The University of Cincinnati Classics Department is one of the most active and largest centers for the study of the Greek and Roman Antiquity in the United States. Seventeen full-time faculty members, four research associates, and two Rawson Visiting Scholars specialize in Classical philology, ancient history, and archaeology, including Greek prehistory.
About thirty-five graduate students are in residence at any given time, while others spend a year or more abroad to study or conduct research. In the heart of the Department is the recently renovated Burnam Classical Library, the world's most comprehensive library for advanced research in Classics (with some 300,000 volumes). The department's Tytus Fellowships bring an additional nine to twelve researchers to the Department each year, in addition to many shorter-term visitors. About thirty undergraduate majors profit from the vibrant scholarly community, while an Outreach Program takes faculty and graduate students to more than 100 area schools each year. The department's lecture series, including those sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, attract audiences from the larger academic and lay community in the Cincinnati area. The Department edits Nestor, a bibliographic resource for Aegean Prehistory, and sponsors continuing series of publications for Pylos, Keos, and Troy. Faculty organize or participate in archaeological fieldwork in Greece at Pylos, Knossos, Isthmia, Anavlochos and the Athenian Agora, in Italy at Pompeii and Tharros in Sardinia, in Turkey at Gordion, and in Israel at Caesarea Maritima.
The Cincinnati Difference
What will you find in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati and nowhere else?
- Six or seven years of guaranteed funding, at a level well above subsistence in low-cost Cincinnati
- Personalized professional development and mentorship
- In-person and online teaching experience suited to your needs and development
- Non-teaching service assignments in the first two years, and a dissertation year at the end
- A carefully designed and flexible ancient languages curriculum, allowing either fast passage or up to four years for mastery
- The world-renowned John Miller Burnam Classics Library, with over 300,000 monographs and 2,000 active periodical subscriptions
- The award-winning Outreach Program, now in its second decade
- The Tytus Scholars program, hosting 9 new visiting Classics scholars from around the world every year
- Excavation opportunities under Cincinnati permits in Greece and Italy
Learn more about our Faculty, Ph.D. and MA tracks in Ancient History, Bronze Age and Classical Archaeology, and Greek and Latin Philology. You may also browse our graduate course cycles, and check out detailed policy about our graduate programs in our Graduate Handbook. See more here about the Burnam Library, the Tytus Fellows program, and our Outreach program.
Contact
Department of Classics
410 Blegen Library
PO Box 210226
Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0226
Phone | (513) 556-3050
Fax | (513) 556-4366
Latest News
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Kathleen Kidder Wins the Mary White Prize
Our alumna Kathleen Kidder (University of Houston) received the Mary White Prize for Best Article in Phoenix, the journal of the Classical Association of Canada, for her recently published article on “‘Like a Mole (?)’: Proteus’ Subterranean Journey (Alex.118–127) and the Poetics of Hidden Space,” Phoenix 75.3–4: 181-202.
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Lyvia Morgan Wins the 2024 James R. Wiseman Book Award
Morgan 2020, p. 228, fig. 7.1A. Visualization of Town by a River. Scale 1:3. Watercolor L. Morgan. We are pleased to share that Lyvia Morgan has been awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s 2024 James R. Wiseman Book Award. The Wiseman award honors an academic book on an archaeological topic from the past four years. Morgan’s book, Keos XI: Wall Paintings and Social Context. The Northest Bastion at Ayia Irini, published by INSTAP Press in 2020, considers the miniature frescos from the department’s excavations. The volume is gorgeously illustrated and includes some of Morgan’s own watercolors.
UC Classics excavated Ayia Irini, Keos, Greece from 1960-1972 under the direction of John (Jack) Caskey. His and subsequent work revealed Ayia Irini to be a town with a long history of settlement from the late Neolithic to the Classical period. After Caskey’s death in 1981, Elizabeth Schofield (Ph.D. University of Cincinnati Classics Department) took over the direction of the study and publication of the material. Schofield assigned Morgan publication of the Bronze Age wall paintings from the Northeast Bastion; the results of Morgan’s study, which she began in the 1980s, are presented in this book, in which she also contextualizes the paintings within the wide context of the Aegean world.
