• Date of Birth: October 15, 1894
  • Born City: Norfolk
  • Born State/Country: VA
  • Parents: Rev. Jeremiah B. & Mary McClure Watts W.
  • Date of Death: January 03, 1961
  • Death City: Staunton
  • Death State/Country: VA
  • Education:

    A.B. Tarkio Coll., 1917; A.M. Cornell, 1919; Ph.D., 1924.

  • Dissertation:

    "M. Tulli Ciceronis De oratore, librum primum codicibus tribus qui appellantur Cornellianus 28, Vaticanus Latinus 2901, Vaticanus Palatinus 1470 usus" (Cornell, 1924).

  • Professional Experience:

    Teaching in public school of Hepburn, IA, and (1920-1) Somerville High School, NJ, also Tarkio Coll. and Converse Coll.; Prof. Gk. & Lat. & head of dept. Wheaton Coll. (Norton, MA), 1925-55, and pres. Phi Beta Kappa, 1935-8; visiting prof. Florida State U. 1957-60; excavations at Isthmus of Corinth with U. of Chicago 1955-59; life member, CANE; Fellow, Royal Numismatic Society.

  • Publications:

    The Earlier Staters of Heraclea Lucaniae (New York, 1940); Teaching and Christian education: a paper presented at the Episcopal Church Vocational Conference for College Women, March 1, 1947 (Norton, MA: Wheaton College Press, 1947); "A City's Coinage: The Mint of Camarina," Archaeology 8 (1955) 102-7.

     

  • Notes:

    Eunice Work did not begin her career until the age of 30. A Bennett fellow at Cornell, she maintained an Ithaca address even after she began teaching at Wheaton. She gave 35 years of service to the profession, and though she published only one scholarly monograph, she was known at Wheaton as a reliable and dedicated teacher. There she devoted much energy to her chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, of which she was president for three years. During World War II, Work took a leave of absence from Wheaton to study Russian at Columbia and Cornell; she then taught the language, as well as cryptography, for the United States Navy. After retirement from Wheaton, Eunice Work moved to Tallahassee FL and took up a visiting professorship at Florida State; she also served as founding president of the local AIA chapter and energetically lectured to school, college and civic groups in the area. Each of the summers following her retirement she also spent as a member of Oscar Broneer's Chicago team that excavated the Temple of Poseidon at the Isthmus of Corinth, and performed expert analysis of the numismatic finds (including the discovery that up to half of the dedications to the god were ancient counterfeits). Her plans to publish a study of the Greek coins of Corinth were cut short when she fell ill during a visit to her birthplace in Virginia in summer 1960, and did not recover.

  • Sources:

    AmWom, 1007; obituary in The News Leader (Staunton VA) 4 January 1961; Wheaton Coll. archives.

  • Author: Ward W. Briggs, Jr. with additions by T. Corey Brennan