Paul Hagstrom

Tue Apr 13, 7pm, CAS 537C (Geddes Viewing Room). The ancient Maya civilization of Central America left behind an intricate and mysterious hieroglyphic script, carved on monuments, painted on pottery, and drawn in handmade bark-paper books. For centuries, scholars considered it too complex ever to understand–until recently, when an ingenious series of breakthroughs finally cracked the code and unleashed a torrent of new insights into the Mayas’ turbulent past.

Tue Apr 27, 7pm, CAS 537C (Geddes Viewing Room). One summer day in 1798, a naked boy eleven or twelve years of age is found in a forest in the rural district of Aveyron in southern France. Living like a wild animal and unable to speak or understand language, the child has apparently grown up in solitude in the forest since an early age. He is brought to Paris, where Dr. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard takes custody of the boy, whom he eventually names Victor, and removes him to his house on the outskirts of Paris. There, under the patient tutelage of the doctor and his housekeeper (Françoise Seigner), Victor gradually becomes socialized and acquires the rudiments of language.

Tue Mar 23, 7pm, CAS 537C (Geddes Viewing Room). How Jean-François Champollion used the Rosetta Stone to unlock the mysteries of the lost civilisation of Ancient Egypt which had been closed off to Europeans for centuries prior to the invasion of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. The stone, discovered by the French in 1799, had been created as a work of propaganda by the Greek speaking Pharaoh Ptolemy V to establish his place in Egyptian cosmology and flashbacks are included to explain this belief system.

Tue Apr 20, 7pm, CAS 537C (Geddes Viewing Room). David and Greg are “The Linguists,” who document languages on the verge of extinction. In the rugged landscapes of Siberia, India, and Bolivia, their resolve is tested by institutionalized racism and violent economic unrest.