Plenty of Nothing

Hilda Petrie, Archaeologist

Hilda Petrie in Egypt. Source.

Helen and Norrie, 1937

This somewhat otherworldly photo of Helen Kemp and Northrop Frye was taken in 1937, the year they were married. McMaster University has an archive of Northrop Frye images here.

Nancy Sandars

You may know N. K. Sandars as the translator of the Penguin Gilgamesh. She was born in 1914, and served in the Second World War as a dispatch courier and in military intelligence. Trained as an archaeologist, she was an expert on Bronze Age France. She lived to be 101. Obit.

Edith Hamilton

If you have ever taken a Classical Civilization 1000 course you have probably read Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

Sylvia Hahn

Sylvia Hahn was head of the art department at the Royal Ontario Museum from 1934 to 1976, and much of the style of the place comes from her brush. Here she is in her workspace in the northeast part of the building. That's the Lillian Massey Building of the University of Toronto across the street. Judging by that taxi it must be the 1960s. Source.

Jocelyn Bell

In 1967, Jocelyn Bell became the first human to observe a neutron star. She went on to the presidency of the Royal Astronomical Society, and knighthood, but she was excluded from the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics that went to her supervisor. Her star, PSR B1919+21, is 2283 light years from here, and pulses every 1.33 seconds. The list of known neutron stars now runs above 2000. Today is her 73rd birthday.

Donald Keene Museum

Donald Keene poses in a recreation of his New York apartment at the Donald Keene Center in Kashiwazaki, Niigata, in 2013. How many translators have a museum dedicated to them in their own lifetime, or ever? Source.

Constance B. Hieatt

The frontispiece of Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C.B. Hieatt. You know you've made it in academe if they give you a festschrift. Hieatt, who died in 2011, was the translator of the Bantam edition of Beowulf, Karlamagnús Saga, and was a world expert on medieval cookbooks. She taught at the University of Western Ontario.

[You can find an obituary here.]

[There's a bibliography of her publications in M. J. Toswell (ed.), Prosody and Poetics in the Early Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of C. B. Hieatt (University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 219-23. ISBN 0-8020-0653-1.]

When I Die and Go to Heaven ...

I want to sit between these two people: Arnaldo Momigliano and Betty Radice. Douglas

Beatrice de Cardi

I recently read Beatrice de Cardi's name in a footnote in an archaeology book published in 1950, and thought I'd look her up and see who she was. Well, she isn't was, she's is. She just celebrated her 100th birthday (read about it here), seven years after this BBC segment labelled her the oldest archaeologist in the world. She learned her archaeology from Mortimer Wheeler at Maiden Castle in the Thirties, but made her mark in Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. D

[She died July 5th, 2016, age 102.]