Dr. Peter Miller receives 2024 Faculty of Arts Excellence in Scholarly/Creative Activity Award
Tue. Sep. 10, 2024
The Faculty of Arts has announced Dr. Shailesh Shukla and Dr. Peter Miller as the recipients of the 2024 Faculty of Arts Excellence Awards.
Dr. Miller was nominated for his book, Sport: Antiquity and Its Legacy, published in 2023 with Bloomsbury Publishing, as part of its Ancients and Moderns series. As fellow Classics professor Dr. Connor Whately wrote in his nominating letter, “[b]ooks in this series have to wear two hats: engage with big topics from the ancient world, like sport, but also situate that topic in the modern world, so emphasizing the manifold ways the ancient and modern worlds were connected and interrelated. But they’re also not meant to be dry, academic monographs; rather, they’re meant to appeal to a broader audience, whether that be composed of undergraduate students, faculty in other disciplines, or the wider public. Needless to say, Peter manages all this and more with aplomb in his fabulous new book.”
John A. Martino, in his Journal of Classics Teaching review, praises Dr. Miller’s “remarkable book” for its “deft control” of an “expansive topic.” The Arts Awards Committee was similarly impressed by the book’s breadth and stimulating topic—an especially relevant one, given this year’s Olympic Games. Dr. Miller provides an engaging and incisive look at sites of continuity and discontinuity between ancient Greek and Roman athletics and modern sport. These include representations of the ideal athletic body, ancient architecture and spectacle, and classical symbols in the modern Games.
Congratulations Dr. Miller and Dr. Shukla!