Movie Night
Wednesday, April 26, 5:00 PM
Location: Classics Lounge, 7321 Dwinelle
Professor Anthony Bulloch will host a movie night featuring _O Brother,
Where Art Thou_, a modern-day take on Homer's Odyssey. He will
introduce the movie by way of its relationship to the Homeric epic, and
conclude by leading a group discussion of its points of divergence and
convergence with the original epic poem. Refreshments will be served.
(Pictures link to larger versions)
Cal Day
2006
April 22,
(Right) The welcoming representatives at their tables: Rachel
Marks, President of NESSA; Professor John Hayes of NES; and Stephanie
Pearson, President of The Classical Forum.
(Far Right) For Cal Day 2006,
the Near Eastern Studies Student Association (NESSA) and The Classical
Forum hosted information tables side-by-side. The groups serve a
largely overlapping member population, as they are Cal's only two
undergraduate organizations concerned with the ancient world, and their
partnership again proved fruitful at Cal Day. Below: Jamie
Comstock-Skipp and Katy Loveless, of NESSA, and Stephanie Pearson,
President of The Classical Forum, attract interest with their
renditions of ancient costume.
Cal Day
Saturday, April 22, 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Location: All Over Campus!
[See photos from last year's Cal Day here.] Cal Day is the
annual extravaganza centered
on the diverse offerings of UC Berkeley. The Classical Forum will be
hosting a table on Upper Sproul next to Ludwig Fountain, so swing by to
see the togate representatives tempt new admits with candy and laurels!
If you are interested in helping recruit new members, a task involving
standing at a highly decorated table and explaining the group to
interested parties, contact Stephanie at stephip@berkeley.edu. It's
always fun, so come lend a hand!
(Pictures link to larger versions)
Curses
from Corinth
April 19, 2006
Great event, bad photo: Ron Stroud's talk, "Curses from Corinth."
Curses from Corinth
Wednesday, April 19, 4:00 PM
Location: Classics Lounge, 7321 Dwinelle
Professor Ron Stroud will present a special talk on the tablets recently excavated from a sanctuary in Corinth. These tablets are inscribed with curses in Greek and Latin, from women and men cursing other women and men; come unwrap the mystery of these tablets and the religion from which they arise. Light refreshments served.
Latine Loqui
Wednesday, April 12, 4:00 PM
Location: Classics Lounge, 7321 Dwinelle
Professor Trevor Murphy will give a special talk on the Latin language and its relationship to Latin culture. Light refreshments to be served.
"Cult
Places and Practices at Mycenae"
Sunday, April 9, 3:00 PM
Room 101, Archaeological Research Facility
2251 College Building, UC Berkeley (behind Boalt Hall)
Kim Shelton, Director of Nemea Center, Department of
Classics, UC Berkeley, and Field Director, Petsas House Excavation,
Mycenae, Greece: Archaeological Society of Athens
This lecture will discuss the archaeological evidence for the location
and mechanism of cult from primarily Bronze Age contexts at Mycenae.
Prof. Shelton will focus her discussion on objects of cult use,
architecture, and the origin and history of the Cult Center. She will
consider (and discredit) the theories of a popular house shrine/cult
versus an official/exclusive palace cult/cult center. continuity of
cult at the site will also be mentioned. Co-sponsored with ARF and the
UC Berkeley Department of Classics.
Thesmophoria BBQ
Friday, April 7, 11:30 AM-1:30 PM
Location: VLSB Northern Lawn
This event has been
canceled due to rain, sorry.
Ancient Greeks celebrated the fertility of the season with a festival involving baking phallic cookies, telling jokes, and burying pig parts with which to sow the fields. We shall modify these rituals in our own BBQ: fun-shaped cookies, lots of jokes and merriment, and pseudo-pig (i.e., chicken sausages) and bell peppers on the grill. Swing on by to check it out! Buy a healthy grilled lunch à la Ancient Greece to support TCF's future endeavors (at very reasonable prices!), share your best jokes, and leave with your own suggestive cookie. Those ancients knew how to party, so take your cue from them and join us!
