Department of Classical Studies
Kimberly “Max” Brown (PhD AAMW 2004), Director of Research Development and Stakeholder Engagement at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Brian Rose, and Sheila (Bridget) Murnaghan, have been awarded a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for their project, Eternal Soldier. ES, founded in 2014 and based in the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum, brings together a volunteer community of classicists, historians, veterans, and VA clinicians to think about ancient warfare in relation to recent armed conflicts. Placing the contemporary veteran experience in a diachronic perspective, ES enables veterans to see that their lives may differ in detail from those of ancient warriors, but their emotional, spiritual, and psychological experiences have a timelessness that unites all warriors. The Fellowship will be used for a series of workshops, to be held in the Fall of 2021, designed to engage veterans as partners in determining the structure and scope of future ES programs. These "design workshops" will explore the veterans’ own interests in order to identify unmet needs and missed opportunities, to understand how ES and the Penn Museum may better serve women veterans and veterans of color, and to develop strategic programming that will make the experience of veterans accessible to non-veterans.