Barbara P. McCarthy

McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A. M. Harmon. She was awarded the title of Doctor of Letters by Brown University in 1980.[1]

From 1929 to 1970 McCarthy taught at Wellesley College, where she was Professor of Greek from 1929 to 1955, and Ellen A. Kendall Professor of Greek from 1955 to 1970. In 1934 at Wellesley McCarthy initiated the production of plays in Greek, which she directed. She was lecturer at Holy Cross College between 1970 and 1974, and visiting professor at Brandeis University in 1973.[1]

In 1956–1957 McCarthy was the president of the Classical Association of New England, by which she was later awarded the Barlow-Beach Award for Distinguished Service, in 1978.[1]

Barbara McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Menippean satire, and especially for her article 'Lucian and Menippus' (Yale Classical Studies 4: 3–55), an adaptation of her PhD dissertation. Here McCarthy engaged with the theses of the philologist Rudolf Helm.[2] In the book Lucian und Menipp (1906),[3] Helm claimed that Lucian was heavily indebted to the Cynic Menippus. In her article, Barbara McCarthy did identify similar motives, themes and frames between Lucian's writings and the Menippean fragments. However, she argued that there was no evidence of a close copying of forms and thematic of Menippus' satires by Lucian.[4] Her work supports Lucian's claim of originating his form of satiric dialog.[2]

McCarthy died October 28, 1988.

In 2000, McCarthy was commemorated by her former student at Wellesley Lynn Sherr in a talk given at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States meeting at Princeton (29 April 2000).[5] In 2004, a panel of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States spring meeting in New York was dedicated to the memory of McCarthy (24 April 2004): New Directions in Research and Teaching on Elementary Greek and Greek Prose Authors, Commemorating the One Hundredth Birthday of Barbara Philippa McCarthy, Ellen A. Kendall Professor of Greek, Wellesley College.[6]

Post mortem homages

• American Philosophical Association Newsletter (Feb. 1989) 15.
• Lefkowitz, Mary (1989) 'In memoriam' , Wellesley 73.2: 26–27.

Dedicated entries

• Who's Who of American Women 1970–1971: 812.
• Who's Who in America 1978–1979: 2139.
• Lefkowitz, Mary (1994) ‘McCarthy, Barbara Philippa’, in Briggs, Ward W., Jr. (ed.) Biographical Dictionary of North American Classicists. Westport, CT and London: 379.
• Lefkowitz, Mary. ‘McCarthy, Barbara Philippa,’ Rutgers Database of Classical Scholars.

Dedicated contributions

• Hallett, Judith P. (2014) 'Eli's Daughters: Female Classics Graduate Students at Yale, 1892–1941', in Wyles, Rosie and Hall, Edith (eds.) Women classical scholars: unsealing the fountain from the Renaissance to Jacqueline de Romilly.[1] Oxford 2016: 260–274.