David DeVore | 20 Jahre Jacobi-Stipendienprogramm
The Jacobi Fellowship of the Commission for Ancient History and Epigraphy for doctoral students celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025. In this anniversary year, we will be presenting twelve former Jacobi scholarship holders, who will talk about their current work. We asked them five questions, which they answered in writing. In November, we get to know Dr. David DeVore, associate professor at the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona. Dr. DeVore was a Jacobi Fellow in Munich in 2010 with his project The Use of Biographic Forms and Themes in Eusebius’ Historia Ecclesiastica.
"The ancient Mediterranean prefigures many of the big questions"
Prof. Schuler: How did you decide to pursue an academic career in ancient studies? What fascinates you most about antiquity?
Dr. DeVore: First off, I thank the Commission for Ancient History and Epigraphy for the opportunity to share my academic experiences. Being the son of a physicist and a librarian, I always found joy in being in the classroom, learning, and discussing the human world, especially the past. Although when I first reached university I intended to study American History, a course in Ancient Greek in my second year was exhilarating, and another course the same year on historiography introduced me to Herodotus and Thucydides. I decided that my calling was to research ancient historical writing. Ever since, the nexus between conscious but long-deceased narrator, linguistically-elaborated narrative, and historical events in the distant past has been the main focus of my interests.
Aside from my fascination with Ancient Greek, I continue to find ancient Mediterranean history exhilarating for three reasons. First, in the Mediterranean we confront formidable and influential minds, from the biblical historians and Herodotus to Augustine and Procopius. Second, the random and scarce survival of evidence, at first glance a drawback to historical inquiry, makes it possible to study every available piece of evidence related to a topic. Accordingly, there are relatively few unstudied archives—a scholar or team of scholars really can evaluate every word of a text or every excavated locus of an archaeological site. And that accumulated knowledge in turn spurs exciting intellectual resourcefulness in reconstructing ancient Mediterranean experiences more comprehensively. Third, the ancient Mediterranean prefigures many of the big questions—about imperialism and globalization, image versus reality, gender relations, the social role of religion, and power relations at the scales of community, city, region, and state—that many still grapple over. My students read Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Israelite, and other ancient texts and with little prompting see analogues to think with about their own, more contemporary questions.
Die Fortsetzung des Interviews finden Sie hier:
https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/20_jahre_jacobi_stipendium_interviewreihe_devore?newsletter=1