Tryptich with faculty reading a papyrus, a graduate student excavating a grave, and three students reading Ancient Greek

Department of Classics

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
classics@uc.edu

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Latest News

  • "Princes of Pylos" on display in Kalamata

    Princes of Pylos poster
     
  • 2025 MetaClassics lecture

    2025 MetaClassics lecture flyer

    Please join us for the 2025 MetaClassics lecture, presented by the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center and the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, on Tuesday, March 4, 12:30 PM, at the Taft Research Center!

    This year’s speaker is Professor Kelly Nguyen of UCLA, who will deliver a lecture titled, “What is ‘Classics’ to a Vietnamese Refugee?” 

    If you are interested in attending the lecture virtually, please email caitlin.hines@uc.edu for the registration link.

     

     
  • Anna Conser's approach to ancient music

    Anna Conser's portrait
    Congratulations to Anna Conser who gave a very well-attended talk (A Deadly Marriage Hymn: The Musical Design of Medea Stasimon) at the seminar Approaches to Ancient Music organized by the University of Oxford on Tuesday January 28th!
     
     
     
  • New Issue of the Blegen Bulletin

    Title page of the Blegen Bulletin

    Blegen Bulletin 2024, the newsletter of UC Classics, is available as a pdf here

    In this issue:

    • Daniel Markovich’s vision as head of UC Classics for the department and the discipline
    • The research interests of new faculty members Dylan Kenny and Mathijs Wibier, and the current research projects of Steven Ellis and Marion Kruse
    • Events sponsored by UC Classics including brown bag faculty talks, the Semple Symposium on Stobaeus, a celebration of Peter van Minnen’s career, and much more
    • The move of two more research resources in Aegean prehistory to UC Classics: the Aegean conferences and Aegaeum publications, and the PASP archives, joining Nestor
    • The Rawson Fellowship program and the three Fellows currently resident in Cincinnati: Tom Carpenter, Jan Driessen, and Lynne Lancaster
    • An engaging year of student activities, including an original production of Plautus’ Amphitruo, and the study abroad of Semple Scholars
    • Books, books, and more books, including four Festschriften honoring members of the UC Classics community
    • Brief news and updates about members of the faculty, current students, and alumni—including a profile of Dan Levine (PhD 1980), who was the recipient of the Aristeia Award from the ASCSA.

    Enjoy — and send your own news and updates to Carol Hershenson!

     

Patrick Burns (ISAW) Lecture at Taft Center

Date: 02.20.2025 4:30 pm
Calendar: Public Events
Please note that this lecture will take place at the Taft Center.
 
On Thursday (2/20) at 4:30 pm, Dr. Patrick Burns (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World) will be giving a public lecture at the Taft Center for the Humanities.  His lecture will address how new developments in digital language processing can be applied to Latin corpora (full abstract below).
 
The Digital Afterlife of a Dead Language: Or Recovering 34 Billion(!) Latin Words from AI Training Data
 
Latin has been a perhaps unexpected beneficiary of recently published Large Language Model (LLM) training datasets. For example, an artificial intelligence firm just released a text repository advertising 34 billion Latin tokens—a number over 5,000 times larger than a comprehensive repository of canonically classical Latin like the Perseus...

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MetaClassics Lecture

Date: 03.04.2025 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
Calendar: Public Events

 

MetaClassics 2025 flyer
2025 MetaClassics lecture flyer

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Dana Munteanu: Characters in the EN and the Poet. The case of Neoptolemus.

Date: 03.06.2025 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Calendar: Public Events