Message from the Chair
2007-2008 Academic Year
Welcome to the NU Classics Department Website. Please browse the site for news of our programming and curriculum. Specific pages address the interests of current and prospective undergraduates, doctoral candidates, visitors for events and scholars.
For new visitors to our site, let me offer an overview of our department. Classics at NU comprises a lively group of eighteen multidisciplinary scholars with broad interests who are engaged in a variety of research and teaching projects about Greek and Roman antiquity. Please browse the faculty profiles for details of their specific research areas. The core classics group in 2007-08 includes twelve classicists (tenure-line and lecturer faculty, Mellon post-doctoral fellows, and visitors) and six scholars whose primary appointments are in other disciplines. All these scholars work together to provide a strong, imaginative curriculum, including excellent training in both Greek and Latin.
Our undergraduate majors and minors are intellectually ambitious students who enjoy small classes, strong advising by faculty, and support for extra-curricular activities (e.g., trips to Chicago theaters and museums). The requirements for the major and minor allow students considerable flexibility in the design of their personal programs of study and the opportunity to undertake independent research through enrollment in our Research Seminar for Majors. Our recent graduates are now studying toward doctorates in classics at the finest universities in the US, attending medical school, and pursuing careers in business, the performing arts, and elementary and secondary school teaching.
We are also pleased to announce a new minor in Classical Studies that is open to NU students from all NU Schools who wish to develop a secondary area of specialization in a subfield of classics or classical traditions (e.g., ancient philosophy, Greek or Latin literature, ancient drama and modern performance, ancient politics, Roman history), or to freely explore aspects of Greek and Roman culture as part of a strong undergraduate liberal arts education. Students may complete all the reading for this new minor in translation (no Greek or Latin study required).
Classics at NU often partners with our university’s Classical Traditions Initiative (CTI) to offer a full schedule of programming (lectures, workshops, reading groups, trips) that brings together graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty across departments (e.g., theatre and drama, philosophy, writing arts, comparative literary studies, art history, German, English, anthropology, classics, political theory, medieval studies, communication studies, medical ethics). This programming offers a mix of classics talks, events with cognate fields, and workshops designed to place our understanding of antiquity in provocative juxtaposition with more contemporary sources and issues.
2007-08 events include a series on the themes of symposia and eros in antiquity. In the Fall term (November 13), Amalia Avramidou will discuss the way in which Greek vases depict sympotic scenes. In the Winter, our attention turns to Plato's Symposium, which will be one of the topics explored in a lunchtime discussion by Richard Kraut on March 3, and at a four-speaker conference on March 14 on Plato's moral psychology. Finally, in the Spring term, we look at one of the ways in which these themes are transformed in later antiquity, as Richard Bett, of John Hopkins University, lectures, on May 9, on "Beauty and its Connection with Goodness in the Stoics."
Classics and CTI also collaborate to support several strong graduate programs at NU that offer classics-related pathways of study (for example, comparative literary studies, philosophy, medieval studies, political theory). You can find details on the CTI graduate page and on the Interdisciplinary Cluster Initiative page of The Graduate School.
Please contact us if we can assist you with a particular request. But for now, please browse the site!
All good wishes,
Richard Kraut
Professor of Philosophy and Classics
Interim Chair, Department of Classics
