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A generation ago Louise Taft Semple established an endowment in the Classics department “to make vital and constructive in the civilization of our country the spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic inheritance we have received from Greece and Rome.” Her endowment has enabled us to create an interdisciplinary program internationally recognized for both teaching and research. Classics at the University of Cincinnati is broadly based on the history, literature, and archaeology of the Greek and Roman world, and we strive to achieve and maintain excellence in each of these areas. The endowment furnished by the Louise Taft Semple Fund has enabled us to develop the best Classical library in the United States, and one of the best in the world. All of our goals and achievements are congruent with the University’s mission statement: to provide the highest quality learning environment, world-renowned scholarship and innovation, and to serve as a model for freedom of intellectual exchange.
The greatest strength of the department lies in its interdisciplinary program. With roots in European intellectual history and enriched by modern theoretical perspectives, our department offers an integrated approach to the linguistic, literary, and material culture of the ancient Mediterranean world. This ideal of Altertumswissenschaft is frequently invoked but the University of Cincinnati program, which requires students to be fully familiar with archaeology, history, and philology, is unique in North America. The heart of the department is the Burnam Classics library. This library has one of the best Classics collections in the world, and the unification of the library with faculty offices and classrooms has allowed us to construct an energetic and interactive program that is currently one of the most prominent and successful in the United States. The desire to share the strength of the Classics Library with colleagues beyond Cincinnati prompted the recent establishment of two new programs that bring scholars here year-round: the Margo Tytus Visiting Scholars Program and the Summer Residency Program, both of which select from applications around the world to add visiting scholars-in-residence to the Cincinnati community.
The Archaeology program is also one of the most vibrant in the country, with field projects in Albania, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Turkey, involving international teams of scholars. We provide a broader range of fieldwork experience than is available at any other graduate institution in the United States. Our departmental Semple Symposia (recent subjects include Feminism and the Classics, the Aegean and the Orient in the Second Millennium B.C., Plato as Author, Posidippus, and Constructing Literacy Among the Greeks and Romans) have consistently attracted groups of international scholars to UC, and the edited volumes of the conference proceedings have set new standards in interdisciplinary research. We hosted the third Papyrological Summer Institute in 2005, attracting scholars and students from around the world.
Department
of Classics | University of Cincinnati | PO Box 210226 | Cincinnati OH | 45221-0226
| Phone: (513) 556-3050 | Fax: (513) 556-4366 | program.coordinator@classics.uc.edu