Fall 2025 – Spring 2026 lecture season
Stay informed about local events by becoming a member of the Archaeological Institute of America and selecting Western Massachusetts as your local society. For a complete list of Classics and Archaeology lectures in the Five Colleges, see the Amherst College Classics Lecture Schedule. All lectures are free and open to the public.
Dr. Alex Moskowitz
Breaking Bronze for Demeter: Indigenous Religion and the Making of Greek Sicily
Tuesday, March 24, 2026
5:30pm
Mt. Holyoke College
Skinner Hall, Room 216
Alex Moskowitz is a classical archaeologist and historian interested in rewriting conventional narratives of colonization in the Archaic Mediterranean through the lens of the experiences of communities indigenous to the sites subject to Greek and Phoenician settlement. His current research focuses on Sicily and explores the development of metallurgical knowledge and craft communities throughout the first half of the first millennium BCE. Alex received a PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan. Before that, he completed an MA at the University of Georgia and a BA at Swarthmore College. Alex is an active field archaeologist who has conducted fieldwork with various projects in Greece, Italy, and Kosova. He is a long-time staff member of the American Excavations at Morgantina, where he co-directs the Khora of Archaic Morgantina Project and supervises fieldwork for the Agora Valley Project. He is excited to talk with students interested in learning about archaeology and participating in archaeological field projects.
This year’s Ellen and Charles S. La Follette Lecture is sponsored by the Western Massachusetts Society of the AIA and the Mt. Holyoke College Department of Classics and Italian.
Dr. Yannis Hamilakis
32nd Annual Phyllis Williams Lehmann Lecture
Saturday, April 18, 2026
11:00am
Smith College
Dr. Hamilakis is the Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology and Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Brown University. He is an archaeologist, writer, and exhibition curator, and a Guggenheim Fellow (Class of 2025). His main research and teaching interests are the socio-politics of the past, the body and bodily senses, the archaeology of eating and drinking, human-animal relationships, the ontology and materiality of photography, archaeology and nationalism, archaeological ethnography, the archaeology of contemporary migration, and critical pedagogy in archaeology. His main geographical research focus has been Greece and the Aegean, and although much of his fieldwork is to do with the prehistoric (Neolithic and Bronze Age) Aegean, he is equally interested in the archaeology of the contemporary. In fact, many of his projects are multi-temporal. Since 2010, he has co-directed the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project in central Greece, and since 2016 he has directed a field project on the archaeology of contemporary migration on Lesvos.
Western Massachusetts Society of the AIA 