Our Mission
Classical Studies are a gateway to the humanities and the foundation of literature, culture, art, history, philosophy, religion, and politics in the Western world and beyond. Classics at UC Irvine offers a wide range of opportunities for contact with ancient worlds and their receptions over the course of history and up to the 21st century. Our undergraduates can
- enroll in our popular Classical Mythology series, which has introduced thousands of students to the Greco-Roman gods and heroes, and familiarized them with receptions of ancient material in different media, both print and digital
- learn ancient/biblical Greek and Latin
- take our popular course in medical terminology
- read literature, history, and philosophy in translation
- study ancient religions
- produce capstone projects under the supervision of specialists in a variety of research fields
- participate in the robust intellectual community of our student-run Classics club (Eta Sigma Phi)
Our internationally recognized faculty teach highly sought after courses in a wide range of topics including Greek and Roman epic, tragedy, philosophy, gender in antiquity, comparative mythologies, ancient slavery, classics and theory, ancient medicine and environment, and classical receptions. UC Irvine is also the home of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), a large digital corpus of literary texts, which has collected and digitized texts written in Greek from Homer (8 c. BCE) to the fall of Byzantium (1453 CE), as well as a large number of post-Byzantine texts (16-20 c. CE).
