Pantelia to get award from American Hellenic Council

Maria Pantelia, professor and chair of the Department of Classics and director of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae at UC Irvine, will receive the Theodore Saloutos Award from the American Hellenic Council at its 2014 awards gala on March 22 in downtown Los Angeles. The annual award, named after a founding member of the council, recognizes dedicated community members who have made major contributions to Hellenism and Greek culture and heritage. The AHC is a nonpartisan political advocacy organization that promotes democracy, human rights, peace and stability in Southern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, with an emphasis on Greece and Cyprus. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae at UC Irvine aims to create a comprehensive digital collection of all surviving texts written in Greek from antiquity to the present era. Under Pantelia’s direction, the TLG underwent a major expansion to include Byzantine and Modern Greek, in addition to being brought online in 2001. To this day, the TLG has identified and digitized the entire extant corpus of Greek from Homer to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a collection consisting of more than 4,000 authors and 15,000 works. Equipped with a highly powerful search engine and a suite of digital research tools designed to analyze this data, the TLG is a resource used by millions of readers in more than 2,000 academic institutions in 58 countries.