Bone Talk
Wednesday, April 5, 6:00 PM
254 Barrows
NES grad student Jessica Kaiser will talk about her
osteology experience in the field @ Giza, Egypt. She will be
demonstrating techniques to identify age and sex on specific skeletal
parts, followed by a hands-on workshop. [NOTE that TCF's meeting will
end in time for this event, and a crew will be heading to it directly
from the meeting.]
TCF and NESSA take care to feed hungry bellies, so add that to the list
of "pros" for attending these events.
April Meeting
Wednesday, April 5, 5:30 PM
Location: 205 Wheeler
It is that time again. Time to plan for the future and see what is in store for The Classical Forum.
March Meeting
Wednesday, March 1, 5:30 PM
Location: 205 Wheeler
Beware the Ides of March but not the beginning,
because that
is when we will be having our monthly meeting. If you are not
a
member, come and check us out. If you are, help us plan
upcoming
events and learn what the club has planned already.
Classics
Undergraduate Reception
Friday, February 24, 4-6 PM
Classics/Rhetoric Lounge, 7321 Dwinelle
A meet-and-greet-and-eat for classicists! Meet the
department faculty,
staff, and GSIs; greet fellow Classics students and majors; and eat the
provided fare. A great way to break into your community of
ancient-o-philes.
Don't forget to pitch in! See you there.
Electra
Movie Night
Wednesday, February 8, 5-7 PM
Classics/Rhetoric Lounge, 7321 Dwinelle
Tim Doran, graduate student in Cal's Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology group, is hosting a movie night featuring a filmed theater performance of the stellar Greek tragedy Electra. In this gripping story of revenge, manipulation, and the often tense conflict of the human spirit, Electra, obsessed with exacting revenge on her father's murderer, uses her brother Orestes to help her kill both their mother Clytemnestra and her new husband. Don't miss this opportunity to see a great theater performance, here complemented with Tim's sharp commentary and a pizza dinner.
de Young Reception
Friday, January 27, 7:30 PM
Koret Auditorium, de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park
From the flier:
"DR. ZAHI HAWASS,
Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of
Antiquities of
Egypt, well-known Egyptologist, and internationally renowned TV
personality and
author, will speak about the CT scans of the mummies of King Tut and
Hatshepsut, his discoveries at the Valley of the Golden Mummies and
inside the
Great Pyramid of Khufu, as well as his other recent archaeological
findings.
$25 per person."
For more information, download the PDF.
Photo by Ozier Muhammad, New York Times
Baghdad Lecture
Monday, January 23, 7:30 PM
145 Dwinelle
U.C. Berkeley will host a lecture,
discussion, and book signing by Matthew Bogdanos, author of Thieves of
Baghdad. The speaker, a colonel in the Marine reserves and a New York
homicide prosecutor with a lifelong passion for the classics, will
describe his efforts to save irreplaceable antiquities looted from the
Iraq Museum in 2003. For further information, see www.savingantiquities.org
Co-sponsored by UC
Berkeley and SAFE (Saving Antiquities for Everyone).
First
Meeting
Monday, January 23, 5:30 PM
Cafe Milano (2522 Bancroft Way at Telegraph)
The Classical Forum is planning for its first meeting of the semester,
and yes, said meeting is brutally soon! Please join us at our local
Cafe Milano for a discussion of the semester's events to come. Bring
your ideas and enthusiasm; experience, specific goals, and classical
knowledge are not by any means necessary. We would love to hear from
you, whether your input be general or focused, consistent or sporadic.
Please note that this time and place are merely provisional. We will set a regular monthly meeting time and place at this first meeting; if you cannot abide this first meeting time but would like to attend future meetings, email Stephanie at stephip@berkeley.edu so she can factor you into the future plans.
Monthly
Meeting and Card Making Party
Wednesday, December 7th, 5pm
We're back, for now, to our first Wednesday of the month, 5pm time
slot. Come share ideas and grab a cookie, get in on the
esoteric art of planning, and be the first to know about the coming
events.
