Randolph-Macon College Classics Professor and Fulbright Scholar Elizabeth Fisher is spending the better part of a year at Aksum University in Aksum, Ethiopia. During her 10-month tenure as a Fulbright Scholar at the university, she is traveling throughout the country to see archaeological sites; teaching undergraduate and graduate courses; and researching connections between Greece and Ethiopia in antiquity.

Fisher is one of approximately 1,100 U.S. faculty and professionals who is working abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program in 2015-16. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.

“I am very much enjoying my time in Ethiopia and feel honored to have this opportunity,” says Fisher. “It’s especially challenging this year because there is a terrible drought in northern Ethiopia. People are really suffering, and animals are dying.”

Symposium
Twenty-four members of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), Greece, visited Ethiopia March 25-April 3, 2016 to attend a symposium that Fisher arranged. The director of the ASCSA, the head of the academic program at the ASCSA; and RMC Professor John Camp II, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Classics and director of archaeological excavations at the Athenian Agora, led the group.

“Attendees met the director of the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa and toured the museum,” says Fisher. “They also met with Yonas Desta, director general of the Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage (ARCCH), the council that oversees all archaeology and cultural heritage preservation for Ethiopia, to discuss the current efforts and future plans of the ARCCH toward the discovery and preservation of the archaeological resources in Ethiopia.”

Learned Dees, cultural affairs attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Addis Ababa, hosted the group, along with colleagues from Addis Ababa University, Fulbright Scholars, and members of the U.S. Embassy community, at a luncheon at the U.S. Embassy compound.

Participants toured the Stele Park and Aksum Museum and viewed the Ezana inscriptions and other archaeological sites in and around Aksum. In addition, Aksum University hosted the first International Archaeology Symposium, with five speakers presenting various papers about archaeology in both Greece and Ethiopia. The speakers spoke about a range of topics, including the American School, a non-profit educational institution in Greece; the results of one of the most recent and important excavations in Greece at Thebes; and the state of preservation of archaeological resources in Aksum.

Camp, who joined the faculty at Randolph-Macon College in 1995, spoke about the Agora Excavations, which have been ongoing in Athens since 1931. Camp will be honored in New York City in several weeks for his 50 years of participation in the Agora Excavations, which he has directed since 1996.

Rounding off the symposium, Fisher presented a portion of her research on the early connections of Greece and Ethiopia, particularly during the Bronze Age.

Research
“My research has taken me all over the country,” says Fisher. “I have traveled to the western edge of Ethiopia to look at frankincense forests, into the Rift Valley to see Grant’s gazelles, to the Islamic city of Harar, to a remote village in the Wejjerat region, and to the Omo Valley on the Kenya border, where I watched a Hamer bull-leaping ceremony.”

Elizabeth Fisher
Fisher, who joined the RMC faculty in 1988, earned her B.A. from The College of William & Mary, her M.A. from Florida State and her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. She teaches a broad spectrum of classics, art history and archaeology courses and has accompanied students on numerous travel-study trips—to Ethiopia, Israel, Egypt and other destinations—throughout her tenure at RMC.

In 2013 Fisher was presented RMC’s Samuel Nelson Gray Distinguished Professor Award, which honors the faculty member selected by the president as the person who has made a distinguished contribution to the college.