Department of Classical Studies
R. Alden Smith, Professor of Classics at Baylor University and a Penn alumnus in Classical Studies (PhD 1990), was honored by a special panel discussion of his work at a recent meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMWS) on April 8, 2017, in Kitchener, Ontario. Professor Smith had just completed a successful term as President of CAMWS. The panel was devoted to the impact of his first book, Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1997), which was based on his Penn dissertation. The panel, organized by Professor Julia Hejduk, a colleague of Professor Smith at Baylor and herself a past President of CAMWS, included Professors Carole Newlands of the University of Colorado, Boulder; Joseph Farrell of Penn, who was the director of Professor Smith's dissertation; Peter E. Knox of Case Western Reserve University; and James J. O'Hara of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Professor Smith is currently Chair of the Classics Department and Associate Dean of the Honors College at Baylor. He is a renowned and much-decorated teacher, and has been credited with building up the Baylor Classics program into one of the best undergraduate majors in the country. His research continues to focus on Latin poetry, and he is the author of many books and articles in that field.