We are proud to announce that Benjamin Acosta-Hughes has decided to join the Department at the rank of Full Professor. Benjamin Acosta-Hughes got his PhD from Berkeley and is coming from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He is a leading expert on the poetry of the Hellenistic epoch and made his reputation with his first book, Polyeideia: The Iambi of Callimachus and the Archaic Iambic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): the book was praised as one of the "most significant recent publications of the field" and it "a model how this is done." His second book, Arion's Lyre: Archaic Lyric in Hellenistic Poetry is under contract with Princeton University Press and scheduled to appear next year. Between the two monographs, he has published a number of scholarly papers in leading journals or in collected volumes, and he co-edited a conference volume on the epigrammatist Posidippus of Pella (Labored in Papyrus Leaves: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2004) whose collection of more than one hundred epigrams has been recovered from Egyptian mummy wrappings (2001). Together with Susan Stephens of Stanford, he is working on a monograph on Callimachus entitled "Callimachus in Context" that is scheduled to appear next year; and he will publish the Loeb edition of Greek epigrams. Besides his impressive scholarship, Professor Acosta-Hughes brings with him his numerous ties to European universities. He is an honorary faculty member of the Università Roma III, and he has taught and will teach again at the École Normale Superieure (Lettres et Sciences Humaines) in Lyon (France).

He will join our Department for the Academic year 2009/2010, and we are very much looking forward to it.