This September, the Humanities Council will partner with the Keller Center to showcase humanities and social science innovation at the annual Innovation Forum. This is the first time since its inception in 2005 that the Forum will feature Princeton’s humanities and social science community. The inaugural participants include Classics professors Brooke Holmes and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who will join others to present on innovations with potential cultural and societal applications outside of campus gates.
Princeton’s Graduate School has launched a new pre-doctoral fellowship, which will fund students to study at Princeton for a year before they enroll as first-year Ph.D. students. Students from groups historically underrepresented in higher education are especially encouraged to apply for the new fellowship, which is among University efforts to increase diversity on campus and within academia.
Despite significant disruptions to academic work this year, a number of graduate students have made exceptional progress in their research and completed their doctorates in Classics. Here we celebrate three who have recently defended their dissertations.
In response to the recent and ongoing violence against persons of color and the renewed struggle against inequality in which this country is now engaged, Princeton’s Department of Classics reaffirms its commitment to diversity, equity, and justice within our field. We add our voices to those calling for an anti-racist, inclusive society for ourselves, our students and, indeed, for all. We affirm our belief that Black Lives Matter as do the lives of all those who suffer from discrimination (whether based on gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, disability, or religious affiliation). We pledge ourselves to defend, in word and deed, the oppressed and vulnerable within our society.
Froma I. Zeitlin retired from Princeton University in 2010, where she was the Charles Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature in the Department of Classics and Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. In this interview for the Society for Classical Studies she talks about her experience as a woman in Classics in the 1970s and after.
Marina Di Bartolo, M.D., works as a primary care practitioner in Camden, New Jersey, where she treats patients in the crosshairs of the coronavirus. On the latest episode of Princeton's “We Roar” podcast, she shares her journey from Venezuela to Princeton University to last week’s ruling that protected the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — at least for now.
In the 25 years since the Humanities Sequence was established at Princeton, those who have taught and studied the course have singled out its close-knit community for its transformative power. With this sense of community so strongly part of the HUM Sequence experience, how would the isolation of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic affect the teaching and the discussions that are the lifeblood of the course?
Princeton’s seniors were honored last month at a virtual commencement ceremony that marked the end of their time as undergraduates. As the Class of 2020 prepare for the next stages of their lives and careers, we asked some of those who chose to major in Classics about their work and plans for the future.
Three classics majors have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa: Leina Thurn, Christopher Howard and Kirsten Traudt. Election to this chapter is based on scholastic standing and generally includes the highest-ranking tenth of each graduating class.
The Princeton University chapter of Phi Beta Kappa is giving its annual awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching to Melissa Haynes, lecturer in classics, and Wyatt Lloyd, assistant professor of computer science.
Erika Valdivieso will join the Department of Classics as a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton. She and fifteen other scholars across several disciplines will join the twelve fellows selected last year with the aim of enhancing diversity in the professoriate.
This Fall, Princeton will offer language classes in Akkadian, Latin and Ancient Greek. Here are some of the other courses from the Classics department next semester.
As the new academic term threatens arrival, many of our undergraduate and graduate students will be returning to campus refreshed and enlightened by their experiences travelling abroad this summer.
2019-2020 Spring
Princeton has named Nicholas Johnson, an operations research and financial engineering student from Montreal, valedictorian for the Class of 2020. Grace Sommers, a physics student from Bridgewater, New Jersey, has been named the Latin salutatorian.
Seminars, language classes and office hours are now being held over video conferencing software, with assignments and tests carried out remotely. Staff and faculty are organizing team meetings from home to discuss administrative and academic matters. Here, members of the department share their experiences of life online.
"We’re facing major moral and psychological crises right now, and a lot of the pain is not biological. That’s where I think that the ancient material is so important."
Princeton University has launched a new podcast series to share the personal stories and expertise of students, faculty, staff and alumni during the COVID-19 pandemic. The second episode comes from a Classics major, who talks about her experiences of online learning and shares lessons from a 2000-year old letter about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Princeton University is actively monitoring the situation around coronavirus (Covid-19). The latest University guidance for students, faculty and staff is available on the University’s Emergency Management website.
The department's annual newsletter is now available online and paper copies have been mailed. Inside you can find updates from faculty and students, an article by alumnus Rosa Andújar, Ph.D. ’11, and the story of last summer's Dolia/Pithoi in the Mediterranean study by Professor Caroline Cheung.
Kirsten Traudt, a senior studying Classics at Princeton, has been awarded the Keasbey Scholarship to study in the UK. Traudt, who is from Morristown, New Jersey, will pursue an M.Phil. in Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures at the University of Oxford.
2019-2020 Fall
Roger Bagnall, distinguished papyrologist and Emeritus Professor of History at NYU, delivered a lucid and thought-provoking Prentice Lecture in Princeton on Thursday, November 21st, entitled 'Roman Names and Roman Citizenship in Egypt.’
On the evening of Tuesday, October 24th, Ishion Hutchinson, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry and Associate Professor at Cornell University, delivered the second in the recently inaugurated series of Fagles Lectures for Classics in the Contemporary Arts, entitled “The Classics Can Console?”
With classes beginning this week, a new crop of Junior classics majors arrives on campus ready to embark on the next phase of studies. We are pleased to introducing the promising cohort of Classical scholars of the class of 2021 – or rather, to allow them to introduce themselves.
Rising senior Grace Sommers was recognized with the Class of 1939 Princeton Scholar Award on Sunday September 8th, at Opening Exercises.
Sommers is a physics major from Bridgewater, NJ, who is pursing a certificate in Ancient Roman language and culture.
Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and is the author of two poetry collections, Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award and the Larry Levis Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among others. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University and is a contributing editor to two literary journals.
2018-2019 Spring
The Department of Classics is happy to share the news that four classics majors were elected to Phi Beta Kappa: Nicolette D'Angelo, Kevin Duraiswamy, Alyssa Finfer, and Rafail Zoulis. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1776 and the oldest of all national honorary scholastic societies, has a chapter at Princeton. Election to this chapter is based on scholastic standing and generally includes the highest-ranking tenth of each graduating class. Congratulations to all!
We are pleased to announce that Joonho Jo, Class of 2021, is the winner of the Stinnecke Prize in 2019. It is given to the sophomore or junior who passes the best examination based on the Odes of Horace, Eclogues of Vergil, and the Latin Grammar and Prosody, as well as the Anabasis of Xenophon or Plato’s Euthyphro, Crito, Apology and Phaedo and the Greek Grammar. The winner receives a one-time stipend of $5,000. Sophomores and juniors in all departments are eligible to compete.