IATH NEWS
NEW DIRECTOR SELECTED FOR IATH
The Vice President and Provost has appointed Bernard Frischer as the new Director
of UVA's Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities, beginning in the Fall term 2004. He will also join the
faculty as Professor of Classics and Art History.
"It is an honor and challenge to be chosen to succeed John Unsworth, the
first Director of IATH," says Frischer. "Under John's leadership, IATH
established itself as the premier research center in the United States for digital
humanities. It is my hope to build on the achievements of the past by helping
to make digital humanities a sustainable and integral approach to humanistic research
both at Virginia and at other major universities around the world."
Professor Frischer is a leading scholar in the application of digital technologies
to humanities research and education. He is the founder and director of the Cultural
Virtual Reality Lab at UCLA, which uses three-dimensional computer modeling to
reconstruct cultural heritage sites. Frischer has overseen many significant projects,
including virtual recreations of the Roman Colosseum and the Roman Forum. The
works of Frischer and the Lab have received international acclaim and have been
featured on the Discovery Channel and in Newsweek and the New York Times.
"I am drawn to virtual reality technology because it strikes me as a highly
effective way to help students and scholars visualize and understand complex lost
worlds such as ancient Rome," says Frischer. "In the twenty-first century,
real-time 3D-computer models of cultural heritage sites will become as common
in history, art history, archaeology, and classics classrooms as two-dimensional
35 mm slides were in the twentieth."
Frischer's research career reflects his interest in interdisciplinary approaches,
and has included studies in the literature, philosophy, art history and archeology
of Greece and Rome. He is the author of four books, including Shifting Paradigms:
New Approaches to Horace's Ars Poetica, and The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism
and Philosophical Recruitment. Since 1997, Frischer has directed the excavations
of Horace's Villa, a project sponsored by the American Academy in Rome and the
Archeological Superintendency for Lazio of the Italian Ministry of Culture, which
will be the subject of his next book.
Professor Frischer has been a faculty member in Classics at UCLA since 1976, and
served as Chair of that department from 1984 to 1988. He received his BA in Classics
from Wesleyan University in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Classical Philology from the
University of Heidelberg in 1975. His numerous awards and honors include appointments
as the Loeb Classical Research Fellow, the Paul Mellon Senior Fellow at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts of the National Gallery, and a Fellow of
the American Academy in Rome.
Frischer's spouse, Jane Crawford, has also been appointed as a Professor to the
UVA Classics Department. She comes from Loyola Marymount University, where she
currently serves as Chair of the Department of Classics and Archaeology.
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