All Scholars

     An early baseball fan whose arm is remembered fondly by intramural teammates, Judith Ginsburg was also an enthusiastic birder and with her partner, Miri, raised cockatiels. For 26 years she was one of Cornell’s most beloved teachers and colleagues. Her two monographs have proved to be enduring contributions to Tacitean studies. 

     Both at her home institution and in the APA Judith was especially involved in committees devoted to the interests of vulnerable peoples. At Cornell, she was an active member of the Women's Studies Program and the graduate field in History; she helped write procedures for handling charges of sexual harassment, served on the AIDS advisory Committee, the Committee on Professional Ethics, and the University Benefits Committee (which during her term extended benefits to partners of gay and lesbian employees). In the APA she served on the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (which she chaired from 1985-87) and also on the Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Ethics, which drew up the first standards of professional conduct for the Association. She was also a long-time member of the Women's Classical Caucus and served on its Steering Committee. 

     Ralph Johnson recalled her as prowess at Latin composition: Having asked “the shyest member of our group” to put her translation on the blackboard, “As the chalk begins to click and Judy's clauses begin to flower beneath her hand, my astonishment gives way to sullen envy, which dissolves into admiration and joy." 

     Her dissertation under Erich Gruen's direction was a careful, clear and also highly original study of an insightful question, how did Tacitus adapt the traditional annalistic format, associated primarily with republican historiography, to shape and add meaning to his narrative of a transformed political system, the principate. Gruen wrote of it, “She demonstrated brilliantly and convincingly that Tacitus utilized the annalistic form of composition to his own ends, remaining within its framework to give the illusion of conventionality, while manipulating it so as to provide a vehicle for his idiosyncratic reconstruction.”

     Judith followed up this book with several historical and literary studies of the period covered by the Annals. At the same time, she sharpened and nuanced her readings of the historiographers with the tools of the historian—epigraphy, numismatics, portraiture—and also with the critical insights of women’s studies. She shared this growth with her students at Cornell; in particular, she developed a coherent sequence of advanced courses on the history and historians of Rome that became a mainstay of the graduate curriculum and led to several outstanding dissertations that she directed on historiography. 

      During the last decade of her life she took up the ambitious project of combining many different approaches in a reading of Tacitus’ Agrippina. As the daughter of Germanicus, wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, Agrippina is the flashiest and most alluring of Roman women to study, mostly treated with a sensationalism that might have embarrassed even Tacitus, but all the more suited to Ginsburg’s approach: a skeptical cross-examination of Tacitus’ narrative overlaid on the visual portraiture of sculpture and the political portraiture of rhetoric.  As with her first work on Tacitus, her reading reveals patterns of cultural and social understanding. 

     Judith continued to work on her book throughout her last illness. It was brought to completion by Erich Gruen, Natalie Kampen, Elizabeth Keitel, and Beth Severy-Hoven, who added footnotes and conclusions in square brackets where necessary for clarity. Unlike her first book, which opened up a new and exciting field, Ginsburg's Agrippina shows how a frequently read (and misread) historical narrative can be revisited with more depth, subtlety and insight. Kristina Milnor in BMCR wrote: “By breaking down the ideological influences on and within Tacitus' depiction of Agrippina . . . Ginsburg also takes an important step toward breaking us of our dependence on him as "true history", and shows how we should use him, rather than being used by him, in writing the stories of women in ancient Rome.

     She adds that in this book, “we may also see Ginsburg herself, a person . . . who had found time in her career to garner such love and respect from her scholarly peers that they were willing to put aside their own work to see her manuscript through to publication.”