Ashley Simone Selected for Presidential Teaching Award

The Department of Classics is proud to announce that recent Ph.D. graduate Ashley Simone was selected as a recipient of the 2019-2020 Presidential Teaching Award. The Department extends its sincere congratulations to Ashley on this very well-deserved recognition.

The Presidential Teaching Awards were established in 1996 as a way to honor the University’s best teachers. They are conferred based on the original criteria for the awards for faculty and graduate student instructors. To receive this award is a great honor, as it demonstrates commitment to excellent and often innovative teaching as recognized by the entire Columbia community

2020-2021 Year at a Glance

As announced by the President of Columbia University in April 2020, the 2020-2021 academic year will be comprised of three semesters:  Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Summer 2021. The Department of Classics will offer courses for undergraduate and graduate students in each of these terms.

2020-2021 Department of Classics undergraduate courses are posted here.

2020-2021 Department of Classics graduate courses are posted here.

These pages provides an overview of our course offerings for all three terms, to help students as they make decisions and plans for the academic year ahead. Please note that this schedule may be subject to change, and students are encouraged not only to revisit this page but also to confirm the course listings in the online Directory of Courses and Vergil, where course descriptions and class meeting times will be posted. 

Black Lives Matter Statement

Black Lives Matter. The Department of Classics at Columbia University wishes to issue this statement of solidarity, although we recognize that simply printing such words—as true and heartfelt as they are (tragically) necessary—comes close to repeating the hollow adage of “thoughts and prayers”. We are currently working to develop and implement a program of substantive curricular and institutional reform, addressing race and racism, and involving immediate and future action.

New SNFPHI Summer Grants in Public Humanities

Applications for The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) summer grants in public humanities are now being accepted. Application materials and further details can be found here.

CANCELLED: Barnard/Columbia Ancient Drama Group performs Euripides’ Andromache

POSTPONED: Conference: War and Peace in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East

Sophomore Helen Ruger wins prize at Tennessee Undergraduate Classics Research Conference

Sophomore and Laidlaw Scholar Helen Ruger was awarded the Bettye Beaumont Prize for Best Paper at the Tennessee Undergraduate Classics Research Conference at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville on February 22nd, 2020. Helen delivered a paper titled "Graceful Giving: The Role of the Female in Seneca’s De Beneficiis." The Department of Classics congratulates Helen on her achievement.

Helen Ruger with Dr. Justin Arft

Classics and the Public: A Conversation with Demosthenes Papamarkos

Marcus Folch Awarded Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities

The Department of Classics is delighted to announce that Professor Marcus Folch has been selected as a recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his project, “A Cultural History of Incarceration and the Prison in Greece and Rome.” This is the only award made by the NEH for a Classics-related project this year. During 2020-21 Professor Folch will be researching and writing a book on the social and political history of prisons in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Congratulations to Professor Folch! Click here for the official press release.

Public letter on formal affiliation with the Paideia Institute

THREE SUMMERS by Margarita Liberaki, translated by Prof. Karen Van Dyck

An excerpt from Professor Karen Van Dyck’s introduction to the new edition of her translation of Margarita Liberaki's novel Three Summers has been published in the Paris Review blog.

Karen Van Dyck is the Kimon A. Doukas Professor of Modern Greek Literature.

Simone Oppen (Ph.D. '19) Appointed Lecturer in Classics at Dartmouth College

Simone Oppen has been appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Classics at Dartmouth College from 2019 to 2021. Simone is thrilled to return to teaching Classical Mythology and Latin (among other courses) after years working on her PhD thesis, Comparative perspectives on Persian interactions with Greek sanctuaries during the Greco-Persian Wars (co-supervised by Elizabeth Irwin and John Ma, degree conferred in 2019). She is especially grateful for the support of the Columbia Classics faculty and larger community in getting her to this point and looks forward to growing as a teacher and scholar in Hanover!

