Please note: our department endorses the activist agenda of Black Lives Matter. The study of ancient Africa matters, as do the contributions of individuals of color to the ancient world generally. The hiring of a diverse faculty and the training of a diverse student body are vital for the intellectual well-being of Classics and Ancient Studies, and we are committed to working to diversify our field, department, course offerings, and syllabi. Black lives have not always mattered in our disciplines. We acknowledge this and vow to both continue and to amplify efforts to make the study of the ancient world more equitable, accessible, and inclusive at Barnard and at Columbia.
The department offers two majors. The majors in Classics (Greek, Latin, or Classics) center on work in the original languages, whereas the major in Ancient Studies has an interdisciplinary focus. All members of the department are available for major advising and students ideally choose an advisor who can help them develop their required senior essays.
Read more about our different majors, minors, and current classes here
Students may fulfill their language requirement at Barnard and have it count towards the Classics and Ancient Studies degree by taking a year's worth (or one intensive class) of Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, or Aramaic.
Our majors graduate well prepared for graduate careers in Classics, Egyptology, and related academic fields such as museum work (Andrea Myers Achi, pictured above, is an Assistant Curator of Medieval Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), history, philosophy, archaeology, art history or comparative literature. They also enter successful careers in secondary school teaching, arts administration, as well as law, medicine and biological sciences, business, politics, public service in both the government and non-profit sectors, journalism and creative writing, publishing, library science, and the arts (especially theater, film and dance).
The Classics Department is the beneficiary of the Matthew Alan Kramer Fund, whose principal purpose is to support the production of plays in Ancient Greek or Latin. Students of the department have produced Antigone, Medea, Alcestis, Persians, Eumenides, Cyclops, Electra, Clouds, Trojan Women, Rudens, Helen, Trachiniae, Bacchae, Hippolytus, Heracles, Birds, and Persa, which have provided an exciting and different learning experience for the participants.
Every effort is made to introduce students to considerable resources for the study and influence of the Classics in New York City, including plays, films, and museum and gallery visits.
Our students are involved in an ongoing project to compile and annotate particularly interesting texts, media, and scholarship relevant to the study of race and ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean world. The resources are organized along methodological lines, and the site serves as a broad and productive entry for individuals interested in race, ethnicity, and multiculturalism in antiquity.
This website is an ongoing project spearheaded by Barnard and Columbia students interested in the study of the ancient world and in feminist archaeology. Its focus is methodological and asks what various analytical techniques can tell us about societal constructions of gender in the past.
Congratulations to Brit Zak ’21 (double major in Classics and Jewish Studies) for receiving The Ingeborg, Tamara, and Yonina Rennert Prize in Jewish Women’s Studies for her senior thesis, "Exegesis in Translation: Sicubi dubitas, Hebraeos interroga.” In this thesis Brit investigated Jerome’s translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin and the extent to which Jerome used differences between Hebrew and Latin pronoun systems to weave in early Christian and/or Jewish exegetical material.
