Charles Platter, an associate professor of classics and a member of the University of Georgia faculty since 1987, has been named winner of a Fulbright Fellowship.
Platter will spend a semester during the 2001-02 academic year lecturing at the University of Lisbon in Portugal. A statement released by the university said Platter will lecture on the work and ideas of noted 20th century French philosopher Michel Foucault.
''Foucault made a conscious attempt to apply his work to classical antiquity,'' Platter said in the statement. ''I plan to use Foucault's work to help focus on the formation of ethical identity in the classical period.''
Platter, whose research interests include Greek comedy, literary theory and Latin elegy, received his bachelor's degree in English from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, and his master's and doctoral degrees in Greek and classics, respectively, both from the University of North Carolina. He came to UGA as an instructor in 1987 and was hired as an assistant professor in 1990. He was promoted to associate professor in 1996.
He has edited several volumes and just completed a book called ''Carnivals of Genre in Ariophanic Comedy.'' One volume he edited, ''Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity,'' will supply background for his lectures.
Foucault was a structuralist philosopher noted for his examination of the concepts and codes by which societies operate, especially the ''principles of exclusion'' (such as the distinctions between the sane and the insane) by which a society defines itself.
Foucault's early studies concerned the history of mental illness and society's response to it. He theorized that institutions such as asylums, hospitals and prisons are society's devices for exclusion and that by surveying social attitudes in relation to these institutions, one can examine the development and uses of power.
The Fulbright Program, recognized as the U.S. government's flagship program in international educational exchange, was proposed to the U.S. Congress in 1945 by then freshman Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, who saw a much-needed vehicle for promoting ''understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries of the world.''
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