Henry R. Immerwahr

Henry R. Immerwahr

Henry Rudolph Immerwahr was born on February 28, 1916 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland). Because of his Jewish ancestry he left Germany to attend the University of Florence (1934–38), where he received a Dottore in Lettere. While in Florence he registered with the International Student Service in Geneva, Switzerland, and through this intermediary was offered a fellowship to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens from a philanthropist in New York. There he aquired his interest in Greek epigraphy. He arrived in Athens on March 3, 1939. But in that year the war in Europe erupted and most of the students at the School went back to the States prior to the German invasion of Greece in 1940. In America he spent the next two years as a graduate student at Yale (PhD 1942) before being drafted into the US army (1942-45).
After the war ended, he studied at Harvard for a year, but in 1947 he returned to Yale, where he taught for ten years, working mainly on literary subjects such as Herodotus. In 1957, he moved south when he joined the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill rising to full Professor in 1963 and to Alumni Distinguished Professor of Greek in 1975. But in 1977 he retired from the University of North Carolina to become Director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens for a five-year term. Since that time he has returned to Chapel Hill and now lives in a retirement home. His mailing address is 750 Weaver Dairy Road, Apt. 1110, Chapel Hill, NC 27514, his e-mail address, hri@email.unc.edu. He is a member of the American Philological Association, the Archaeological Institute of America, a corresponding member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, and the (Greek) Friends of the Gennadion.

(Sent by H.R.I. on 21 March 2009.)

Henry Immerwahr deceased on 15 September 2013, aged 97 (obituary).

Rudolf Wachter

Rudolf Wachter

Rudolf Wachter, born in, and citizen of, Winterthur in Switzerland, studied in Zürich, where he took a doctorate in Latin linguistics and literature in 1986 with the thesis, Altlateinische Inschriften: Sprachliche und epigraphische Untersuchungen zu den Dokumenten bis etwa 150 v. Chr. (published by Peter Lang, Bern, in 1987). With a young researcher's fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation, he went to Oxford to continue his studies in the field of Greek vase inscriptions. The result was a second doctorate, a D Phil. in 'Comparative Philology' of the University of Oxford, the thesis being entitled Non-Attic Greek Vase Inscriptions. Ernst Risch in Zürich (†1988) and Anna Morpurgo Davies in Oxford (†2014) were his principal teachers, and he owes them more than he can tell. Back in Switzerland, he got part-time teaching posts in Greek, Latin, and Indo-European linguistics at the Universities of Fribourg and Basel, acquired his venia docendi at Basel with the final and enlarged version of NAGVI in 1996 and got a 50% tenure post as a professor extraordinary a year later. NAGVI was eventually published by OUP in 2001, in the year of a replacement professorship at Heidelberg, when he also made the first contact with Henry Immerwahr about (C)AVI and photographed the first vase collection. In 2006 the part-time tenure at Basel was completed when he was appointed professeur associé in historical linguistics at the University of Lausanne.
His main research fields are Greek and Latin epigraphy and linguistics, Indo-European comparative linguistics, the history of the alphabet, and the history of education. He is active in various projects, e.g. 'Ilias-Gesamtkommentar' of J. Latacz, Basel, 'Thesaurus Linguae Latinae' in Munich, 'Latinum electronicum', published by Mouton-De Gruyter in Berlin, and 'Latinum Helveticum', a project at the borderline between schools and universities in Switzerland in the field of classics. He is an elected member of the 'Academia Europea'.

Simone Hiltscher

Simone Hiltscher

Simone Hiltscher studied German and History at the University of Bonn. Besides and after her studies she worked as journalist and editor for several publishing houses and newspapers. In 2001 she completed a further education as Multimedia Publisher. Since 2001 she has been working as a Multimedia Developer at the Universities of Basel and Berne in several projects. Amongst others she was responsible for the technical realisation of the project "Latinum electronicum", an online Latin course for university beginners, published by Mouton-De Gruyter in 2008. Since 2005 she has also been working for the Parzival Project (now University of Berne), where she produces digital editions of manuscripts of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, the last of which was recently published.
In the AVI project she is responsible for developing the server-side database, the user's interface and the communication between the two. All this is being realised with HTML5, JavaScript, jquery, PHP and MySQL.
In her spare time she tries to educate her dog Tacitus. Simone loves hiking, and she is an enthusiastic singer and photographer.

