Welcome to the Department of Classics!
The Department of Classics invites students to share in the study of the languages, literatures, and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome and the civilizations they helped to shape. We offer several undergraduate majors and minors, including an honors option, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. Areas of strength include Greek and Latin literature and social, political, architectural, and intellectual history. Collectively, we emphasize the long and complex story of how diverse communities of the Mediterranean basin, western Eurasia, and beyond have engaged with classical culture and thought from antiquity through the Middle Ages, the early modern period, and up to the present day. Because we are a small and collegial department, students have the opportunity to work closely with distinguished faculty and to develop individualized, and often interdisciplinary, curricular paths fitted to their own interests and experience.
Nico Dogaer is the author of Industry, Trade and the State in Ptolemaic Egypt (Cambridge University Press), which provides a reassessment of Ptolemaic state intervention in industry and trade, an issue central to the economic and political history of Hellenistic Egypt. Based on a full survey of Greek and Demotic Egyptian sources, and drawing on theoretical perspectives, it challenges the prevailing interpretation of ‘state monopolies. Nico Dogaer’s research extends from fiscal reform in the Persian Empire and the Hellenistic world to institutional change and its effects in Roman Egypt.
Argead Macedon and the Zhou state of Qin had a uniquely parallel historical experience. Emerging from being fringe states to producing Alexander the Great and the First Emperor of China, then rapidly collapsing into periods of interstate violence, the mirrored trajectories of these two polities offers and ideal case study for comparative history. In this talk, these polities will be compared in a causal narrative analysis from their earliest origins through to the reins of Alexander the Great and the First Emperor, with brief remarks on the collapse that followed them. By comparing them this way, elements of Greek and Zhou cultures that often go underapprecaited as causal factors in history are clearly highlighted.
Contact Us
Location
The Department of Classics is located in PED 130 on the University Park Campus. Our front door is located on the backside (southeast) of the physical education building, opposite of ADM (Bovard) and Associates Park. 3560 Watt Way, PED 130, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0652