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Classics chair Corey Brennan and Rutgers
College student Carlee Catena view a
rare slide from the 1930s discovered in
a storage room several years ago. The
long-forgotten collection of
archeological images from Greece, Italy
and the Middle East, taken by classics
faculty over four decades, are being
digitized and archived for use in
teaching at Rutgers and in New Jersey
schools.
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One summer day three years ago, classics department chair Corey Brennan and Kathryn Neal, the department’s administrative assistant, were rummaging around a dank storage room in the department’s basement on the Douglass campus. Amid old boxes, yellowing papers and long forgotten props for Latin plays, they discovered a large metal box. In it were dozens of drawers holding dusty but intact slides.
The discovery was a classicist’s dream: a treasure trove of about 1,000 antique, glass-plated lantern slides taken in Italy, Greece and Turkey during the 1930s. The images were extraordinary: photodocumentation of 28 archaeological sites, including rare photographs of Benito Mussolini’s Rome and his propagandistic celebration in 1937 of the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Augustus Caesar.
“I remember standing there thinking, ‘Now what do I do?’ ” Brennan recalls. “The slides were covered with dirt, growth and mold.” (The room had at one time been used as a dark room.) “But I knew they were of crucial importance to scholars and for teaching, and that we had a mandate to preserve them.”
The classics department already had on its hands a rare collection of about 11,000 35 mm slides taken by faculty members during the 1960s and early 1970s. The slides featured exotic buildings and landscapes in Europe and the Middle East. Many of the slides were meticulously labeled; others were missing dates or other identification.
Along with their value to classics scholars, the images, particularly the lantern slides, also provided an invaluable glimpse into Rutgers’ history: Who took these forgotten visuals? What could they tell us about the academic and teaching culture of the past?
Brennan’s research began with the more modern 35 mm slides. He learned that most had been shot by the late Rutgers professor Christoph Clairmont. The photographs went beyond the expected Greek and Roman topography and Mediterranean archaeology to archaeological sites in Yugoslavia, Israel, Iran and Iraq, including 30-year old images of the Baghdad Museum and of regional Iraqi museums, which were destroyed or severely damaged during the 1991 Gulf War.
The black-and-white lantern slides were even more interesting. They had been used for instruction by the classics faculty at the New Jersey College for Women, the predecessor of Douglass College. Two women faculty members, Shirley Smith and Evalyn Clark, took many of the images. The pair made several trips abroad during the 1930s, including a particularly ambitious tour in 1935.
Brennan learned through old newspaper clippings that in 1935, Clark testified before the Rutgers Board of Trustees in a highly charged case involving Lienhard Bergel, a German instructor at the New Jersey College for Women. Bergel claimed he had been let go by the chair of the German department, Friedrich J. Hauptmann, because of his opposition to Adolf Hitler. (The case is recounted in “The Case of the Nazi Professor,” by Richard P. McCormick, David M. Oshinsky and Daniel Horn.)
Clark, who spoke forcefully in Bergel’s defense at university hearings without the protection of tenure, particularly caught the media’s attention. “My guess is that she was exhausted that summer and went on this extended trip with her colleague,” Brennan says. Clark left for Vassar in 1939, where she spent the rest of her career. She died in 2001.
Smith used the lantern slides for teaching through the 1950s, and Brennan says she essentially made up a one-woman department at the college for two decades. “Clark, in particular, had a keen eye for the contemporary reuse of the past, especially when it was for political purposes,” Brennan says. “Her experiences in Europe surely played a role in her decision to abandon ancient Roman history for the study of the modern European era.”
In 2003, Brennan submitted a proposal to the university’s Academic Excellence Fund for a grant to create a digital library for use in undergraduate courses at Rutgers and distribution via CD-ROM to public K-12 Latin programs in the state. The first year he was unsuccessful, but last year the project received a $45,000 grant from the fund, which awarded Brennan another $25,000 for 2005-06.
Nearly all 11,000 35 mm slides and a good portion of the lantern slides have been scanned and digitized. The next step is metadata tagging by specialists in archaeology and ancient art history and entering the images into the Rutgers University Libraries’ Luna Insight database. One Rutgers doctoral candidate and an undergraduate senior are already at work. Preserving the lantern slides has been a labor-intensive process, and students have spent the last year cleaning and labeling them. Some of the high-quality lantern slides have required digital enhancement, since a number of images within the glass plates had ripped.
Brennan hopes to have all 12,000 slides available to Rutgers faculty and students within a year. The department plans to reach out to Latin teachers in New Jersey schools, distributing free CD-ROMs of about 1,000 of the images most useful for the classroom. “My feeling is that this collection will have a very broad appeal,” Brennan says, “with an added bonus for those with an interest in the history of Douglass College or American women in classics and archaeology.”
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