Awards and Service
- Senior Visiting Scholar, American School of
Classical Studies, 2010
- Perrine Prize, Phi Beta Kappa, 2010
- 2008, 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003 HOPE awards
- President, Texas Classical Association,
2006-2008
- SMU University Distinguished Professor, 2005-07
-
Vice President, American Research Center
in Egypt, North Texas chapter
- President-Elect of the Texas Classical
Association, 2004-2006
- Vice President, Texas Classical Association,
2002-2004
- 2001Mortar Board Outstanding Faculty award
- 1997
Rotunda Outstanding Faculty Teaching award
Books and Essays
- Articles on
Aeternitas, Clementia, Fortuna, Harpocrates,
Honos, Isis in Greece and Rome, Navigium Isidis,
Sarapis, Sistrum,
for the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient
History, ed.
Roger Bagnall, et al., (Wiley-Blackwell), in press.
- "Time for Caesar:
The Julian Calendar and Roman Politics," in Kathleen
Wellman, ed., Making History: Essays in
Honor of Ruth Sharp Altshuler
(Dallas: Southern
Methodist University, 2007), pp. 87-115.
- "Measuring time
in Ancient Egypt," NT-ARCE Newsletter
14.4 (2007), p. 6
- Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, University of Michigan Press, 2006
- “A Time to Regender: The Transformation of Roman Time” in Time and Uncertainty, ed. Paul A. Harris, Brill, 2004; reprinted in Kronoscope, 2003
- “The Vestal Virgins of Rome” Archaeology Odyssey, 2001
- “The Clemency of Sulla: Roman clemency, eternity, and immortality,” Historia, 2000
In her first book, Professor Melissa Dowling examined
the ways in which Romans responded to the end of
democratic Republican government and the rise of Roman
Imperial society. The transition resulted in a new
ideal of clemency to balance the cruel abuses of power
in the Roman empire. Clemency and Cruelty in the
Roman World explores the spread of clementia
as a popular virtue, ultimately influencing early
Christian ideals of mercy.
Dowling’s current book, The Cult of Isis and the
Suffering Heroine: Heliodorus’ Aithiopika, explores
the ways in which the Egyptian worship of Isis was
absorbed and transformed in the Roman empire. She
focuses on the worshipper’s experience in temples and
shrines in Greece, Italy and Egypt, and on religious
symbology. The works of Plutarch and Heliodorus in
particular reveal the initiate’s understanding of the
moral and philosophical framework of the cult.
Dowling’s third book project, The End of Time:
Eternity and Immortality in Roman Culture, examines
the connection between ancient ideas of immortality and
changing Roman conceptions of time and temporality. In
particular, she is investigating the contributions of
the Egyptian cult of Isis to Roman ideas of the
afterlife, an important predecessor to Christian beliefs
in heaven and hell. The End of Time is an
interdisciplinary study of intellectual and cultural
developments in the Roman empire between the first
century B.C. and the third century A.D. She examines
the politicization of time and the calendar, the
increasingly sophisticated political manipulation of
time in the ancient world, and the creation of a concept
of time as a force or deity. Her study begins with
Julius Caesar, the Julian calendar, and the creation of
a political ideology of time at the end of the Roman
Republic. Dowling concludes her study by analyzing the
transformation of Egyptian and Roman ideals of eternal
time that resulted in the creation of apocalyptic ideas
of time in early Christian thought.
Last updated
August
2011. |
