The Department of Classics continues a long Carolina tradition of offering undergraduates and graduate students access to research by world-class faculty on many fascinating aspects of the ancient Greek, Roman, and broader Mediterranean worlds. We study, write about, and teach the language, literature, history, art, and archaeology of the Greek and Roman world and its relevance to today. Classics is inherently multidisciplinary, drawing on various forms of evidence and modes of interpretation in order to understand the past, and to explore how later periods, including our own, have found classical antiquity meaningful, or in some cases have misused the classical tradition in ways we must now study with an unsparing eye.

Current graduate research and teaching include Homeric epic; Aegean prehistory and protohistory; Archaic poetry and Greek drama; performance; Greek topography and mortuary archaeology; Greek and Roman historiography; women and gender studies; Hellenistic and Roman Near East and Egypt; Hellenistic and Roman art; religion, sacrifice, magic, and the underworld; Roman comedy and satire; Hellenistic, Republican and Augustan poetry; the Second Sophistic; paleography and Medieval Latin; and the reception of the classical world. Current archaeological fieldwork includes the French Mission to the Eastern Desert in Egypt and the Azoria Project on Crete.

Our five undergraduate majors are Greek, Latin, Combined Greek and Latin, Classical Civilization, and Classical Archaeology. We offer courses in Greek and Latin from the beginning to the advanced levels, and a broad range of courses in which all readings are in English, many of which are popular with both majors and non-majors. Many of our students study abroad; many combine a major in classics with a double-major in another field. Some of our graduates go on to successful graduate study in classics or classical archaeology or related fields such as anthropology, religious studies, and ancient history, while others pursue a variety of careers in fields such as law, medicine, media, business, science and technology, many after degrees in graduate or professional schools. We believe both that the study of the classical world continues to be valuable in and of itself, and also that training in classics provides skills and perspectives that are useful in any field.