Please note that the card making party has been rescheduled to coincide with this meeting. It's a chance to craft some thank-you cards for the people who make TCF shine. Professors, staff, and guest lecturers need to be thanked for their contributions to TCF, so here's your chance to cut-'n'-paste in conjunction with our last meeting of the year.
(Photo courtesy of Nemea Excavations Archive, UC Berkeley)
Nemea
Night
Tuesday, December 6th, 7:30pm
Chevron Auditorium, International House (on Piedmont at the end of
Bancroft)
Open to the public and fully catered this event is hosted by Professor
Kim
Shelton who will be informing the attendees on what progress has been
made in
Nemea and what the future holds for the site.
NESSA
Feast for the Senses
Tuesday, November 22rd
254 Barrows Time 6:00pm
TCF's sister group, the Near Eastern Studies Student Association
(NESSA), will be hosting a Feast in honor of the seasonal
tradition. Come feast your eyes on the studs in Oliver
Stone's Alexander, feed your
belly on provided food and drink, and fuel your sense of humor with the
silliness of the film. A great pre-holiday workout for those
needing to stretch the stomach and capacity for fun.
(Pictures link to larger versions)
Cookie
Basket
A holiday fund-raiser
(Courtesy of www.allisongourmet.com)
Cookie
Party
Sunday, November 20th
Time TBA, residential venue TBA
Cookies! We like eating them. Money! We
like spending it. Put them together, and we have a fun way to
make money toward future theater tickets, movie nights, and museum
outings. TCF will be having a Cookie Party to cut, bake, and
package cookies to sell in the Classics Department for a suggested
donation. Every member is cordially invited to come to the
home of one lucky TCF host with one log of cookie dough.
Sprinkles and frosting will be provided, a movie will
entertain us while cookies bake, and sugary fun will be in
abundance. Please come, eat, enjoy, and help us fill the
piggy bank.
(Pictures link to larger versions)
Achilles
and Patroklos
November 11, 2005
Tweed Conrad and Professor Mark Griffith eating pizza
with the group
before the performance.
Achilles
and Patroclus
A new play about
love and war.
Written by Gary
Graves
Directed by
Christopher Herold
Berkeley City
Club (2315 Durant Ave.) Nov. 11, 8:00pm
URGENT!: Please RSVP Steph at stephip@berkeley.edu
if you would like to come. As of this writing there are only
about twenty tickets for this night left and in order to qualify for a
group discount we need to buy 15-20 tickets. For further
information see the Central
Works website or the East
Bay Express'es website. Also, a different article from the
East Bay Express can be found here
in a PDF (605kb).
We are going to
try to set up
a pre-party and and a post-play discussion panel, possibly with
professor Griffith. As for the play, Frako Loden of
the East
Bay Express
writes, "In the Iliad, these Greek
heroes of the war against the Trojans are fierce comrades in armor.
But centuries earlier, according to Plato's Symposium, they are
proof that 'love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods,
and the chiefest author and giver of virtue in life and of happiness
after death.' In other words, they're the greatest lovers of all time."
It is within this context that Achilles and Patroclus takes
place. Though based on the ancient epic, this drama is set in a modern
war that resembles the current struggle in Iraq. "Meanwhile
despite the carnage," Loden says, "there's the utopia of a ménage à
trois among Achilles, Briseis, and Patroclus." The director,
Christopher Herold, is one of Berkeley's own drama professors.
(Courtesy of www.sikyon.com)
Greek
Hate: Athenian War Propaganda and the Persians
Sixteenth Annual W. Kendrick Pritchett Lecture (AHMA)
Monday, November 7th, 8:00pm
Alumni House
Margaret C. Miller, University of Sydney
Come with TCF to see an unraveling of the Athenian-Persian conflict as
elucidated by propagandistic material culture. A reception
will follow the lecture.
