Hello Friends and Colleagues:
As you know, we are now in the run-up to our annual meeting, which will be held this January 7-10 in San Francisco. (Please note: as usual for our west-coast meetings, the meeting runs Wednesday-Saturday.) As we make plans and look forward to exchanging scholarship, ideas, and fellowship, I’ll be using this corner of the newsletter to advertise a few events at the convention. There is, of course, a full slate of terrific looking panels, workshops, and presentations, and I encourage all of you to attend, in person or via our hybrid facilities. We advance as a scholarly community through conversation, critique, and dialogue, and the annual meeting is one place – not the only one, but a significant one – where those conversations happen.
To start, I’d like to call your attention to a celebratory panel this year, “100 Years of L’Année Philologique.” In 1926, Jules Marouzeau founded what was to become the central and primary bibliographic tool for scholarship in the field of Classics. The first volume of L’Année philologique (APh) appeared in 1928, covering the years 1924-26. From the very start, Marouzeau was driven by two separate, but ultimately cooperative impulses: a desire to compete with other European scholarly traditions (especially German), and in that spirit of competition, to develop a classical bibliography that would be comprehensive, critical, and fully international.
The 2026 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies will therefore mark the one-hundredth year of L’Année philologique; it is also a moment when the international bibliography is undergoing significant expansion, in large part spurred by the efforts of the American Office. It is therefore a fitting time to hold a panel celebrating the history of l’année and demonstrating its new features. A panel distinguished scholars and professional bibliographers will discuss the history of APh, explain how the bibliography is constructed in its current form, present important new scholarly developments in the bibliographic coverage of the project, and demonstrate the unique capabilities of APh’s continuously improving electronic interface. (Note: if you haven’t used APh online in a couple of years, you’re missing out).
I sometimes hear from colleagues and friends that they haven’t paid much attention to l’année in the era of ChatGPT, Google Scholar, and the like. I’m here to tell you that the APh is a vastly superior resource, in many of the same ways that the research you read is superior to those few student papers that perhaps seem (ahem) to have been produced by generative AI. I invite you come to the panel and learn how.
End dispatch one; I’ll see you in San Francisco!
Kirk Ormand
President, Society for Classical Studies
