New Mellon and Carpenter Professors On Board in Athens
Margie Miles
Margaret (Margie) Miles and Charles Denver Graninger arrived in Athens last week ready to assume their duties. Margie replaces John Oakley as Mellon Professor and will serve the School for the next three years while on leave from the University of California at Irvine. Denver, on leave from the University of Tennessee, holds the Carpenter Professorship for two years. Margie is well-known, both in Greece and Italy, as an archaeologist and historian of Greek architecture. She is particularly interested in how religion and ritual shaped physical space in both places. She has excavated in Athens and Corinth, and has studied Greek temples at Rhamnous and Sounion, and at Selinous and Agrigento. In Athens, she published the results of the School’s excavations of the sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone near the Agora of Athens. Margie is currently researching a book on temples and religion in Sicily and Southern Italy, in which she intends to demonstrate how the cosmic views of Presocratic philosophers (especially Pythagoras and Empedocles) helped to shape the design of western Greek temples. She is also concerned with issues of cultural property, the ethics of collecting, and the fate of art in wartime, and has recently completed a book on the origins of the modern concept of “cultural property” in the work of Cicero. (Art as Plunder: The Ancient Origins of Debate About Cultural Property, Cambridge University Press, 2008). Denver’s research also focuses on ancient religion, as viewed through historical, epigraphical, and archaeological sources. Of special interest are the cults of Thessaly, particularly those of archigetai and ktistai. The entire community of ASCSA wishes both the best of luck in their new positions!