Undergraduate Honors and Prizes

The Classics Department congratulates its graduating seniors and is delighted to announce the following Honors and prizes:

DEPARTMENTAL HONORS
Lauren Nguyen

DOUGLAS GARDNER CAVERLY PRIZE
Lauren Nguyen

ERNEST STADLER PRIZE 
Margaret Corn and Hannah Loughlin

BENJAMIN F. ROMAINE PRIZE 
Peter Rachofsky

EARLE PRIZE
William Steere and Andrew Hauser

as well as

 New York Classical Club Recitation contest in Latin, 3rd Prize
Uwade Akhere

 Optime fecistis!

Breaking News: Greece, Turkey, and the Media in the New Political Landscape, May 3-4, 2019

For more information, visit: https://breakingnews.college.columbia.edu/

2019 Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Production of “Herakles" a Triumph (Complete With Aulos)

The Department of Classics extends its congratulations to the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group, whose 2019 production of Herkales has been hailed as, “[…] something truly special — even beyond the obvious specialness that BCAD treats its audience to every year by performing classical plays in their original languages at such a remarkably high level — and the vision of the director, Caleb Simone, is to thank for bringing this year’s production together in such an innovative and compelling fashion.” Read the entire review, via Medium, here.

Via The New York Review of Books: “‘Nobody has ever made head or tail of Greek music, and nobody ever will,’ said the musicologist Wilfrid Perrett in 1932, quoting a classicist friend. ‘That way madness lies.’ In a sense this last statement was on the mark, for it was the “piping” of Madness, the malign deity of Euripides’s Herakles, that BCAD’s director and composers set out to replicate. Thanks to their efforts, a handful of lucky New Yorkers witnessed something remarkable this month: the awakening of a theatrical tradition that has lain dormant for more than two millennia.”

View a video of the production here.

Photo credit: Pamela Sisson

Medea on Trial: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood and Lisa Dwan

Join the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality on Thursday, March 28th, for Medea on Trial: A Conversation with Margaret Atwood and Lisa Dwan. The discussion will explore topics of feminism, symbolism, and justice, and will take place at 6pm at The Forum. 

RSVP is required to attend. 

To RSVP, please click here.

Additional information can be found on the IRWGS event page.

Karen Van Dyck will give a lecture at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris

Increasingly literature asks how to translate the foreign accents and multilingual idioms of the migrant. Two contemporary Greek novels–one about Greeks in the United States, the other about Greek Albanians in Greece–address this question by developing translingual practices that are themselves translational. Using hybrid creoles that blend languages through transliteration and homophony, these novels imagine translation solutions that challenge the hegemony of standardized national languages. The American case foregrounds the visual impenetrability of the new alphabet, while the Balkan case treats sound as a permeable means of encompassing ethnic differences. How might attention to translational poetics in the source text enable translators to be more experimental by exposing the instability and ideological import of the translating language? How might comparative studies of translingualism in literature and literary translation offer new categories for understanding migration? Van Dyck presents her work, with a response by Dimitris Christopoulos, President, International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). Mark Mazower introducing.

The conference will be held Wednesday, March 20th, from 7-9 PM CET. Tickets can be found here.

Lauren Nguyen Receives Pearson Fellowship

The Department of Classics is very pleased to announce that Classics Major Lauren Nguyen (Columbia ‘19) is the winner of the 2019-20 Lionel Pearson Fellowship awarded by the Society for Classical Studies. Lauren will use the Fellowship to earn an M.St. degree at the University of Oxford. We offer Ms. Nguyen congratulations on this accomplishment.

Professor Karen Van Dyck, 2018-19 Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination

Professor Karen Van Dyck is a 2018-19 fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which opened its doors in Paris in September 2018. Its purpose is to question the established ways in which knowledge is defined, produced, and taught.  More information about the CII&I and the 2018-19 Fellows can be found here.

Professor Van Dyck is pictured here, to the left of President Bollinger, at the CII&I inaugural event in Paris, January 2019.

Katharina Volk Receives Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities

We're delighted to report that Prof. Katharina Volk is the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to be held in 2019-20. Katharina will be working on her project "The Politics of Knowledge in Late Republican Rome," a monograph on the intellectual history of the late Republic, which examines the intersections of scholarship, philosophy, and politics in this turbulent period. Katharina is thrilled about the award and looking forward to spending more quality time with her friends Cicero, Varro, and Nigidius Figulus.