The skills and knowledge acquired through the classics are easily transferable to other areas. You'll also develop a unique sense of perspective that comes from the study of a cultural history that is so broad and pervasive.
You will find an academic and social home in the Department of Classics. Our program is rigorous, but as a small department, we provide extraordinary individual attention to students. Many students find they are able to double-major in Classical Civilization and another field of interest.
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Subject matter relevant for all
"In the 2018 spring semester, I served as a teaching assistant in a mythology course. This course was offered in a women’s prison as part of UVM’s Liberal Arts in Prison Program, directed by prof. Kathy Fox. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, but I thought I might gain teaching experience and I was glad to give back to the community. This became far more than a volunteer experience: I gained compassion for the incarcerated and their families, a new outlook on the classroom, and even increased familiarity with Greek and Latin mythology. We read foundational works of mythology, such as Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Odyssey, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and students were held to the same standards as those on campus. Their passion for the course content inspired me to revisit the 'evidence' in the text after witnessing some of the students’ many debates over the character of Odysseus. Seeing these women continue their education and critically engage with primary and secondary source materials, even under the constraints of the prison environment, reinforced the value of opening the broader academic conversation to new minds and voices. Learning does not need to be confined to the traditional lecture hall, and studying classics has lasting value academically, personally, and professionally that applies beyond the bounds of a four-year undergraduate career." - Tessie Sakai '18
Meet your Classics Colleagues
Study the classics and you will join the ranks of some of the most influential men and women of all time--in all fields of endeavor. A few examples: Toni Morrison, William Shakespeare, Joe Paterno, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Jefferson, T. S. Eliot, John Stuart Mill, Sir Isaac Newton, e. e. cummings, Immanuel Kant, Salvador Dalí, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gertrude Stein, Indiana Jones, Karl Marx, Robert Graves, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Cleopatra, Ezra Pound, Bertrand Russell, Jules Verne, Sigmund Freud, Blaise Pascal, Desmond Tutu, J. R. R. Tolkien, Moses Maimonides, Desiderius Erasmus, W. H. Auden, René Descartes, Camille Paglia, Albert Einstein, John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill, Umberto Eco, W. E. B. DuBois, Jean Racine, Jorge Luis Borges, St. Augustine, Wole Soyinka, Queen Elizabeth I, Ted Hughes, John Milton, J. K. Rowling, Galileo Galilei, Vince Lombardi, Mary Shelley, James Joyce, Sting, Max Weber, David Packard, James George Frazer, Willa Cather, Thomas Hobbes, James Baker, Martin Luther, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Friedrich Nietzsche, H. D., William Gladstone, Mahatma Gandhi, Oscar Wilde, Michel Foucault, Alexander the Great, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ted Turner, Lord Byron, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Derek Walcott, Richard Wagner, Sören Kierkegaard, Sylvia Plath, Carl Jung, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, William Wordsworth, Iggy Pop.