Welcome from the Chair

Classics at Rutgers is an area studies department that spans every discipline within the human sciences while also bridging the humanities with the physical, biological, health, and social sciences. Since 1771, when it was first taught at Rutgers (then Queen’s College), Classics has constantly been adapting to the educational landscape of the time and students’ evolving needs. As an all-encompassing liberal arts department, we find ourselves today using the ancient world to contribute to students’ intellectual, ethical, and personal development.

The field of Classics investigates the nations on the northern, eastern, and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea in the period between the seventh centuries BCE and CE. Languages and literatures, philosophy, and religion were traditionally the field’s central intellectual approaches; these have now yielded primacy to political, social, and cultural history, material culture, and reception studies. The importance of reception is reflected most recently in the anchoring of the Modern Greek Studies Program (MGSP) within Classics. Current work on antiquity in the Mediterranean also focuses on intercultural contacts and cultural cross-influence with neighbors including the Greater Iranian empires (i.e., Persian, Parthian, Sassanian) and early Byzantine empire. Studying the ancient Mediterranean, broadly understood, is a way of focusing on a geographic subsection of the ancient world in all of the intellectual richness described above.

In terms of faculty profile and reputation, the prestige of our graduate programs, and the range and popularity of our undergraduate offerings, we believe we are one of the top Classics programs in the Big Ten. Our faculty publish on fascism, disability, economics, technology, linguistics, democracy, music, Classics and mass incarceration, and the reception of ancient poetry in Asian-American literature; in the community, they teach and collaborate on scholarship with incarcerated individuals; they conduct excavations in Italy, Greece, Iraq, and Jordan. Among our current Ph.D. students, three have secured academic positions even before graduation; recent M.A. students have been admitted to Ph.D. programs at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Cincinnati, Indiana, and Ohio State.

Recent successes

Classics

At the start of November 2025, we celebrated 254 years of instruction in Classics here on the banks of the Raritan. The continuing popular presence of Classics at Rutgers and our inclusion in the 1770 university charter (as “the learned languages”) are sources of strength and pride.

Undergraduates at Rutgers recognize the strength of our teaching: bucking the general downward trend in the Humanities, our projected enrollments in Classics in AY 2026 are on par with those of AY 2018. Our innovations in teaching are paying dividends: for example, in Fall 2025, Elementary Greek I enjoyed an enrollment of 20, the largest within memory. By putting this course online and by thoroughly retooling its structure and content, we have demonstrated that we are tapping a continuing demand when we can meet students where they are. Outstanding teaching in Classics was recently recognized at the national level: Kristina Chew was honored with the Rudolph Masciantonio Award by the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, as well as with an Excellence in Online Teaching Award by Rutgers University Online Education Services.

We continue to attract excellent students: in Spring 2025, Maria Walsh, a junior majoring in Classics, won first place in the New York Classical Club's college Latin contest, besting competition from Columbia, NYU, and other New York-area schools. We pride ourselves also on the opportunities we offer to Rutgers undergraduates to conduct research, through the direction of senior theses and internships. Corey Brennan’s Archivio Digitale Boncompagni Ludovisi project, now in its 13th year, has seen over 50 students work on the artistic and archival treasures of the Casino dell’Aurora in Rome. One intern, Carol Cofone ’17, in 2025 published the results of her work as a book with Rutgers University Press; another, Hatice Koroglu Cam ’22, received national press attention for her identification in the collection of a satiric self-portrait by Michelangelo.

Our Ph.D. students also excel. Emily Wiley is this year’s Fowler Merle-Smith Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, continuing a record of placement rivaled only by the graduate programs at Michigan (with over 60 students) and Cincinnati (over 40). Victoria Hodges received an Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship, which she is spending at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford, as a Visiting Associate Member.

Modern Greek Studies Program (MGSP)

Efforts to integrate the Modern Greek Studies Program (MGSP) into the Department of Classics, begun in 2022, have continued to be highly effective, and the benefits of this partnership are increasingly being appreciated by students and faculty in both the MGSP and Classics.

Thanks in good part to the support of Classics faculty and staff, recent outreach and fundraising events put on by the MGSP have been especially successful. A notable highlight was our annual Mouyiaris Memorial Lecture in September 2025, which was delivered by Nikos Christodoulides, the President of Cyprus. The event raised over $100,000, including $20,000 pledged by President Christodoulides on behalf of the Cypriot government. Over 250 people attended the lecture, which also showcased MGSP minors past and present, who posed thoughtful questions to President Christodoulides during a Q&A. One of the distinguished attendees at the event, Ms. Ifigeneia Kanara, the Consul General of Greece in New York, also attended the Classics/MGSP graduation reception in May 2025—another recognition, as Consul General Kanara herself emphasized, of Rutgers’ growing prominence, national and international, as a center of Hellenic studies. In addition to fundraising from local communities, the MGSP has also brought significant funds ($8,000) into its operating account through the successful renewal of a grant from the Ministry of Education of Cyprus for the year 2025. An application for a further renewal of this grant for 2026 has been submitted.

Looking forward

Elytis Professorship in Modern Greek Studies

Working closely with members of the generous and supportive Greek- and Cypriot-American communities in New Jersey and beyond, we continue to raise funds to bring us closer to our goal of endowing an Elytis Professorship in Modern Greek Studies. The recent visit by the President of Cyprus, which helped to raise over $100,000, was a major step forward. We continue to work closely with the RU Foundation to identify and attract the donors we need.

The Elytis Professorship is crucial not only for the future of the MGSP, but for Classics as well: having a dedicated scholar in Modern Greek Studies on our faculty will help us remain in step with trends at many peer institutions, where older disciplinary boundaries between Classical, Byzantine, and Modern Greek Studies have been productively eroded in both teaching and research.

Classics AI Conference

On 12-13 March 2026, Classics in collaboration with Rutgers University Libraries hosted an international conference on developments in AI and the study of antiquity. Some current applications in AI include transcribing handwritten texts; reading, translating and analyzing ancient textual collections at scale; reconstructing degraded visual artifacts (including texts); distinguishing typographical variations in material remains; monitoring shifts in the state of preservation of monuments; and remote sensing in landscape archaeology, detecting the likely presence of features invisible to the eye. Our contributors, a mix of scholars from Rutgers and three continents assessed contemporary and potential contributions of AI to the study of the Old World through the end of the first millennium CE, covering a wide range of topics bearing on the reconstruction, preservation, classification, and analysis of the past. Following the success of this conference, we are now exploring possibilities for acting as a BTAA (or similar) hub for AI research in antiquity.

Classics study space

Classics is home to a set of valuable research collections. These collections consist of 30,000+ 35mm slides (of which ⅔ are digitized with metadata), over 10,000 pre-2000 scholarly offprints, and 30+ boxes of important archival material for the history of classical scholarship. We are fortunate, in addition, to have received substantial gifts of books from donors with connections to Rutgers Classics: from Seymour Feldman (Philosophy) and from the estates of Steven F. Walker (Comparative Literature), John Lenaghan (History), and Larissa Bonfante (NYU Classics). We’re anticipating a substantial gift of the largest private collection of books on Roman studies in North America (perhaps 10,000 in all). To house these outstanding collections, we’re in the process of establishing an accessible study room where these materials and our existing digital humanities equipment can be stored and utilized.