FSU Department of Classics to use $1M gift to enhance research, professional development opportunities

Starting this summer, students and faculty in Florida State University’s Department of Classics, both at home and abroad, will have access to new research and professional development opportunities, thanks to a generous gift from the family of a former professor emeritus.

Charlotte Orth Reckford gifted $1 million to the department in honor of her late husband and Langford Eminent Scholar professor emeritus Kenneth J. Reckford. The Orth Reckford Classics Fund for Research and Archives supports student research that combines science and the humanities and creates opportunities for students to gain curatorial, conservator and museum experience in the U.S. and abroad via the Archaeology in Tuscany International Program for excavations at Cetamura del Chianti.

“This gift was made by my mother out of abiding love to honor my late father’s legacy of cultivating courage and a deep reverence for the humanities,” said David Orth Reckford, Charlotte and Kenneth’s son. “It is also a gesture of gratitude for the unconditional kindness and support with which FSU’s Department of Classics embraced him in the final chapter of his preeminent career and as an expression of support for the humanities and FSU classics in particular to advance archaeological and philological research.”

A significant portion of the gift will be endowed, providing funds in perpetuity to support excavations and research at Cetamura del Chianti, a research site in Italy’s Tuscany region operated by FSU’s Department of Classics and the FSU Florence Program, with archaeology work directed by M. Lynette Thompson Distinguished Research Professor of Classics Nancy de Grummond.

“For this summer at Cetamura, we were able to give 10 scholarships to graduate and undergraduate students, which will allow us to have the largest crew and the longest season in the last 10 years.”

– Nancy de Grummond, director of excavations at Cetamura del Chianti

For over 50 years, FSU faculty, staff and students have studied the Cetamura site, which is unique for its artifacts and buildings that span three distinct periods: Etruscan, Roman and Italian medieval. Excavations have unearthed materials ranging from waterlogged grape seeds to the remains of a Roman bath. The grape seeds are one of the site’s most important discoveries. The water trapped in the seeds preserved DNA well enough for researchers to determine more about wine and culture in the ancient world.

“The Reckford family’s continued and staunch support of the Department of Classics has had an immediate and great impact,” said Nancy de Grummond, director of excavations for Cetamura for over 40 years. “For this summer at Cetamura, we were able to give 10 scholarships to graduate and undergraduate students, which will allow us to have the largest crew and the longest season in the last 10 years.”

In addition to funding individual student research, the gift emphasizes the fundamental relationship between the sciences and the humanities by matching a separate contribution by John Goldthwaite, a former senior research scientist and husband of long-time Cetamura collaborator Lora Holland Goldthwaite. Goldthwaite’s gift has been used to scan the Chianti landscape with Light Detection and Ranging technology, or LiDAR, which uses pulsed light to map the terrain and detect structural remains above and below ground.

“Through this gift, my mother hopes to help grow the collaboration between classicists and scientists so that we can learn even more from our classical past to protect and enrich our collective future,” David Orth Reckford said. “My father would be delighted!”

Kenneth Reckford died in 2021 at age 88. In 1957, he earned a doctoral degree from Harvard University in classical philology and then spent three years as an instructor at Harvard. He taught for more than 40 years at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill before his retirement in 2003. In 2009, Reckford became a Langford Eminent Scholar at FSU, where he taught a graduate course on Plautus and an undergraduate course on comedy, satire and society.

To learn more about the Department of Classics, visit classics.fsu.edu or to make a gift to the department, visit give.fsu.edu.