Be sure to check out the publication, available on Jstor, and please join us in congratulating Dr. Lyvia Morgan! -
New Ph.Ds in 2023: Cecilia Cozzi
In the second of our recent graduates series, we honor Dr. Cecilia Cozzi. In 2017, Cecilia started the PhD program. She notes that, “it has been an incredible journey. At Cincinnati, I have learned the importance of having a multidisciplinary approach for the development of research questions and ideas. This mindset helped me immensely for the development of my PhD thesis, which employed modern psychoanalytic categories to investigate the negotiation of inheritance between fathers and sons on the Tragic stage.”
Cecilia also tested the benefits of multidisciplinarity through her involvement in the UC Classics Outreach Program, where we experimented with a new kind of presentations, combining classical contents with analysis of operatic arias and musical performances.
Cecilia is now continuing on this path in her appointment as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas. While teaching both language and culture classes, she is also venturing in the creation of a series of events for the general public: panels of scholars from across different departments at KU alternate with live performances of students of the Theater and Music departments. The discussion of ancient dramatic texts becomes a starting point for broader discussions on the role of music, music therapy and its emotional implications. Mindful of her great experiences with the Study Collection, she remarks that “I have also insisted on the creation of specific class activities at the Wilcox Classical Museum and Spencer Art Museum, so that students can enjoy a less frontal and more experiential approach to Classical Art and witness its reception beyond the chronological scope of our discipline.”
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Cecilia Cozzi!
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New Ph.Ds in 2023: Sarah Wenner
UC's Classics Department has had four dissertation defenses so far in 2023: Sarah Wenner, Cecillia Cozzi, Duccio Guasti, and Andy Lund. These short news articles over the following weeks will describe their dissertation work and what they've been doing since their defense.
Sarah Wenner defended her dissertation, titled "(Re) Making a Roman City: Refuse, Recycling, and Renovation Across Empire," on January 13, 2023. Under the direction of Prof. Steven Ellis (committee members: Prof. Barbara Burrell and Prof. Jack Davis), her dissertation considered the construction of Roman cities from ca. 500 BCE - 500 CE through one of the most voluminous urban components: refuse. Wenner examined patterns of waste recycling at three Roman cities, assessing one type of excavated material culture at each site (ceramics at Petra; animal bones at Pompeii; and bulk finds at Segedunum, UK), arguing that both individuals and city administrations struggled to maintain their control of the urban resource, especially during periods of population growth.
After her defense, Wenner accepted a National Endowment for the Humanities post-doctoral fellowship to begin work on her first book, tentatively titled "As Above, So Below: Refuse and the Making of Petra." During her four months in Jordan, she analyzed hundreds of thousands of sherds from previous excavations while living at the American Center of Research in Amman, assisted in the running of the Garden and Pool Complex field school in Petra, and participated in a new field project at Khirbet edh-Khalde, just outside of Aqaba in southern Jordan.
Back in Cincinnati, Wenner has accepted a position at the Cincinnati Art Museum, where she is a research fellow in Ancient Mediterranean and Ancient Middle Eastern Art. She is also teaching two classes for the Classics department: Greek Art and Archaeology and Classics and Cinema. She says of her time at UC Classics, "When I began my PhD work in 2015, I had no idea how many worlds the department would open for me. My advisor, Steven Ellis, and all of the faculty have helped me expand my research in new and exciting ways; have encouraged me to grow as an expert in Nabataean and Roman ceramics; gave me the teaching experience I wanted and allowed me to flourish as a creative instructor; and helped me find opportunities in the museum field." Please join us in congratulating Dr. Sarah Wenner!