Recent News

For the Spring 2024 semester, Princeton Classics will be offering a new slate of undergraduate course options in Latin, Greek, and Classical Studies!  These will include three original topics and three entirely new classes. Full length course descriptions are available now.

On October 3rd, poet and translator A.E. Stallings delivered the 2023 Robert Fagles Lecture for Classics in the Contemporary Arts to a standing room-only audience. For those who missed it, a full recording is available here!

For our second talk of the year, we were delighted to welcome Prof. Naomi Campa, who delivered the lecture “The Plataian Community at Athens: An Enclave?” A scholar of Greek intellectual history and ancient political theory teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, Prof. Campa also serves as co-chair of the Lambda Classical Caucus and on the Mountaintop Coalition steering committee.

We announce with great sadness the death of Janet Martin on August 30th. An expert in medieval Latin, early leader in the Women’s Classical Caucus, and the first woman to receive tenure in the department’s history, Janet taught at Princeton Classics for thirty-seven years before transferring to emeritus status in 2010. She will be deeply missed.

This September, grad student Pria Garcelle attended the Intensive Textile Course at the Textile Research Centre (TRC). There, she gained first-hand experience with millennia of techniques for transforming fibers into threads, threads into fabrics, and fabrics into the objects, decorations, and necessities of life. For Pria, who studies ancient textiles and their sociological roles in ancient Greece, it was an invaluable opportunity to acquire experiential knowledge of this important and underappreciated aspect of human history. You can read her reflections here!

Prof. John W.I. Lee kicked off the Classics Department’s annual lecture series with “African Americans and Xenophon, c. 1800–1910,” arguing that “although Xenophon gets less attention today than Herodotus and Thucydides, his work played a vital role in early African American education.” Analyzing the early curricula of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Prof. Lee found that Xenophon’s Anabasis—a tale of mercenaries in hostile territory whose escape to freedom was often compared to the plight of runaway slaves—was joined only by the Greek New Testament as the primary text for their courses in ancient Greek.