STUDENTIBUS PROSPECTIVIS // For Prospective Students

Below is a short introduction to the plainest advantages of studying Classics at UD. If you want to know why to study Classics at all, click here. It might also help you to know something about the students here who study Classics: read about some of the current Classics students and recent graduates. View an issue of the monthly newsletter for classics at UD, called MELI NUCESQUE. Learn about classics-related clubs at UD. Last, you’ll find at the bottom of the page some aids for Latin and Greek study.

UPPER LEVEL “CLASSICS” COURSES here are almost always reading courses in Greek and Latin authors, read in the original. If you scrutinize other programs closely, seeing past all glossy surfaces, you will discover, perhaps to your surprise, that this is actually very rare. We are able to do this because so many basic classical texts are taught in translation extremely well by other departments, in U.D.’s classically oriented Core program of twenty-five courses that all students must take. See the list of courses and texts in UD’s CORE CURRICULUM.

CONSEQUENT ADVANTAGES. From this a U.D. classics major or concentrator gets three plain advantages: (a) a more thorough training in the languages than is possible elsewhere, yet also (b) (from the Core) a more solid general education in classical thought and culture than is possible elsewhere, and (c) the conviction — which elsewhere is hard to feel, but which we think that young classicists value — that their field is not some arcane and marginal “specialty” but the core of the Core. For those reasons, we have a strong suspicion that, for undergraduates, there is no better place in the country to study classics.

THE VARIETY OF COURSES AND FACULTY. As was just said, the university’s Core program is itself classically oriented. One result of this is that the English, Politics, History, Philosophy, and Theology faculties each include men and women who are deeply interested in classical studies, have researched them minutely, and help us by giving courses both on classical topics and in the languages themselves.

THE CAMPUS IN ITALY. The University of Dallas has a rustic, very beautiful campus near Rome, where most of our undergraduates study for a semester (usually in the sophomore year). Part of the Rome Program is a ten-day trip to Greece, and the Director and History teacher at the Rome campus, Peter Hatlie, is a classicist who in spring offers a reading course on Greek Historians to our sophomore Greek students.

GRADUATE SCHOOL. UD classics graduates are presently in PhD classics programs at Brown University, Boston University, Bryn Mawr College, CUNY, Fordham, Tufts, the Universities of Chicago, North Carolina, St. Andrews (Scotland), Toronto, Villanova, and Wisconsin, and they have been accepted at many other places including NYU, Penn, UCLA, and UVA. All are fully funded, and some were awarded the most prestigious scholarships. It seems that graduate schools accept them because, as was written above, they have been very abnormally well trained both in the languages and in classics more broadly.

For a list of WEBSITES USEFUL FOR CLASSICS, click here.  Other links useful to classics students are on the web page of Karl Maurer, a former Chairman of the Classics Department, who died several years ago, but whose memory we cherish and whose web page we maintain; for those links, click here.