Francesca Rochberg, Catherine and William L. Magistretti Distinguished Professor Emerita of Near Eastern Studies in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, has been named as one of the 2023 Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lecturers at UC Berkeley. For more than a century, UC Berkeley’s academic senate has selected distinguished faculty members whose research has changed the trajectory of their disciplines and expanded the global understanding of a subject. The lecture illuminates Berkeley’s core mission to create new knowledge for the public good. The lecture will take place on Monday, February 13, 4pm-5pm at the International House.
Rochberg is an Assyriologist and Historian of Science who focuses on the nature of science in antiquity. Her research materials are the cuneiform sciences, centrally Babylonian astronomy and related astral sciences, and their transmission, transformation and legacy in ancient Greece and the Greco-Roman world. Her lecture for this event is titled “The History and Transmission of a Babylonian Astronomical Idea.”
Rochberg has published a number of books, including Aspects of Babylonian Celestial Divination: The Lunar Eclipse Omens of Enuma Anu Enlil (1987), Babylonian Horoscopes (1998), The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (2004), In the Path of the Moon (2010), and Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science (2016). In 2020 she edited (with Alan C. Bowen) Hellenistic Astronomy: The Science in its Contexts. Most recently, Rochberg received the Francis Bacon Award in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and was visiting professor at CalTech University in Pasadena, CA. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a visiting fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a senior fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Member of the American Philosophical Society.
The 110th Martin Meyerson Lecture will occur on Monday, February 13, 4pm—5pm at the International House on Piedmont Avenue. The event is free and open to the public.
For information, or if you require an accommodation for effective communication or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact the External Relations team at 510.643.1936 or events1@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.