Distinguished Service Award
2025 Citation
When Lisa Carson began her PhD program in Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the mid-1980’s and started to fulfill the work requirement for her fellowship, there was no way she could foresee that this would become a lifelong commitment to documenting the scholarship of English-speaking scholars in the pages of the Année Philologique. The APh had established an American office in Chapel Hill in 1965 under the direction of T. R. S. Broughton, who recruited graduate students to do the difficult work of identifying appropriate works to be cited, abstracting each article, formatting the citations, and finally indexing them to meet the exacting standards of the editorial director in Paris, the legendary Juliette Ernst. Lisa became so expert in this task, which requires a rare combination of precision, good judgement, linguistic expertise and diplomatic skills, that she was appointed Assistant Director and Chief Bibliographer in 1988, before she had even completed her PhD. In 1991, when the faculty Director stepped down from his post, Lisa, though still a student, was chosen to succeed him. She has been Director of the American Office ever since. When it moved to the University of Cincinnati in 2005, Shirley Werner was appointed Assistant Director to help with the ever-increasing deluge of scholarship. The successful collaboration between Lisa and Shirley continues to this day. The Année Philologique is an enterprise grand in scale. It was founded in Paris in 1924, and since 1927 has produced an annual volume with citations and abstracts of scholarly work on classical subjects in more than 20 modern languages. It is now an online database with nearly 1.5 million records (1,482,829). Since 1988, when Lisa first became Director, 159,742 citations of scholarly works in English and 12,339 in other languages have been edited and indexed by Lisa and/or Shirley. Theirs is a singular achievement, especially when one considers that before digitization countless hours in libraries were necessary to identify, verify, abstract, and index each item. In addition to processing citations, Lisa and Shirley have worked tirelessly to broaden the scope of the Année Philologique. Together with the SCS’s Advisory Board, they successfully lobbied the APh’s governing body to include articles in scholarly collections such as edited volumes. More recently, they secured an agreement to include the scholarly study of receptions of classical antiquity. This was of particular interest to Shirley who had independently begun collecting bibliography in this newly important subfield. Since 2023, The American Office has successfully launched a pilot program of cataloguing scholarship on classical reception, which now has nearly 1000 entries – nearly all of them created by Shirley.
For their unique and critically important contribution to documenting the scholarly record of all classicists writing in English, Lisa Carson and Shirley Werner richly deserve the Distinguished Service Award.
