David Jacobson, now in his seventh year in the Classics department, was born and raised in foggy San Francisco. Seeking sunnier shores he migrated south, first to U.C. Santa Cruz, obtaining a B.A. in Classics and History, then to U.C.L.A. for a post-baccalaureate program in Classics. Glutted with sun and smog, and having finally learned that coffee alone has the magical power to lift a fog, he returned to the Bay Area. At Berkeley David has taught Latin, Greek, Greek Civilization, Greek Mythology, and Greek Tragedy. His research is primarily focused on Homer, choral lyric poetry, and Athenian drama, with particular attention paid to issues of gender, space, and performance.

Allison Kirk - AHMA ('The Group')

email: allison-kirk@berkeley.edu

Allison Kirk is a fourth year graduate student in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology here at Berkeley. She received her BA in Ancient Mediterranean Studies from Trinity University in San Antonio. She completed her MA in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology here at Berkeley with a thesis on images of altars on administrative records from the Persian Empire. For the past two years she has been a PhD student here. Allison's fields of study are: Archaic and Classical Greek Sanctuaries, the Mycenaean Palaces and their Mediterranean Context, and Historiography of Archaic Greece. In all these fields her focus is on archaeological evidence. She has excavated at the Greek Sanctuary of Despotiko, the Athenian Agora, Mycenae, and will be a part of Berkeley's excavations at Nemea this summer.

Michael Laughy - AHMA ('The Group')

email: laughy@agathe.gr

Michael H. Laughy, Jr. holds a BA from the University of New Hampshire in Philosophy, Anthropology, and Latin, and an MA in Classics from the Washington University in St. Louis. He is a currently a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, “Ritual and Authority in Early Athens”, focuses upon religious authority and agency from the Iron Age through the Early Classical period.
Michael has worked as a field archaeologist since 1992, working first on historic and prehistoric sites in New Hampshire. He has been excavating in Greece since 1997, including over ten years at the Athenian Agora Excavations, where he currently serves as a field supervisor. He has also excavated Ancient Corinth and Phylakopi on the island of Milos.
Michael is originally from New Hampshire. As a military brat, he lived in Turkey for two years, as well as ten different states, before returning to New Hampshire for high school and college. In past lives he has been a barista, short order cook, waiter, grocery bagger, newspaper deliverer, and spent a summer as a truck driver in Wichita, Kansas. In 1993, he co-founded a house painting and home repair business, which he operated for several years before moving on to graduate school. Michael is also a musician, who in his spare time has been the drummer in a number of post-punk bands in New England, Missouri, and the S.F. Bay Area.
Michael and his wife, Amber, have a son, Harry, who was born in Athens, Greece this past August. Harry has just begun laughing; whether he is laughing with or at his parents is not known at this time, though his father has his suspicions.

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Tim Pepper - Classics

email: twp@berkeley.edu

Tim is a graduate student in the Classics Dept., where he is writing a dissertation on the cultural expression of ambition in the early-to-mid 3rd century BCE Mediterranean. His other academic interests include the study of ancient papyri and the interactions of Roman and Greek cultures in Roman Comedy. He spent two seasons excavating with an Italian team in Dime, Egypt, where he assisted with the excavation of the sacred precinct and the conservation of papyri found there. Prior to Berkeley, Tim received his A.B. from Harvard University, then spent a year pursuing a research project in Hungary and Romania, where the highlight was meeting people ranging from traditional Transylvanian villagers to the heir to the Hapsburg throne and the lowlight was having his (American) bank fail partway through and being forced to survive for four months on the money in his pocket.

 

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Maria Schulman - Classics

email: maria@berkeley.edu

Maria...

 

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Randy Souza - AHMA ('The Group')

email: randallsouza@berkeley.edu

Randall Souza (Randy) is a third-year Ph.D. student in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology. He studied Classics at Amherst College in his beautiful home state of Massachusetts, and received an M.A. at Berkeley last spring, writing a thesis on the formation of community in western Sicily in the third century BCE. He has worked on many sites throughout the Mediterranean, most recently at Sardis in Turkey. His interests include community and groups, style and practice, and capital, all of which he likes to explore through archaeology.

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Antonia Young - Art History

email: antyoung@berkeley.edu

Antonia Young is a graduate student in the History of Art. She
received her M.A. in Latin from the Berkeley Classics department and her
B.A. in Classics from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Her interests
include ancient Roman art (in particular Roman wall painting), Latin
literature, and the social and cultural history of ancient Rome. She's
taught many courses at Berkeley including Latin language and both Greek
and Roman civilization.

Mailing address: Dept. of Classics, 7303 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720