Pepe Danquart’s Schwarzfahrer won the 1994 Oscar for best short.

I’m excited to speak at a couple upcoming panels on antiquity and its influence on early modernity. At the end of March 2017, I’ll be presenting at the RSA in Chicago on the panel entitled “Early Moderns and Their Ancient Philosophers” (Friday, March 31). I’ll also be on a 2018 SCS panel hosted by the Society for Early Modern Classical Reception, “Translation and Transmission: Mediating Classical Texts in the Early Modern World.” I’ll be talking about some ongoing research on Hobbes’ scientific thought and its appearance in his English translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Especially for those interested in the early modern period and in the history of rhetoric, pencil us in!

The classicist’s killer app is the app crit.

Horrible puns aside: the apparatus criticus (app crit) is that big block of text at the bottom of any OCT or Teuber edition, and it shows the variants and conjectures for uncertain words in ancient texts. (As a pedagogical point, I find it valuable to show students a good scholarly Bible with an enormous app crit documenting the conflicts in manuscripts and textual traditions.) These guides to textual problems, however, are dense and loaded with inscrutable abbreviations, and even for advanced graduate students, they can be daunting.

At work, I recently discovered a helpful guide to the symbols and abbreviations one finds in an app crit, compiled by Karl Maurer at the University of Dallas. Many thanks to him for this helpful document, which I’ll add to this site’s list of classicist resources.