Secondary Faculty
James G. Lennox
PhD, University of Toronto, 1978
James G. Lennox is professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and secondary member of the Departments of Classics and Philosophy.
During 1983-84, he was a junior fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.; in 1987, a fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University; and in 1994, a visiting lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University.
He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. His research and publications focus on the relationship between philosophy and the life sciences, with particular emphasis on ancient Greece and the 19th and 20th centuries. He is co-editor (with A. Gotthelf) of Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology (Cambridge, 1987) and (with M. L. Gill) of Self-motion from Aristotle to Newton (Princeton, 1994). A collection of his articles on Aristotle is published under the title Aristotle's Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, 2000). His translation and commentary on Aristotle's Parts of Animals 1-IV, published as part of the Clarendon Aristotle Series (Oxford, 2002), is the first English translation of this work since 1937.
Dennis Looney
PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1987
Dennis Looney is associate professor and chair of the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures and secondary member in the Department of Classics.
For several summers in the mid-1980s he taught in the intensive Latin/Greek Institute at the City University of New York. He has received National Endowment for the Humanities grants for summer study.
His general interest is in history of the classical tradition, with a particular focus on the connection between classical writings and the vernacular literature of medieval and Renaissance Italy. He has published articles on Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, and a book on the reception of the classics in Ferrara from 1450-1600, Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance (Wayne State UP, 1996). His book was nominated the finalist for the Modern Language Association's Marraro Award for best book in Italian Studies, 1996-1998.
Bruce L. Venarde
PhD, Harvard University, 1992
Bruce L. Venarde is professor in the Department of History and has a secondary membership in the Department of History of Art and Architecture as well as the Department of Classics.
His research interests are on religious, social, and cultural change in Western Europe, 500-1300. He has published monographs, translations, textual editions, and reviews on subjects including monastic foundations in their social contexts; women, gender, and holiness; the history of sexuality; and the wandering preacher and monastic founder Robert of Arbrissel (ca. 1045-1116). His best known book is Women’s Monasticism and Medieval Society (Cornell University Press, 1997) and most recent is Les Deux Vies de Robert d’Arbrissel, Fondateur de Fontevraud: Légendes, écrits, et témoinages/The Two Lives of Robert of Arbrissel, Founder of Fontevraud: Legends, Writings, and Testimonies (Brepols, 2006), a triple-language collaboration with five French scholars. His most recent interests are in late medieval female practical mysticism and health care in the early Middle Ages.
All these subjects have some connection to the classical past, which Venarde studied as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College (BA, Phi Beta Kappa, 1984). At Pitt, he is delighted with the opportunity to connect history and literature and follow the
classical heritage into medieval times by regularly teaching Medieval Latin.
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