Broadly speaking, SHANE BUTLER, Ph.D., works regarding the relationship between embodied experience and art, particularly literature. His most recent work regards the intersection of sexuality and aesthetics and includes a monograph that was ten years in the making, The Passions of John Addington Symonds (Oxford University Press, 2022), on the Victorian scholar, poet, and essayist responsible for one of the first major studies of same-sex love in Ancient Greece.
Professor Butler’s other books reconstruct the material context of the production and circulation of Roman oratory (The Hand of Cicero, 2002), examine ways in which the physical formats of books shape the meanings and metaphors of the texts they embody (The Matter of the Page, 2011), follow the connections between literature and the senses into underlying questions about the nature of human experience (Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses, 2013, co-edited with Alex Purves), explore the role of the voice in the making and reading of classical literature, with insights drawn from later analogues (The Ancient Phonograph, 2015), consider how the study of a distant, buried, and never fully recoverable past reflects and enables other aspects of our relationship with our lives and our world (Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited, 2016), and survey the soundscapes of the ancient world (Sound and the Ancient Senses, co-edited with Sarah Nooter, 2019). He is also editing and translating the Latin Letters of Renaissance humanist Angelo Poliziano (vol. 1, 2006) for the I Tatti Renaissance Library, for which series he serves as Associate Editor. From 2010 to 2022 he co-edited with Alastair Blanshard and Emily Greenwood the series Classics After Antiquity for Cambridge University Press.
Professor Butler is also the founder and director of the Classics Research Lab (CRL). With Gabrielle Dean, he created and directed the lab’s first initiative, the John Addington Symonds Project (JASP).
Professor Butler received his PhD from Columbia University (2000) and has held residential fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, the Villa I Tatti in Florence, and the Getty Villa in Malibu, as well as an invited residency at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (MPIWG) in Berlin. He joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 2015. He had previously taught at the University of Bristol, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania.
ROBERT E. HALL, Engr. 1955, spent 28 years as a senior officer at Brown Capital Management LLC and 18 years as an analyst at T. Rowe Price. His interest in and support of the humanities was shared by his wife, NANCY H. HALL, an avid art lover as well as a longtime docent and trustee of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.