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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.

In both the teaching of its courses and in research, the Department is fundamentally interdisciplinary. The faculty unite Greek and Latin philology with perspectives informed by a diversity of theoretical disciplines that are central to debates taking place in the humanities and the social sciences across Departments and Centers. For example, members of our faculty bring comparative methodologies and cultural studies to the understanding of ancient religions; practice theoretically-informed readings of ancient literature and culture; participate in broader discussions of gender in antiquity and comparative folklore; and trace the reception of classical culture in the Middle Ages, Byzantium, and Modern Greece. We are interested in the history of classical studies as an aspect of modern thought and in asking why scholarship is done in the ways that it is. Our affiliated faculty contribute courses and expertise from other fields, including Philosophy, History, Art History, and Linguistics.

The strengths of the Department lie especially in the following fields: (a) ancient religion and myth down to the Middle Ages; (b) literary critical readings of antiquity from theoretical perspectives that include psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and reception theory; (c) epigraphy and Latin paleography, advanced also by the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies; (d) the diachronic Greek tradition, ranging from the Bronze Age to Byzantium and Modern Greece. It is one of few Departments that host a Modern Greek Program, which offers courses in language, literature, and contemporary culture, including the Greek-American Diaspora.

Faculty Publications

Acosta-Hughes, Benjamin

The Door Ajar book cover

Brill's Companion to Callimachus

Callimachus in Context


Anagnostou, Yiorgos

«Λόγοι Χ Επαφής, Επιστολές εξ Αμερικής»

 

YA book cover

 

Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio University Press, 2009)

 

Batstone, William

Sallus

Caesar

Defining Gender and Genre in Latin Literature

Coulson, Frank

Ovid in the Middle Ages

Incipitarium Ovidianum

Fletcher, Richard

Apuleius' Platonism Book cover


Fullerton, Mark

Greek Sculpture Fullerton

Ancient Art and its Historiography

Greek Art


Graf, Fritz

Ritual Texts for the Afterlife

Kleine Schriften V Mythica, Ritualia, Religiosa 2

Apollo


Hawkins, Tom

Iambic Poetics in the Roman Empire

     

Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire

 

Heiden, Bruce

Homer

Tragic Rhetoric


Johnston, Sarah Iles

Ritual Texts for the Afterlife

 

Ancient Greek Divination

Restless Dead


Jusdanis, Gregory

 

A Tremendous Thing

 

Fiction Agonistes

The Necessary Nation


Kaldellis, Anthony

 

The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (Kaldellis)

    

A New Herodotos Laonikos Chalkokondyles on the Ottoman Empire, the Fall of Byzantium, and the Emergence of the West (Kaldellis)

    

Ethnography After Antiquity Foreign Lands and Peoples in Byzantine Literature


López Ruiz, Carolina

 

(with S. Celestino Pérez) Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia. Oxford University Press, 2016.

     

Gods, Heroes, and Monsters

 

When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East (Harvard University Press, 2010)


Munteanu, Dana L.

Sintaxa Latina

 

Emotion, Genre and Gender in Classical Antiquity (London, Bristol Classical Press)

Tragic Pathos. Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press)