The NESCAC News (a website that reports about student athletes at Trinity and other colleges we compete with) posted today (October 30, 2015) an interview with senior Kate Giddens, a double major in Biology and Classics as well as a woman’s volleyball player. You can read all about how she’s combined her interests in all three areas at http://nescac.com/news/2015-16/Friday_Feature/TRI_Giddens.
Celia Schultz, professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan, gave the annual Moore Lecture last week. Her talk, “Must There Be Blood?” focused on the meaning of sacrifice in Roman culture.
Read more about the talk here: http://www.trincoll.edu/NewsEvents/NewsArticles/pages/MooreGreekLectureSchultz2015.aspx.
Archaeologists digging at Pylos, an ancient city on the southwest coast of Greece, have discovered the rich grave of a warrior who was buried at the dawn of European civilization.
He lies with a yardlong bronze sword and a remarkable collection of gold rings, precious jewels and beautifully carved seals. Archaeologists expressed astonishment at the richness of the find and its potential for shedding light on the emergence of the Mycenaean civilization, the lost world of Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus and other heroes described in the epics of Homer.
“Probably not since the 1950s have we found such a rich tomb,” said James C. Wright, the director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Seeing the tomb “was a real highlight of my archaeological career,” said Thomas M. Brogan, the director of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory Study Center for East Crete, noting that “you can count on one hand the number of tombs as wealthy as this one.”
Open the URL for more information!
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/science/a-warriors-grave-at-pylos-greece-could-be-a-gateway-to-civilizations.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=1
Derek Muller, a professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, recently studied the correlation between LSAT and GRE scores and undergraduate majors.
His finding? Classics majors ranked at the very top of majors, with the highest LSAT and GRE scores!
So if you are looking to go to law school, you simply cannot do better than to major in Classics!
For Muller’s report, see his blog at http://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2014/4/the-best-prospective-law-students-read-homer.
Would you like to take a 2-credit archaeological excavation course (CLCV 300) this summer? The link to the Trinity website for the dig is http://www.trincoll.edu/UrbanGlobal/StudyAway/Summer/Pages/Akko-Summer.aspx. The precise fee has not yet been determined, but will probably be around $6000 and includes tuition, room, all meals (unless you choose to eat out occasionally at one of Akko’s many great restaurants), field trips, equipment, supplemental insurance, laundry, sheets, towels, cleaning, and the end-of-season party at local restaurant. We stay at the Israeli Naval Academy in dorm rooms that are air-conditioned quads, each with a private bathroom.
You might also like to look at our photographer’s slideshow from this past summer:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B85EgFpzQNTTSGVCbjVrX1pvNHM/edit?pli=1
Akko — Acre in the Middle Ages — is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the world. It has yielded material dating from the early Bronze Age through Greek and Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages to the present.
2014 dates:
Student arrival date at Nautical Academy: Sunday June 29th (departing from the US on Saturday June 28th) Student departure date from Nautical Academy: Saturday July 26th.
For questions, contact Martha Risser (martha.risser@trincoll.edu)
Susan Bennett graduated from Brown University. Until recently (and it was a secret) she was the voice of Siri, first introduced on Apple’s iPhone 4S.
What did Bennett major in at Brown?
You guessed it — Classics!
In February 1923, Carl Blegen, then secretary of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, dispatched a Valentine to his sweetheart Elizabeth Pierce, who was in Rome.
Blegen had an artist friend render a Mycenaean figure as an expression not only of his love for Elizabeth, but also his ideas that Greek mainland Bronze Age culture should be seen as distinct from the Minoan culture of Krete.
For more about Blegen and Pierce, see the blog of Natalia Volgeikoff-Brogan.
Joe Ricci, who graduated from Trinity in 2008 with a BA in Classics and entered the PhD program in History at Princeton University, has been awarded a Junior Fellowship in Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. The Byzantine Studies program promotes the study of all aspects of Byzantine civilization from the fourth to fifteenth centuries. The fellowship will allow Joe to complete his dissertation, “Nomads in Late Antiquity: Gazing on Rome from the Steppe from Attila to Asparuch.”
Joe writes: “I am very excited to receive a Byzantine Studies Junior Fellowship. The environment, both in terms of the excellent library and the community of scholars at Dumbarton Oaks, will provide me with the perfect opportunity to revise and rewrite several chapters of my dissertation. I hope to complete it and defend in the summer of 2015.”
Congratulations to Joe from all his former teachers and friends at Trinity!
If you’re a Trinity College Classics alum, we’d love to hear what you’ve been up to. Send us an email and we’ll share your accomplishments here on the blog!
Monday, February 10, 6 pm, Rittenburg Lounge, Mather Hall, on the campus of Trinity College.
Alexia Smith is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Archaeology provides an ideal tool for examining the long-term dynamic relationship between people and their environment. This talk presents how archaeologists reconstruct ancient methods of food production and climate change, providing examples from sites in Northern Mesopotamia. Lessons learned from studies of ancient agriculture are applied and used to consider the role that climate change played in the collapse of the Akkadian Empire at the end of the 3rd Millennium B.C.
As always, this AIA lecture is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Wendi Delaney, 860-297-2543.
Following the example of a couple of other small liberal arts colleges, the Trinity Classics Department has moved its Greek 101 class from the fall to the spring semester. The move allowed us to send students who became interested in taking Greek in the fall directly into the first semester, rather than making them wait till the fall of the following year. The result? We now have 14 students taking Greek 101 — including 10 first years and 2 sophomores! — the largest introductory Greek class in years!
Here they are taking their first exam! 
(The rest are sitting at a table to the right.)