thoughtful philosophical essays about anger, death (shortness of life), leisure, the happy life, and tranquility, and also rather gruesome tragedies such as Medea and Thyestes, and even a satire with the impossible title Apocolocyntosis [instead of Apotheosis] divi Claudii (The Gourdification of the Divine Claudius) as well as a work on cosmology, meteorology, and astrology/astronomy. The main controversy stems from the seeming inconsistency of his adhering to a Stoic philosophy of decency, moral awareness, mindfulness, and moderation juxtaposed to his defense of the murderous dictator Nero and his own amassing of considerable wealth and power.
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