Elisabeth Punzi, coordinator for the Heritage and Wellbeing cluster at Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) and Jenny Högström Berntson, research administrator CCHS, were guided in the footsteps of James Loeb in Munich and Murnau. The visit included guiding in the Staatliche Antikensammlungen (State Collections of Antiquities) and the Glyptothek at Königsplatz by Dr. Florian Knauß, head of the State Collections of Antiquities in Munich, at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte by Prof. Dr. Iris Lauterbach and in Munich and Murnau by Dr. Hermann Mayer, chairman at the James Loeb Society and Prof. Hans-Peter Söder (Ludwig-Maximilians Universität Munich/Wayne State University).
Together with the Munich colleagues CCHS/Heritage and Wellbeing cluster collaborate on a series of conferences and publications addressing different aspects of the heritage of James Loeb. The first publication, James Loeb. Collector and Patron in Munich, Murnau and Beyond (eds Mayer & Salmen), will be published in December 2018.
James Loeb was a classical scholar, art collector, and philanthropist. He used his tremendous wealth for the purpose of cultural and social philanthropism and by doing so made a major impact on cultural heritage within classics, archaeology, art and more. For example, Loeb donated his collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities now at the State Collections of Antiquities in Munich, in addition to providing extensive financial support for educational and social institutions. James Loeb is probably most famous for founding the Loeb Classical Library published at Harvard University Press (which contains over 500 of the most important publications of Greek and Roman antiquity, translated from Greek and Latin into English). For the CCHS/Heritage and Wellbeing cluster James Loeb’s connections to the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin and his support to the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie (German Research Institute for Psychiatry) in Munich is of special interest. The connections between James Loeb and psychiatry will be a theme of one of the future conferences on James Loeb arranged by James Loeb Society and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation in Harvard (preliminary in 2021).
In June 2019 the second conference on James Loeb and heritage, this time focusing James Loeb and archaeology, will be hosted in Murnau by the James Loeb Society and Harvard Club Munich. CCHS will also take part in the conference.
Do you want to know more? Further information can be found via the links below:
