专业描述

Welcome to Classical and European Studies. We are a new and vibrant department, research-centered and student friendly. We are home to three programs: Classical Studies, French Studies, and German Studies. Additionally, we host Politics, Law & Social Thought, an interdisciplinary program that involves several other departments across the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences. While each program has its own historical and cultural focus, the four overlap and share common questions. Where does language interface with culture, geography with politics, literature and media with history and theory? How do the aesthetic, social, and political possibilities of the present follow from the events and choices of the past—the Greek polis, the Roman imperium, the scientific revolutions of early modern Europe, and the political and artistic transformations that would define modern France and Germany? Our faculty approach these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. These include, but are not limited to, classical philology, film and media studies, gender studies, literary theory, philosophy (ancient and continental), political theory, and post-colonial studies, as well as social and intellectual history. Our disciplinary range is reflected in conferences we have convened, such as “Terror and Consensus” (1993), “Written Texts and Transformations of Thought and Expression in Classical Greece” (2000), “Changing Perceptions of the Public Sphere” (2005), “Humanism and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century” (2009), “The Place of Politics in German Film” (2010), “Classics Renewed: Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity” (2011), “Dislocating Culture: Narratives and Epistemologies of Displacement” (2011 and 2012), “Citizenship and the Future of the Humanities” (2012), and “Nietzsche and the Ethics of Naturalism“ (2014). In all four of our programs, research and teaching are closely connected. Our students are open to the world and curious about its current state and direction, as well as its past. We encourage students in all of our programs to study abroad—in Athens, Rome, Aix-en-Provence, Leipzig, or Berlin. Whichever program they choose, our students emerge as linguistically proficient critical thinkers who exhibit heightened cross-cultural sensibility and a historically grounded understanding of European culture and its classical past.