Rebecca Benefiel to Deliver Provost’s Lecture The annual address that celebrates W&L faculty for excellence in scholarship and teaching will be held at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 12 in University Chapel.

By Brian Laubscher
August 26, 2024

Rebecca Benefiel, Abigail Grigsby Urquhart Professor of Classics at Washington and Lee University, will deliver the 2024 Provost’s Lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 12 in University Chapel. The talk is free and open to the public.

“The Provost’s Lecture celebrates one faculty member each year whose research or creative work rises to the top of a scholarly or artistic field,” said Lena Hill, university provost and professor of English. “We also use this honor to recognize the faculty member’s outstanding teaching and academic citizenship.”

Benefiel’s lecture will decipher the ancient graffiti of Pompeii, revealing the public perception of the Decimi Lucretii Valentes, one of the city’s most distinguished families who were well-known as elected officials and sponsors of large gladiatorial spectacles.

Titled “Public Lives, Private Grief, and Community Support: Reading Prestige and Crisis in Ancient Pompeii,” the discussion will bring together scattered epigraphical evidence and archaeological finds to identify previously unrecognized public expressions of support and comfort for one of the city’s most prominent families.

“Pompeii is an archaeological site like no other,” said Benefiel. “The unique preservation of the city has resulted in a dense epigraphic landscape of more than 12,000 inscriptions written on the city’s walls. This is the backdrop for life in the early Roman Empire, but scholars are still making sense of much of this written display. I aim to explain the strategies of communication across Pompeii; identify threads linking public prestige, family, personal loss and community support; and enhance our understanding of the role of literacy in Pompeian social relations.”

“Professor Benefiel is a leading scholar of Pompeian graffiti and an expert on the social and cultural history of the Roman Empire,” said Hill. “Her trailblazing research has led to invitations to teach and lecture throughout the country and the world, spanning from the leading classics program at Princeton University to Sapienza University of Rome. At W&L, Professor Benefiel is known for the individualized attention she gives students in the classroom as well as in directed research. I am thrilled that the W&L community will have an opportunity to learn from Professor Benefiel’s groundbreaking scholarship and celebrate her excellence as a teacher-scholar.”

Benefiel has led more than 60 students and faculty in fieldwork at Pompeii and Herculaneum, bringing ancient graffiti to the public through a digital resource called the Ancient Graffiti Project. She has authored numerous articles and publications, including co-editing the book “Inscriptions in the Private Sphere in the Greco-Roman World.” Additionally, her National Geographic podcast on the graffiti of Pompeii was named one of the top five travel podcasts by Exploreworldwide.com.

Benefiel has been a member of the W&L faculty since 2005. She has served as department head for the Department of Classics and is a core faculty member for the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program. She has also been an affiliated faculty member for the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and served as a humanities faculty member for the Digital Humanities Working Group. In 2011, she received an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. She has been a recipient of the Rome Prize and has held fellowships at the Library of Congress and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. She has also been an invited professor at Sapienza University in Rome. Her degrees include a B.A. in classics with a double major in Greek and Latin from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Ph.D. in classics from Harvard University.