Georg Gerleigner

Georg Gerleigner

Georg Gerleigner grew up in a small town in rural Lower Bavaria, Germany. After intensive contact with the ancient world through learning Latin and Ancient Greek at school for nine and five years, respectively, he went to study in Munich where he took his first degree ('Magister Artium') in Klassische Archäologie, Griechische Philologie and Alte Geschichte in 2007. Shortly after starting his PhD dissertation, whose topic grew out of his Magister thesis (supervised by Luca Giuliani and Susanne Muth), he went to Cambridge (Girton College) as a visiting PhD student before transferring to there completely. In 2012, he was awarded a PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge for his thesis (supervised by Robin Osborne and examined by Anthony Snodgrass and François Lissarrague) 'Writing on Archaic Athenian Pottery. Studies on the Relationship between Images and Inscriptions on Greek Vases' (publication still in preparation).
From 2012 to 2015, Georg was temporary lecturer in Classical Archaeology at Kiel University, during which he took a semester of parental leave. He took a more extended period of time off to take care of his children until early 2017, when he started a position at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities to work on the third volume (Attic red-figure pottery) of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, Erlangen, and as a researcher at AVI (of which he has been an enthusiastic user ever since his student presentation on inscribed Greek vase-paintings in 2005).
Besides Greek vase-inscriptions and vase-paintings and their interrelationship, his research interests include all aspects of Greek pottery, Greek and Roman visual culture, mythography and theories and methods in Classical studies.
(For further information and publications, see his web pages at academia.edu and Erlangen University.)

Malte Schaffnit

Malte Schaffnit

Malte Schaffnit is studying Ancient Civilizations with a focus on Greek and Latin Philology (and a short insight into studying mathematics) in Basel since 2015. He has been a student assistant in the AVI project since June 2017. So far he worked mainly on a comparison of the data from the AVI-database, the Beazley Archive Pottery Database and the LIMC.

Former student assistants

Julia Bossart

Julia Bossart

Julia Bossart started her studies in European Archaeology ('Ur- und Frühgeschichte'), Classical Archaeology, and Ancient History at the University of Basel in 2002 and took the final degree of Licentiata philosophiae in summer 2008. Subsequently she worked with the Archaeological Service of the City and Canton of Basel-Stadt and will soon move to Berlin.
In the AVI project she was a student assistant from 2003 to 2008. Her main task was to check and complete the 3000 and more titels in the bibliography that had been extracted from Henry Immerwahr's CAVI by Prof. Wachter, bringing the references into an up-to-date and uniform citation system. Moreover she helped Prof. Wachter with several visits of vase collections (Basel, Karlsruhe, Mainz, and Würzburg) and identified and mounted the photos that Henry Immerwahr had donated to the AVI project.

Victoria Fendel

Victoria Fendel

Victoria studied Classics in Basel from 2009 to 2014. She did her undergraduate studies in Greek and Latin and her Master’s degree in Greek and Near Eastern Archaeology. While doing her Master’s she spent six months as an exchange student in Berlin. Currently she is working on her PhD thesis about language contact between Greek and Coptic at the University of Oxford.
Victoria was a student assistant in the AVI-project from January 2014 to July 2015. During this period the project concentrated on updating the bibliographical references and collecting pieces that had not yet been integrated into the database.

Florence Häusermann

Florence Häusermann

Florence Häusermann is studying Classics in Basel and Zurich. Besides she worked at the library of classical and ancient studies (‘Bibliothek Altertumswissenschaften’) and has been a Latin teacher at the STH Basel (‘Staatsunabhängige Theologische Hochschule’) since 2015. In the AVI project Florence has been a student assistant since January 2014. Her main task is to look for new bibliography (c. 1990 up to the present) and inscribed Attic vases, especially in the CVA volumes that Henry Immerwahr had not integrated into the database.