Phi Beta Kappa hosts antiquities expert April 21 The University of North Dakota chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will host Roger Bagnall, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, at 4 p.m. Monday, April 21, in the North Dakota Museum of Art. Bagnall is part of the visiting scholar program which invites distinguished scholars to visit 100 colleges and universities with chapters of Phi Beta Kappa. The topic for his discussion is "Excavating a Town in an Egyptian Oasis." Dr. Bagnall will describe recent discoveries at Amheida, a site in Dakhla Oasis in the western desert of Egypt with a history stretching from the third millennium BC to the late Roman period. He will describe the interplay of Egyptian, Greek and Roman cultures in artifacts as humble as food remains or as artistic as mythological wall paintings for the late Roman period. Bagnall received his B.A. at Yale University, and his M.A. and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. The principal areas of his research are in the field of papyrology, and the social, economic, and administrative history of Egypt in late antiquity. Publications include: Egypt in Late Antiquity, Demography of Roman Egypt, and Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History. Bagnall was named the first director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University in 2007. He taught at Columbia as a professor of classics and history from 1974 to 2007, and is now professor emeritus; and also served as the curator of the papyrus collection in the Columbia University Libraries. In 2005, Bagnall was the Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkley, and in 2003 received a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Mellon Foundation.