Testimonials from Former Fellows Sponsored by the SCS (formerly the APA)
Yelena Baraz (Fellow, 2004–05; Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature and Professor of Classics, Princeton University)
My time at the TLL was formative in giving me a sense of the range of surviving Latin literature and providing a new methodological toolkit. I also learned a tremendous amount from my colleagues, whose knowledge of the language is unrivaled and who are incredibly generous in sharing it with the fellows. I have returned to Munich many times, for a sabbatical and for shorter research stays, and have collaborated on projects with other former fellows. I have in turn built the importance of words as windows into Roman culture into all the teaching that I do, from beginning language to graduate seminars.
Jennifer Ebbeler (Fellow, 2001–02; Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin)
I was privileged enough to be awarded the TLL Fellowship for 2001–2002. The Fellowship proved to be an excellent opportunity not just to learn and practice lexicography but also to meet colleagues from around the world, develop fluent spoken German, hike the Bavarian Alps, and explore German cities on the weekends. I am especially grateful for the mentorship provided by the editors, particularly in teaching me to use the many different reference works necessary for working with inscriptions and papyrological evidence.
Like many American doctoral students, my graduate training focused on Latin texts pre 200 CE. During my fellowship year, and many hours spent working on texts from Late Antiquity, I developed an abiding interest in post-Classical Latin that continues to shape the texts I teach and write about; and the kinds of research questions I ask. Likewise, my interest in how late antique Latin authors adapt classical language and literary practices to their own ends is very much a product of the analytical practices I learned during my TLL fellowship year. Finally, being equipped with German language skills at the beginning of my career has enabled me to nurture professional friendships with German-speaking colleagues and fully engage with German scholarship.
Charlie Kuper (Fellow, 2018–20; Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee at Knoxville)
I owe so much, professionally and personally, to the world-class team of scholars at the Thesaurus and to the support of the NEH and SCS. Just a few years removed from my fellowship, I can already see how consequential it was for establishing my career in the field. That my research and teaching were significantly enriched by my training there is a profound understatement. I am also happy to say that I still make a weekly digital visit to play a game of Go with Dr. Nigel Holmes—a pastime begun during the pandemic. I am so grateful for the friendship that the Thesaurus has shared with me.
Amy Koenig (Fellow, 2020–21; Assistant Professor, Hamilton College)
My time at the Thesaurus not only broadened my experience of Latin literature incalculably beyond the traditional “canon” of the graduate reading list, but gave me new ways of approaching and appreciating language (Latin and otherwise). It also introduced me to a set of truly admirable, brilliant colleagues and lasting friends, and—as I completed my fellowship during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—instilled in me a profound respect for the resilience and resourcefulness of the project and all those involved. It is a humbling and a rewarding thing to have been a small part of such a monumental treasure-house of scholarship.
Anthony Corbeill (Fellow, 1990-91; Basil L. Gildersleeve Professor of Classics, University of Virginia)
In retrospect it would have been perverse (pravus) of me, and beyond my boldest prayers (precatio), to imagine a better training coming out of graduate school than having the daily opportunity to wander past (praetermeare) the emerald-green (prasinus) lampshades in the Thesaurus library on the way to encountering the millions of hand-written Latin slips that fill the institute’s archive. The contributions that studying a handful of Latin words over the course of several months has brought to my subsequent development as a scholar have been both broad and intense. On the macro level the Thesaurus introduced me to a full range of Latin authors, the very existence of whom had been unknown to me. Nevertheless, several were to become an integral part of my scholarship: the pharmacological writer Marcellus Empiricus’s treatise on folk cures gave insight into the study of gesture in medical practice; the forbidding volumes of the late-Latin grammarians provided the foundation for an extended analysis of the relationship between grammatical gender and biological sex. The gains on the micro level have had equal impact. The rigors of lexicography as practiced in Munich require not just close reading, but multiple re-readings, a process facilitated by the direct supervision of an editor with whom I met several times per week. This attention to detail fostered at TLL manifests itself in everything I have since taught, from analyzing jokes for my elementary Latin students to teaching complex rules of syntax in advanced courses in composition. I am convinced that I owe any success that I may have enjoyed as a scholar and teacher to my formative year in Germany, a year that would not have been possible without the assistance of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Charley McNamara (Fellow, 2016–17; Director of Greek and Latin, University of Minnesota)
By introducing me to an endless array of Latin texts across genres like ancient poetry, political theory, Christian theology, and medical science, my postdoctoral training at the Thesaurus has equipped me to advise students and to collaborate with colleagues well beyond the scope of my own research specialties. I have relied on the Thesaurus for all sorts of academic activities, from presenting the frontiers of humanities scholarship in local high school classrooms to translating manuscripts from Jesuit missions in China, whose novel Latin vocabulary is often prefigured among obscure Roman writers catalogued only in the Thesaurus’s comprehensive entries. Without the ever-revealing Thesaurus, we would remain blind to so much of history—not just of the Latin language itself, but of the world.
