The Department of Classics is devoted to the study of the languages, literature, and cultures of Greece and Rome, focusing on Antiquity but including all periods from the Bronze Age to Modern Greece. This study is important, as the origins of western and much Near Eastern literature, philosophy, art, religion, and social forms lay in the ancient world, making Greece and Rome vital contributors to ongoing discussions of "who we are" in a broader sense. The aim of our scholarship and teaching, however, is not only to document origins but to question the relationship between texts and social practices in both antiquity and modern times as well as to challenge current assumptions. The cultures of Greece and Rome provide us with provocative standpoints from which to understand our own very different world of rapid social and technological change. Conversely, we also recognize that our ways of looking at antiquity are evolving in response to the changes in the world around us.