(Photo courtesy of the Maltese government www.gov.mt)
AIA
Lecture
Ancient
Malta: Crossroads of Mediterranean Cultures
Sunday, November 6th, 1:00pm
Room 101 Archaeological Research Facility(2251 College Building)
Cal's department of Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology,
AHMA, takes pride in its multifarious graduate students. One
such is Amelia Brown, who will deliver a lecture on the cultural
complexity of the little —but feisty— island of
Malta.
(Photo courtesy of The University of California Press)
Closing
Sather Lecture
Writing on Ostraka: a Culture of Potsherds?
Wednesday, November 2nd, 8:00pm
2040 VLSB
Join us and Professor Bagnall for the closing lecture of his Sather
professorship here at Cal. For details on the professorship
and on Professor Bagnall himself, see the Classics
Department website.
Monthly
Meeting
Wednesday, November 2nd, Time 7:00pm
205 Wheeler
We will meet, as usual, on this first Wednesday of the month.
We are looking at a 7pm meeting time so we can head directly to the
closing Sather Lecture afterward. We'll keep you posted.
(Photo courtesy of Nemea Excavations Archive, UC Berkeley)
Nemea
Letter-Folding
Monday, October 31, 9:00-5:00
Nemea Archive Room: 7125 Dwinelle
Newly-hired Classics professor Kim Shelton, the director of Cal's
excavations at Nemea, is looking for hungry help. She shall
provide her workers pizza in exchange for some serious letter-folding:
all the Nemea Night invitations need to go out, and there are plenty of
them to send. Please give the Classics Department a hand, and
a tongue to lick stamps, and chow down on pizza. This will be
a goes-till-it's-done event, beginning around nine in the Nemea Room
(near the conference room, 7205 Dwinelle Hall). Come early
for pizza while it lasts!
de
Young Opening
Saturday, October 15th, evening
de Young Museum of San Francisco
The newly-built de Young art museum in Golden Gate Park will open its
doors for free in honor of its opening weekend. The Classical
Forum and the Undergraduate Near Eastern Studies Student Association
are planning a trip over there on Saturday evening, likely leaving
Berkeley around 6pm and returning around 10pm. We will be
driving, however, so you MUST RSVP to reserve a seat in a
car. Email stephip@berkeley.edu
with your name and a note about seats for the de Young trip BEFORE
TUESDAY AT 5PM. Note that while the general admission for the
weekend is free, there is a $5 surcharge for the Hatshepsut Egyptian
exhibit on show now, and gas and parking fees will be split among the
passengers.
More
information about the de Young Museum>>>
Movie
with Murphy:
Thursday, October 13th, 7pm
Classics Lounge, 7321 Dwinelle Hall; meet outside Dwinelle at North
entrance before 7pm
Undergraduate Adviser Trevor Murphy, in case you haven't met him yet,
is one of our hippest Classics professors. He will be hosting
a movie night, complete with pizza and sodas, featuring one of his
favorite cinematic romps through pagan society: "The Wicker
Man." Of this movie Leonard Maltin writes: "(three and a half
stars) Harrowing, absorbing thriller by Anthony Shaffer...Scot police
sergeant Woodward comes to a small island investigating disappearance
of a child, discovers a society of modern pagans...with seemingly
authentic local color and folk music; a must-see." Join us
for an evening of chatting with your adviser and professor, meeting
your fellow classicists, and chowing down on pizza.
TCF
Meeting:
Wednesday, October 12th, 5pm
205 Wheeler
It's time again to spawn new ideas, enact them, and check up on our
website and funding. We'll talk about the _Achilles
and Patroclus_
theater show coming up, as well as various lectures, movie nights, and
festivals we're planning.
Lecture
Tuesday, October 11th, 5pm
Near Eastern Studies Lounge, 254 Barrows
NES professor Cathleen Keller, co-curator of the De Young Egyptian
show, will present an hour long tour through Hatshepsut's importance
and twisting history. From Queen Mother to King, Hatshepsut's
career merits this closer look by one of the nation's top
Egyptologists.
Enjoy!
(Pictures link to larger versions)
