The National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina provides an institutional base for advanced scholarship in the humanities. The center offers fellows the company of leading scholars in a variety of fields, plus offices, equipment and research support during their fellowship year.

Cole was among 30 NHC scholars selected this year from a field of more than 500 applicants. The NEH fellowship will provide her with a stipend during her NHC fellowship year.

While at the center, Cole will prepare the manuscript of her new book, "Bodies of Water, Fields of Grain." The book is a study of how the Greek polis (city-state, or more broadly, community) recognized the reciprocal roles of males and females through its creation of ritual space and organization of ritual acts.

"Most recent discussions of gender difference in Greek ritual practice," she says, "...concentrate on single issues and offer single explanations-that female rituals reflect the marginalization of women in the Greek community or that rituals reflect a subversive and deliberate counter-culture among women."

Cole argues, however, that the well-documented exclusion of women from certain Greek civic and religious rituals did not imply the social marginalization of women, but articulated the mutual correspondence between the community functions of men and women.

In exploring this topic, she will exploit archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence ranging from the nature of sanctuaries and votive gifts to gender differences described in medical texts, oratories, poetry and drama.

Cole is the author of "Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace" (1984) and is completing a second book, "Dionysiac Inscriptions of Asia Minor," a collection of inscriptions, with commentaries, relating to the cult of Dionysus in Asia Minor.

She also has published a number of journal articles and book chapters on such topics as the sacred and the feminine in ancient Greece, the literacy of Greek women, Greek sanctions against sexual assault, archaeology and religion, the changing world of classical studies, superstitions about the female body in Greece and Greek ritual obscenity.

In 1990, Cole presented a series of invited lectures at the °cole Pratique des Hautes °dudes in Paris and co-directed an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota, from which she holds a doctorate in Greek and Latin. She joined the UB faculty in 1992 after serving for 10 years on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was the Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor of Classics at Carleton College in Minnesota in 1986, and visiting associate professor of classics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1988.

Cole was a junior fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies in 1979-80, and is the recipient of a number of notable fellowships and grants, including those from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Illinois Institute for the Humanities and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.