NEH at LMU
Program History
In 1998, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Loyola Marymount University a highly competitive and prestigious challenge grant to expand the University's Classics Department in two areas. Geographically, the department wished to move eastward to include the ancient Near East in its curriculum, since the Near East was the root of much of what subsequently became classical Latin and Greek civilization. Further, the department wanted to balance its offerings in classical philology with material culture studies and archaeology.
To achieve this, the Classics Department proposed the establishment of the NEH Chair in Ancient Mediterranean Studies. The mandate for the professor who would fill that chair would be to move rapidly to put on a firm footing the new academic programs that the Classics faculty envisioned. The phrase "Ancient Mediterranean Studies" was intended to indicate the geographical extension to the Levant and the new dimension of archaeology that would characterize the newly enriched department.
In the Fall of 1998, Prof. William J. Fulco, S.J., was chosen to fill the NEH chair. He had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where he oversaw the Ph.D. program in Ancient Near Eastern Religions and taught the doctor cycle of comparative ancient Afroasiatic linguistics and archaeology. He subsequently curated the archaeological collections at the University of Southern California where he was also an adjunct professor of archaeology. During that period at USC, 1988-1998, Dr. Fulco occasionally taught archaeology at Loyola Marymount University. At the same time, he established the joint membership for LMU-USC in the consortium that excavates every other year at the large archaeological site of Megiddo in Israel, run by Tel Aviv University. From that time onward, and prior to the NEH Endowment, Loyola Marymount University students had begun to participate in summer archaeological dig experiences.