Upcoming events at Monmouth College

Chorale Trivia Night on Oct. 25; trick-or-treating on campus; hosting Illinois Classical Conference Nov. 1-3

Monmouth, Ill. (10/22/2024) — Halloween happenings abound at Monmouth College

Children looking to hit the jack-o'-lantern jackpot are advised to make a trip to Monmouth College on Halloween.

On Oct. 31, several campus locations will have candy for the costumed kiddos, including several stops along East Broadway, bookended by Dahl Chapel and Auditorium on the Seventh Street corner and Weeks House on the Ninth Street corner. Both locations will welcome trick-or-treaters from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Monmouth's Student Athlete Advisory Committee is in charge of the Dahl Chapel location, which will be staffed by Fighting Scots athletes.

Also along Broadway, Halloween bags can be filled at two sorority houses - Kappa Kappa Gamma and Alpha Xi Delta - as well as three fraternities - Sigma Phi Epsilon, Zeta Beta Tau and Phi Delta Theta. The latter will be set up at Marshall Hall, across Seventh Street from Dahl Chapel.

From 7-9 p.m., the Association for Student Activity Programming and Alpha Psi Omega, the national theatre honor society, will hold a coffeehouse event in Wells Theater, also welcoming trick-or-treaters.

Other non-Broadway locations on campus offering candy include the Pi Beta Phi sorority house, 922 East Euclid Ave.

Monmouth College Chorale to host trivia night on Oct. 25

What is the oldest known musical instrument? Where does singer Peter Gabriel say music comes from?

Those might be two of the questions at the next Chorale Trivia Night at Monmouth College.

The event, which will be held at 7 p.m. Oct. 25 in the Whiteman-McMillan Highlander Room on the upper level of the Stockdale Center, is a fundraiser for the Chorale's annual spring break trip. In March of 2025, the group, which is directed by Monmouth music professor Tim Pahel, will tour the Midwest.

Tickets are available at the door and are $5 for non-students and $3 for students. Teams are for 3-6 players.

The answers to the questions above, by the way, are a vulture-bone flute that is estimated to be 40,000 years old, which was found in a European cave, and "the book of love."

Monmouth College to host Illinois Classical Conference Nov. 1-3

Monmouth College will once again be a hub for the study of ancient Greece and Rome when it hosts the 2024 Illinois Classical Conference annual meeting Nov. 1-3.

A year ago, the college was the site for the national meeting of Eta Sigma Pi, the classics honorary society, and earlier this year Monmouth hosted a two-week summer institute for teachers on the ancient Olympics and life in ancient Olympia.

As part of the Illinois Classical Conference, a public lecture will be presented at 2 p.m. Nov. 2 in the Pattee Auditorium on the lower level of the Center for Science and Business. Titled "A Less Perfect Union: Charioteer Factions and Politics in the Late Roman Empire," the talk will be presented by Sarah Bond, the Erling B. "Jack" Holtsmark Associate Professor in the Classics in the departments of history and classics at the University of Iowa.

Bond's talk is taken from her latest book, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire, set to be released in February by Yale University Press.

Meeting in Monmouth

"We have several Zoom meetings per year, but once a year, we meet in person in the fall, and this is the second time Monmouth has hosted since I've been here," said classics professor Bob Simmons, who joined the faculty in 2014. "But overall, Monmouth is a multi-time host of the meeting. We're expecting more than 40 educators from around the state, plus a few from other states."

One of the papers presented at the conference will be the work of Monmouth College students, and Simmons will also present, discussing the summer institute, which was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"I'll be discussing how we did the institute at Monmouth and how we hope to do it again in 2026," said Simmons, who co-wrote the grant proposal with Nathalie Roy, a middle school teacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who has won that state's Teacher of the Year honor.

"I want these teachers who will be descending upon Monmouth to know what's out there from the NEH and other organizations, and I want to let them know about this specific opportunity at Monmouth," said Simmons. "We drew teachers from all over the nation. If we get accepted to host again in the summer of 2026, these teachers will know what they need to do to apply to what's a very selective process."

Another positive of the conference, said Simmons, is the potential to create connections between the Illinois teachers who'll be attending, and the college-bound students they come into contact with every day.

"If we want Monmouth College to be on the tongues of high school students, it's nice when we can have their teachers on campus," he said. "One never knows where that will lead" when those students make their college decisions.

Bond's Nov. 2 public lecture

The topic of labor unions often leads to the American workforce just before and after the dawn of the 20th century, but Bond's research shows that the dynamic was in place nearly 20 centuries earlier.

"The roots of the medieval guilds and modern labor unions lay in antiquity," she said. "And charioteers were often the union figurehead, guiding both their faction and their fans to political ends. Re-viewing Late Antiquity through the lens of labor organization, strikes, work contracts and - when deemed necessary - coordinated violence, leads us to a different narrative of the 'fall' of Rome, this time from below."

Bond is a regular contributor to the art website Hyperallergic, a columnist at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a section editor at Public Books. She has written for The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Washington Post. Her first book, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professionals in the Roman Mediterranean, was published with the University of Michigan Press in 2016.

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