Reporter Volume 25, No.17 February 17, 1994

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Bureau Staff
Archaeologist and art historian Stephen Dyson, chair of the Department
of Classics at UB,  will conduct a National Endowment for the
Humanities Seminar for College Teachers at UB next summer. He is the
only SUNY faculty member to receive a 1994 NEH summer seminar grant.
The seminar, to run June 27-Aug. 6, 1994, is titled "The History and
Legacy of the Western Roman Empire." It is expected to attract 12 to
15 classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists and anthropologists
from across the country. The program is designed to provide research
opportunities for active teacher-scholars in colleges without doctoral
programs and to give them an opportunity to conduct their own research
while here.
Seminar participants will be guided by Dyson in an exploration of
current research issues related to the creation, maintenance and
collapse of the Roman Empire. Discussions also will attempt to place
the Roman Empire and its colonial experience in a comparative
perspective by looking at colonial activities on this continent.
In September, Dyson was the only North American invited to address a
plenary session of the 1993 International Congress of Classical
Archaeology held in Tarragona, Spain. Dyson presented a paper
comparing frontier urbanism in colonial Rome and in colonial North
America.
He also recently completed the fall portion of the Charles Eliot
Norton lecture tour, the most prestigious of several lectureships
sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). Dyson
presented talks to AIA chapters in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Vancouver,
Seattle, Spokane and Eugene, Oregon. His topics were ancient Pompeii
and his current research on the origins of the discipline of classical
archaeology.
Dyson, who heads the UB Undergraduate College, has published
extensively in classics journals, including The American Journal of
Archaeology, where he was the former assistant editor and currently
serves as book review editor. 
The former president of the Classical Society of the American Academy
in Rome, Dyson is a summa cum laude classics graduate of Brown
University and received a diploma in classical archaeology from Oxford
University (England) as a Fulbright scholar. He holds master's and
doctoral degrees from Yale University.