We asked a few select May 2020 graduates to offer insights and advice on their time in the Edwards College.
With multiple majors, minors, and
certificates, Billie Rogers has made the most of her learning experience at
CCU. The degree bestowed on her this week includes a major in Anthropology and Geography,
minors in Human Environment Geography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS),
and certificates in Sustainability and Applied Archaeology. Rogers is
researching graduate school programs and also has travel on her mind – perhaps
a national parks road trip — for immediate post-graduation plans.
Rogers, a native of Rangeley, Maine, expressed gratitude and admiration for a range of professors during her time at CCU.
“I have been blessed with so many amazing professors in the Department of Anthropology and Geography, I can’t pick a favorite because they are all so incredible and have supported me and helped me out so much during my time at Coastal,” said Rogers. “However, I have to give a shout-out to Dr. Carolyn Dillian because I have been doing research with her since my freshman year, and I’m eternally grateful for her mentorship.”
Rogers also offered a bit of advice for getting the most out of one’s CCU experience.
“Take advantage of every single
opportunity you can,” said Rogers. “I have had so many wonderful opportunities
since my freshman year, such as a short-term study abroad trip to Trinidad,
being part of a research fellowship, attending and presenting at multiple
conferences, being a Resident Adviser, and being the president of a student
organization on campus. These things have completely shaped me into who I am,
and had I been too scared or nervous to not take advantage of these
opportunities that came my way, my time at CCU would have been much different.”
Elizabeth Baltes has been awarded prestigious grant to continue her research on portrait sculpture in Athens, Greece.
What do faculty members do during
quarantine? If you’re Elizabeth Baltes, you earn prestigious grants for
international research projects.
Baltes, assistant professor of art
history in the Department of Visual Arts, has won a National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) grant that provides for study of portrait sculpture from the
ancient agora, or marketplace, in Athens, Greece. (The grant and related trip
is being deferred to Summer 2021.) The NEH funded just 11 percent of submitted
summer stipend proposals.
Baltes’ grant will fund an extension
of a collaborative team book project that began in Summer 2019 with six weeks
of field work studying excavated fragments in the Athenian agora. The team has
a projected goal of finishing field work and research by 2024. Baltes explained
in a recent interview the nature of the project and what she hopes to learn on
her next trip.
What will you be doing on your research trip?
I’ll be doing two things. The first is working with my team to actually look at sculpture. None of
this has been studied systematically since the 1950s, and when it was studied then,
the person studying it was only interested in portrait heads — because that’s
the easiest thing to identify as part of a portrait. But there are thousands
and thousands of fragmentary pieces of sculpture that have been excavated from
this site, and so we’re working to go through all of them to try to
identify as many pieces that we can
confidently associate with portrait sculpture as possible. And that takes time,
and it takes teamwork, to actually look
at something and talk about it and figure out what it is and how it was
working.
The sacred processional way that runs through the Athenian agora in Greece, facing south towards the Acropolis.
And what is the ultimate goal?
We’re broadly interested in reconstructing the history of portrait
sculpture in Athens. A lot of the portrait sculpture from the Agora dates to
the Roman period, essentially when Rome was in control of Athens. So these are largely talked about as Roman
portraits. And so the narrative has been traditionally that portraits in Athens
were driven by what was going on in urban Rome. And so one of the things that
we’re finding out is that that doesn’t seem to be the case, that these
portraits of local people are representing very much local concerns and
interests and they’re not closely adhering necessarily to exactly what’s
happening in urban Rome. So it makes us question, ok, so, so traditionally these
have been called Roman portraits, but what’s Roman about them?
Do you know others, including those on your team, who have applied
for and/or won this grant?
I was the only person who applied for this because most of my team
members are at institutions that have more plentiful research funds. For me, it
was really important to get outside funding so I can continue this work as part
of this team.
Otherwise, I don’t know anyone else who has won this grant.
Technically this grant was supposed to be for this summer, 2020. However,
Greece has essentially shut down — none of the archaeological sites are open, so
it isn’t going to be possible. But luckily, the NEH is allowing recipients of
summer stipends this year to defer as late as next summer, so that’s exactly
what’s going to happen, so the plan now is to tentatively shift everything a
year forward. …..This grant will cover two months of work.
How does this work fit into your scholarship niche?
I’ve been working on various aspects of portrait sculpture since I
was in grad school, and I’ve been working closely with material from the
Athenian agora for the last few years, and so this is sort of a natural
extension of the work I’ve already been doing, both at the agora on portrait
sculpture more generally.
Will it apply to your teaching?
I’m hoping it will. I’m really interested in developing an
upper-level seminar on portraiture because I am interested actually in public
portraits from all eras. So I’m hoping that will happen in the future.
How did you react when you learned you received the grant?
I screamed a lot. It is a pretty big deal. It was really exciting to receive that kind of recognition and acknowledgement of the importance of the scholarly work that I do.