Adam Gitner (Fellow, 2012–14; Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, Thesaurus linguae Latinae)
Working on the TLL is a bit like building a medieval cathedral: the project is bigger than an individual and longer than several lifetimes, but it is a great privilege and satisfaction to do one’s part, to lay the next level of stones, and help see the project through to completion. Each article in the dictionary follows a word through nearly a thousand years in the development of Latin. This opened my eyes to the enormous amount of late and non-literary Latin that survives and taught me how important it is to think comparatively and diachronically through an entire archive of texts in order to fully understand an individual passage. Obviously, this matters to my current work on the dictionary, but it has also enriched and broadened my scholarship in so many unexpected directions. For instance, without my training at the TLL I would not be able to edit Latin papyri or publish on the Old Latin Bible. In personal terms, being in Munich has also meant the chance to learn a new language and a new culture, make new friends and develop new hobbies, such as hiking; it has enriched my life in innumerable ways.
Shirley Werner (Fellow, 1992–93; Research Scholar, Duke University)
I’ll offer an example from my own more recent research of how the TLL has contributed to my increased appreciation of some of the subtleties of Horatian poetry, as well as to a more precise understanding of a development in the history of ideas. Epist. 1.19 contains Horace’s famous programmatic claim for his originality in introducing the meters and spirit of Archilochus and Alcaeus into Latin poetry. In this deeply enigmatic epistle, Horace draws links between the imitation of human behavior, the invention or reinvention of artistic models, and the representation of life in poetry within a conceptual nexus that I have called “mimesis” in a study of the epistle as a whole (“The Rules of the Game: Imitation and Mimesis in Horace Epistles 1.19,” HSCP 2022 112: 343–92). As I noted in that article, however, a careful reading of the TLL articles on mimesis and its Latin translation, imitatio, reveals—rather surprisingly—that the use of “mimesis” as a convenient term for this conceptual nexus is an anachronism from both an Aristotelian and a Horatian perspective.
Although the word mimesis found its way into classical and late antique Latin discussions (more often than not, however, appearing in Greek letters in the manuscripts), in Latin usage μίμησις/mimesis occurs in restricted contexts having to do with its various rhetorical meanings. Quintilian Inst. 9.2.58, the earliest extant instance, defines μίμησις as behavioral imitation; other occurrences cited in TLL are found in the late antique commentaries on Horace and Terence and refer also to impersonation and vocal imitation. Latin imitatio, when used as a translation of Greek μίμησις, mirrors this diversity in rhetorical usage, but, beginning with Cicero Tim. 34, Latin authors also show awareness of Greek philosophical discussions of μίμησις. Seneca Epist. 65.3 (omnis ars naturae imitatio est) offers a particularly vivid philosophical discussion of imitatio, citing Aristotle and Plato. But it should be noted that Horace never sets out a developed theory of mimesis, nor does he link artistic imitation to definite philosophical doctrines. Awareness of the conceptual gaps in this developing history of ideas makes Horace’s linkage in the epistle between human imitation, artistic reinvention, and the representation of life in poetry all the more fascinating.
Since that first deep dive into Latin lexicography as the TLL Fellow, I set my graduate students to ponder an intriguing question that arises from this and other investigations: do we still know whatever we think we know about classical Latin and its usage because we have clung to information preserved over the course of two thousand years, often in fragments, in the glossaries, word lists, and scholarly and grammatical writings, and in the linguistic and lexical controversies we know of from antiquity and late antiquity? Or are we finally gaining a more nuanced understanding of classical Latin? Both are true, of course, but the latter would never be so fully realizable without access to the treasures to be discovered in the TLL.
Elizabeth Palazzolo (Fellow, 2017–18; Assistant Professor, Saint Anselm College)
The TLL Fellowship provided me with an incredible opportunity to be immersed in the Latin language full-time for an entire year, offering time and focus that would not have been possible without the Fellowship’s funding. The work of looking for nuances of usage and meaning among examples of a single word in different contexts, time periods, authors, or genres has made me a more careful reader of Latin and changed the way I think about the development of languages over time. The Thesaurus’ commitment to include examples through the 6th century also introduced me to authors I might never have read otherwise and gave me a much greater appreciation of the ways that the Latin language adapted to meet the changing needs of new genres and audiences in late antiquity.
Adam Trettel (Fellow, 2021–22; Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, Thesaurus linguae Latinae)
After spending 2022–24 in Leipzig as a Humboldt Fellow, I returned to Munich in 2025 to rejoin the Thesaurus as a Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter. I’m thrilled to be part of the team again.
Writing articles for the Thesaurus often involves working through difficult or repetitive material—skills that come in handy in other parts of life as well. Recently, I took up long-distance running again, around the same time I was assigned the task of writing the article on the adjective rutilus (“golden-red” or “shining”). This meant checking dozens of instances of the word in the works of Avienus, who produced a Latin adaptation of the Greek poet Aratus’ Phainomena. Time and again, a star was rutilus, a planet was rutilus, a constellation was rutilus—and each time I had to consult the Greek original.
In May, while running uphill during a half-marathon, I realized how similar this was to my lexicographical work. One foot in front of the other. The sun beating down overhead. The road kept going on and on. I simply had to keep pushing forward; there was no other choice. But at the top of the hill, there was a wonderful view of vineyards—and a much-needed water station.
In talking with colleagues, I have learned that some of the earlier workers at the Thesaurus, such as Peter Flury, also enjoyed long-distance sports such as jogging, hiking, or cross-country skiing. There seems a similar mindset between such sports and the Thesaurus. Both can have stretches of demanding effort, but can be punctuated by the joy of discovering an unexpected detail (or vista), or a refreshing talk with a colleague.