University of Pittsburgh

Nicholas F. Jones

PhD, University of California at Berkeley, 1975

(Undergraduate Advisor 2012-13)

My areas of expertise, specialization, and current interest are Greek and Latin languages, textual criticism (including Greek epigraphy), historiography, social history, Greek comedy, and gender studies. Nearly all my work—teaching and research alike—is essentially textual.  Subject areas correspond approximately to my current affiliations with the Programs in Cultural Studies (with which I am the departmental liaison) and Women’s Studies and with the Departments of History and Religious Studies.

At the undergraduate level, I teach lecture classes in classical mythology, Greek and Roman history, and gender in antiquity as well as the Greek and Latin language sequences.  At the graduate level, my most recent seminars in Latin and Greek include Pliny’s Letters; Hesiod, Aristophanes, Menander; and for the future I am contemplating a course on the historiography of Athens.

My wife, Marilyn Morgan Jones, teaches a rather different version of “Mythology in the Ancient World.”  Like myself a product of the University of California at Berkeley (BA Classics 1969, MA Latin 1971), Marilyn studied at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome during the academic year 1967-1968; and, with me, studied and traveled in Greece during the two academic years 1973-1975 as well.

Most of my research has found its way into books dealing exclusively or in major part with classical Athens.  A recent textbook, Politics and Society in Ancient Greece, joins other titles in the Praeger Series on the Ancient World. Other recent projects include several articles for Oxford’s Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome and for the online/print Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History. 

At present, I am engaged full time as one of a dozen editors and more than 100 contributors at work on Brill’s New Jacoby, an English-language re-edition (Greek text, translation, and commentary) of Felix Jacoby’s Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker.  My contributor’s assignment comprises 37 writers on Athens, including the major “Atthidographers” Androtion and Philochoros. Thirty of my entries are completed and in various stages of editorial review (with a few actually uploaded), but all the Atthidographers assigned to me remain to be written and edited.  Recently, Apollodoros of Athens has been added to my assignment, bringing the Greek to nearly 250 Jacoby pages.  My editorial review responsibilities include entries concerning Athens, the Peloponnese, Aegean islands, and the Asia Minor seaboard.  I expect to be working full time on the BNJ through my final deadline of April 30, 2014 and very likely significantly beyond that date.

Among my honors are fellowships from Fulbright, ACLS, and NEH, the last-mentioned held while in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.  Spring 2005 I was Hyde Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania.   My free-time personal pursuits include large format film photography and darkroom, camping, music, gardening, housekeeping, and various family activities.

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

 

Books
  • Public Organization in Ancient Greece. A Documentary Study, Philadelphia: Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 1987
  • Ancient Greece: State and Society, Prentice Hall 1997
  • The Associations of Classical Athens: The Response to Democracy, Oxford University Press 1999
  • Rural Athens Under the Democracy, University of Pennsylvania Press 2004
  • Politics and Society in Ancient Greece, Praeger Series on the Ancient World 2008
Selected Articles
  • “Perses, Work ‘in Season’, and the Purpose of Hesiod’s Works & Days,” Classical Journal 79 (1984) 307-323
  • “Pliny the Younger’s Vesuvius Letters (6.16 and 20),” Classical World 95 (2001) 31-48
Contact Information
Office: 1522 Cathedral of Learning
Phone: (412) 624-4475
E-mail: nfjones@pitt.edu
Office Hours, SPRING, 2013
Monday and Wednesday  1:00-1:50 pm
By appointment, before and after class and by email (nfjones@pitt.edu)

SPRING Term 2013 Courses
Course Listing Name Days Time Location
Latin 0220 Intermediate Latin Verse MW
 3:00-4:15 p.m. CL 329
Class 0030/Relgst 0083 Myth in the Ancient World MW 2:00-2:15 p.m. CL 324
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