Classical Studies offers the opportunity to immerse yourself in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome. Whether your interests lie in the people, their art, literature, or history, if you want to learn more about the great classical forerunners of western culture, our department has much to offer.
Here you will find some of the most interesting, unusual, and significant course material for an understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world as a parent of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the modern western world.
Whether you want to major, minor, take some electives, or are pursuing a master's degree in Classical Studies, we welcome you and will endeavour to make the classical past alive and significant for you.
News
Bel Cairns
Congratulations to Bel Cairns, winner of the 2024 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Undergraduate Paper Award in the Course Paper category for their Anth 221/GSJ 221 paper: "Cis is a Slur": Twitter Takes on Performative Language Ideology
Congratulations to our own Dr. Vester for winning the The Elaine Fantham Award in Public Engagement
Congratulations to Dr. Christina Vester and Dr. Pauline Ripat (University of Winnipeg in winning the The Elaine Fantham Award in Public Engagement. The Award is given out by the CAC to individuals with exceptional projects, performances, or events that address communities outside the academy and that engage those communities with the ancient world, its reception, and/or individual research into these fields.
Volume 5 of Tiresias is out!
Read the latest copy of Tiresias, our student journal, Volume 5. Also, go to Volume 4 for the past journal. If you need more information about how to be part of this, please contact me.
Events
Meet the Prof Night
Welcome faculty and students to the 2025-26 school year! We want to invite you all to this year’s Meet the Profs, which will take place in the Grad House on Wednesday 24th September on the second floor. We hope to see you come out and get to know your peers and professors.
We can't wait to see you all then!
Your consuls Aleksandra and Tiara
Lecture by Hannah Gardiner
Please join us on September 30th at 3pm, the DRAGEN Lab welcomes colleagues to the St. Jerome’s Library, Room 2011, for a talk by DRAGEN Lab Alumni, Hannah Gardiner, titled, “The Blessed Virgins". For more information go to https://www.dragenlab.ca/news/the-blessed-virgins-hannah-gardiner-lecture.
Female Roles in Ancient Foundation Legends
Please join us on October 6 for a Workshop at the University of Waterloo. DRAGEN Lab, St Jerome's University.
While women tended to play only marginal roles in ancient military and political matters, they not rarely figure as important characters in historical, legendary or mythical accounts of exploration, settlement, or early urban development. In these they often appear as largely artificial and symbolic characters, but this should not prevent us from digging deeper and asking ourselves about the effective historical roles that women played either at the time of foundation or much later when an origin was remembered – or rather construed – to explain, justify, or change interethnic relations. Examples discussed at this workshop will range from the Amazons over Medeia and Kirke to Dido and Lavinia, but they also include the Biblical Sheerah (1 Chronicles 7:20-29) and the romanticized Gallic ‘princess’ Gyptis/Petta, the daughter of the Segobrigian king Nannos. In certain ways, these ladies shaped the legends of early-modern Matoaka/Pocachontas and Malinche, and never ceased to invite new interpretation and instrumentalization, as an example from National Socialist Germany will illustrate.
At this workshop, we shall collect, compare, and analyse diverse stories featuring such women and aim for developing a typology. The better we understand these female roles in the various literary traditions, the better we may understand these traditions of origin and identity as well as the agency ascribed to or claimed by women in different times and places of the ancient world. Their roles but also the foundation stories in which they acted were always subject to sociopolitical change at the local level and to major ideological shifts inducing the redefinition of ethnic identity and alterity on a much broader scale. The ultimate aim of this workshop, and of the international and interdisciplinary collaboration that it forms part of, is to help us better understand the inclusive and exclusive dynamics of storytelling and identity construction in societies of the past and the world we live in.
For the full program including paper abstracts, see https://www.altaycoskun.com/female-roles-2025. Attendance is open to everyone and free, but registration is required. Please, contact Altay Coskun at uwaterloo dot ca for registration.