Contact Information
Classics Department
Macalester College 1600 Grand Avenue Saint Paul, MN 55105-1899 (651) 696-6254 (651) 696-6498 (fax) rife@macalester.edu Spring 2008 Schedule
CLAS 122: The Roman World T/Th 2:45-4:15, Main 010 CLAS 362: Intermediate Greek II M/W/F 10:50-11:50, Main 011 Office Hours M 2:30-4:30 W 2:30-4:30 and by appointment |
JOSEPH L. RIFE Associate Professor of Classics Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton 2005-2006 Ph.D., Classical Studies, University of Michigan 1999 American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1995-1996 M.A., Classical Studies, University of Michigan 1995 A.B., Classics and Anthropology, Kenyon College 1992 I am a traditionally trained classicist and an
innovative social historian who combines texts and materials to explore the
structure and ideology of ancient society. Although my teaching has
covered many periods, regions, and cultural traditions in classical antiquity,
my research has concentrated on the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Asia Minor, during the Roman Empire
through Late Antiquity (ca. 1st c.
BCE-7th c. CE).
This period in the history of the region, once disregarded as marginal but now the focus
of renewed scholarly attention, furnishes abundant literary, documentary,
and archaeological evidence for urban and rural social structure.
My research for the past ten years has addressed the construction of elite
and non-elite social categories through two related channels, the invention
of the classical past and the negotiation of foreign/Roman and indigenous/Greek
identities. This research has traversed two separate but parallel fields
of inquiry, the archaeology of funerary ritual and the history of
the cultural efflorescence known as the “Second Sophistic.” My project
is framed by a particular theoretical perspective in contemporary archaeology
and cultural criticism and influenced by my early background in anthropology
and structuralist historiography. That is, I imagine materials, spaces,
behaviors and texts to be fluid symbolic media for the expression and contestation
of various identities—class, age, gender, ethnicity, religious orientation,
political or professional affinities—within a temporally and spatially delimited
social context. More recently I have worked on landscapes as contexts for self-presentation.
I studied classical languages, ancient history, archaeology, and anthropology at Kenyon and Michigan, where I was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, and in Rome and Athens, where I was the Wheeler Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies. I joined the Macalester faculty in 2002 after having taught Greek, Latin, ancient history, and classical art at the University of Michigan and Cornell University, where I was the Townsend Assistant Professor in Classics. In 2005-2006 I was a member of the School of Historical Studies in the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Apart from these studies, I have conducted archaeological research in Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Tunisia, and Italy. In 2002-2006 I directed an interdisciplinary study of a major cemetery of Roman date near the ancient harbor of Kenchreai, the eastern port of Corinth in southern Greece, called the Kenchreai Cemetery Project. This work was conducted under the auspices of the American School and with the permission of the Ministry of Culture of the Greek State. In 2007 I began a new phase in exploration at Kenchreai in collaboration with Elena Korka, Director of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities for the Ministry. The new Greek-American Excavations at Kenchreai are undertaking large-scale investigation of the northeastern periphery and residential quarter of the ancient port-town, immediately north of the harbor. I have written chapters, articles and reviews on Imperial prose, social history, epigraphy, funerary archaeology, and bioarchaeology. My first book, which is forthcoming, addresses the historical, archaeological, and osteological evidence for life and death during the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Byzantine Middle Ages in the Corinthian countryside, with a focus on the settlement at the Isthmian Sanctuary and Fortress. My second book, under contract with Harvard University Press, explores the uses of funerary rituals, burial space, and memory as media for the performance of social identity and structure in the Greek world during the Roman Empire. |