Classical Studies

Classical Studies is an interdisciplinary field of study encompassing the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.

We seek to understand the languages, literatures, histories, and visual and material cultures of the premodern Mediterranean world—from the Bronze Age to the dawn of the Middle Ages, from the Iliad and the Odyssey to Saint Augustine, and from Greece, Italy, France, and Spain to North Africa, the Middle East, and the Greek-speaking kingdoms of the Indian subcontinent. We approach these ancient societies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including linguistics, art history, archaeology, anthropology, and philosophy, while also considering the long and complex legacies of ancient Greece and Rome in art, language, politics, and culture from antiquity to the present day.
Learn More About the Program

Studying Classics at Bard and want to get more involved?

Submit a translation to Sui Generis

Sui Generis is a publication of the Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures program whose goal to provide students an outlet to produce original creative work in a foreign language or translate the work of other authors.
suigeneris.bard.edu/
Student Clubs

The Classics Club is a student-run group that hosts gatherings where students can meet up and talk about anything related to the study of classics. Latin Table is a weekly occasion for students to converse informally in Latin in order to gain a better linguistic and affective understanding of the language.
More about Student Work
Apply for an Internship or Summer Award

Many excellent opportunities for summer research and study in classics are available both in the US and abroad as well as funding resources and research opportunities.
More Opportunities

The Extent of the Ancient Mediterranean World

Courtesy Ancient World Mapping Center

Current News

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Bard College Awarded $1.35 Million Grant in Support of Humanities Curricular Innovation Project

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant in the amount of $1.35 Million from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative for the project, “The Uses and Abuses of History,” which responds to the rise of unreliable digital media, heightened by the proliferation of AI-generated content. The project is led by four Bard faculty members: Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Iberian Studies Miles V. Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Nabanjan Maitra, Associate Professor of Classics Robert Cioffi, and Assistant Professor of Medieval History Valentina A. Grasso.

Bard College Awarded $1.35 Million Grant in Support of Humanities Curricular Innovation Project

Bard College is pleased to announce that it has been awarded a grant in the amount of $1.35 Million from the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative, which supports newly developed curricula that instruct students in methods of humanities practice and demonstrate those methods’ relevance to broader social justice pursuits. The grant will fund Bard’s project, “The Uses and Abuses of History,” which responds to the rise of unreliable digital, social, and other media, heightened by the proliferation of AI-generated content, which not only threatens our ability to discern fact from fiction but confounds our claims to a shared humanity. Bard was previously a recipient of a Humanities for All Times grant in 2021, the year the initiative was launched, for the “Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck” project led by Christian Ayne Crouch, dean of graduate studies and professor of history and American and Indigenous Studies. Participation in the competition is by invitation only and winning institutions are not invited to a subsequent round, which means Bard has won awards for both of the periods in which it was eligible.

“The Uses and Abuses of History” aims to offer students the tools to exercise judgement, to act, and to guard against the erasure of history in a world that is filled with conflicting and often false narratives. The project has three central curricular goals: first, to provide an institutional structure to unite students, staff, and scholars engaged in humanistic inquiry from across Bard College; second, to strengthen students’ habits of attention and abilities to read and think critically and contextually; and third, to make use of the College’s growing collection of archives to make archival research and praxis central to its curriculum. To accomplish these goals and enhance humanities education at Bard, the project will deploy curricular development, a workshop series, and a regranting program including summer research opportunities. The final year of the grant will culminate in an exhibition featuring a broad range of artifacts underscoring the crucial role played by material culture in the shaping of historical narratives.

The principal investigator team for “The Uses and Abuses of History” includes four Bard faculty members: the principal investigator, Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Iberian Studies Miles V. Rodríguez, Assistant Professor of the Interdisciplinary Study of Religions Nabanjan Maitra, Associate Professor of Classics Robert Cioffi, and Assistant Professor of Medieval History Valentina A. Grasso. A wider advisory council of faculty and administrators will help guide the project.

“The project team and I are honored to take part in the Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times Initiative at Bard College,” said Rodríguez. “We are thrilled to contribute to Bard’s historical commitment to curricular and pedagogical creativity and innovation. While we recognize that the spread of false information is nothing new under the sun, we consider ourselves fortunate to respond to its present permutations with a robust collaborative project in service to our students and intellectual community.”

The Mellon Foundation’s Humanities for All Times initiative was established in 2021 to support the development of new humanities-based curricular and community projects at liberal arts colleges across the United States.

Post Date: 04-23-2026

Law & Liberty Reviews New Book by Bard Professor James Romm

Demosthenes: Democracy’s Defender by James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics James Romm was reviewed in Law & Liberty. Graham McAleer writes that Romm’s “fast-paced” biography provides a valuable perspective on Demosthenes’s charge to Athenians, in which he stated “you cannot have been wrong [to] have taken on the danger of fighting for the freedom and safety of all.”