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  • Natalie Boymel Kampen
  • Elaine Fantham

Natalie Boymel Kampen (Tally to the many who knew and loved her) passed away peacefully after a heroic struggle with lymphoma, on August 12, 2012: she died where she wanted, at her home in Rhode Island, as her devoted sister- and brother-in-law Susan and David Udin, and loyal friends kept vigil for her.

Tally was born on February 1, 1944, daughter of Jules and Pauline (Friedman) Boymel. Like her liberal intellectual parents she was passionate for social justice and for women’s self-realization. After graduating BA and MA (1965, 1967) from the University of Pennsylvania she moved to Rhode Island, where she pursued her doctoral studies at Brown University and taught at the University of Rhode Island for almost twenty years (1969–88) earning her doctorate in 1976. She had idyllic memories of the gentle countryside and friendly communities of Rhode Island, walking her dog and riding her horse over the land and inspiring congenial friends to support good causes, and to pursue their artistic talents in collaboration at the Hera Gallery at Wakefield.

Her first book, Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (1981) brought a new dimension to the interpretation of Roman private reliefs, showing how both subject and treatment reflected the activities and values of ordinary women: the same spirit would animate her last book, Family Fictions in Roman Art (2009), six separate studies of imperial elite self-representations and of anonymous family groups. As a great intellectual innovator, and an inspiring mentor and teacher. she was invited in 1988 to take up the newly endowed Barbara Novak Chair in Art History and Women’s Studies at Barnard College, where she taught undergraduate courses in feminist theory and gender studies, while offering graduate studies in the Ancient World at Columbia University.

It was then I met her, and had the privilege of cooperating with her and three distinguished Hellenists, Helene Foley, Alan Shapiro, and Sarah Pomeroy to produce Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (1994). As a conventional philologist from a traditional program I had so much to learn from them all, but the chief delight was learning from Tally new ways of seeing the women of the Roman and imperial worlds: we rented an apartment in Umbria, planning our shared chapters in a charming hill-town founded two thousand years ago by Augustus himself. Our time together helped me to realize the enormous generosity of her candid criticism, as I experienced in person how she cared for and helped all who worked and studied with her.

Tally was a great collaborator and promoter of fruitful seminars; witness her edited collection Sexuality in Ancient Art (1996), and her contribution to The Art of Citizens, Soldiers and Freedmen in the Roman World (edd. Guy Metraux and Eve D’Ambra, 2006). Her wide interest in women’s roles both in history and in currently developing countries brought her invitations from Oxford, where she was a research fellow in 2000, from Sweden, where she was honored by the University of Gothenburg with the Felix Neubergh medal, and from India where she was a visiting professor at New Delhi’s Jawarlahal Nehru University in 2010.

This was the year of her retirement from Barnard, and she looked forward to the Getty Foundation seminar on The Art of Rome’s Provinces, for which she had been so long preparing: with her co-director, Susan Alcock of Brown [End Page 691] University, and other international scholars she planned to accompany the younger members of the seminar for two weeks visiting Roman sites and museums in England in May 2011, and a further two weeks in Greece in May 2012. She wrote in happy excitement about the travels and lively discussions in the first year, but dis aliter visum: the return of her illness forced her to leave the Greek sessions of 2012, returning for urgent hospital treatment, then when it could not counteract her illness, to enjoy her last weeks among friends and family in her Rhode Island home.

Elaine Fantham
Toronto
elaine.fantham@utoronto.ca
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