2025 Letter from the Chair
From S. Sara Monoson, Department Chair (September 2022 – August 2025)
News and Programming Updates for Friends of the Department of Classics at Northwestern University
As I write this, seven undergraduate Classics majors are preparing to go on a one-week all expenses paid study trip to Rome designed by and accompanied by two of our own faculty members. When the new academic year starts, we will hear all about their visits to sites and museums, their experiences reading Latin in the presence of relevant monuments and artifacts, and their investigations of the layered history of the Eternal City. More details about their early September trip will be posted to our department website.
This trip is a newly inaugurated part of the programming we integrated into the menu of learning experiences available to Northwestern students by the Department of Classics. It joins a set of exciting courses and related events beyond the classroom that we offer throughout the academic year.
As you know, Classics as an academic discipline interprets the record of, and the various meanings attached to, the cultural output of ancient Greece and Rome. And, as you are also likely aware, across the country departments of Classics have been shrinking, and campus communities linked to them have been struggling. At Northwestern we have been working hard for years to buck that trend—and with success! While covid protocols and financial stresses have interrupted some of our plans, they did not dismantle them. In very recent years, we have welcomed four new faculty members, bringing our roster of full-time classics faculty to nine (substantially larger than we were 25 years ago!). In addition, three senior faculty colleagues appointed in other disciplines whose scholarship addresses antiquity are active in our community. Plus, for three-years starting in Fall 2025 we will host the return to NU of a scholar from Russia whose specialty is Byzantium as a visiting professor.
These investments in our faculty have enabled us to expand our curriculum to include ancient science and technology (astronomy, medicine), religion, archaeology, and reception studies globally on top of history, literature, art, philosophy, drama, and of course ancient Greek and Latin language training. Our courses on Mythology and Roman History as well as an array of focused topics have proved both popular and highly regarded for their rigor. We also enjoy offering small college seminars for entering Weinberg first years. We are proud to serve hundreds of students enrolled in our courses annually as well as to draw into our community a healthy number of Classics majors and minors and students of ancient Greek and Latin. Our language directors are both past recipients of college-wide teaching honors, and it was just announced that a recent faculty hire in Classics is among the new class of NU Searle fellows, a program supported by the provost that advances teaching excellence. We aim to be a leader in classics education in the US and to that end in 2024 collaborated with the Global Antiquities workshop at NU’s Kaplan Institute for the Humanities to host conference on Teaching Antiquity that that brought educators from around the country to the Evanston campus. We expect this to be a bi-annual event looking forward a few years.
Investments in our programming have enabled us to develop initiatives such as the Rome trip and an array of other activities. We now offer a 6-week long credit-bearing summer program in Athens directed by Prof Ryan Platte, and a robust schedule of activities (including visiting scholars) whose events are designed to supplement the intellectual experiences of undergraduates as well as to advance the research interests of faculty and doctoral students. We have also inaugurated what we hope will be an annual (all-expenses paid) domestic one-day study trip to a North American city that has some connection to classical antiquity to explore. In 2025 our Classics Undergraduate Advisory Board with faculty guidance arranged for ten students to travel to Nashville to see the full-scale replica of the Parthenon and huge statue of Athena modeled on the ancient cult statue constructed to celebrate Tennessee’s bicentennial in 1897 and restored in recent years. Here is their report (scroll for terrific photos!). Next year we expect students to visit Cincinnati. In addition, students attended a performance of an adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad at the Goodman Theater in the Loop and a production of Sophocles’ Antigone at the Court Theatre in Hyde Park. We also supported a trip to see the Art Institute’s exhibit “Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture” from the Torlonia Collection. In addition to these special events, we also routinely host a weekly evening study hour.
We are pleased to report that our majors have done excellent academic work. Our annual Classics Expo featured students presenting their work and a ceremony honoring special accomplishments. Individual majors have been elected Phi Beta Kappa and won campus-wide academic honors and awards. The recipient of WCAS’s Frank N. & Lee L. Corbin Prize award in 2023 double majored in physics and classics (on the Greek & Latin track). Our students have also completed competitive programs at the Centro in Rome and undertaken their own projects with summer fellowship support from NU and specifically from our department.
It is common for our students to go on to impressive post-graduation activities. Some recent majors are now in graduate programs in fields as diverse as bioarchaeology (University of Aberdeen), comparative literature (University of St. Andrews), classics (Princeton), and physics (UC Berkeley). Others have gone on to MBA programs (including Kellogg), law school, and medical school. Others have gone right into the workforce in fields such as finance, Latin teaching, secondary education, cybersecurity, and political consulting. We continue to hear from them years later and prize those ongoing connections.
Graduate students affiliated with our department through the Classics Cluster, a second home to doctoral candidates studying classical antiquity across disciplines, have also thrived. Though small, that group has made great contributions to our intellectual community as teaching assistants. This year, doctoral candidate Nava Cohen (Comparative Literary Studies and Classics) won a college-wide award for teaching excellence.
We are grateful for your support of our efforts to offer classics students at Northwestern an exceptional experience.
In my next letter I will provide some updates regarding the scholarly research activities of our faculty and students.
Warm good wishes!
S. Sara Monoson
Chair and Professor of Classics
