Research Culture

The Yale Department of Classics is a thriving research community. Members of the Faculty are engaged in research spanning Greek and Latin Literature, Ancient History, Art & Archaeology, Ancient Philosophy, and modern Classical Receptions. For a detailed overview of areas of research in the department, click here. However, this broad summary hardly does justice to the originality of the research being done by individual scholars. We invite you to peruse the Faculty’s individual web-pages to get a better sense of the research that we are engaged in.

The department hosts a number of invited lectures throughout the semester, at which visiting scholars present their current research. This regular lecture program is supplemented by occasional conferences and colloquia: most recently a conference on ‘Music in Non-Musical Texts in Classical Athens’, organized by Pauline LeVen. In addition, the department is involved in a number of collaborative research ventures: Mediterranean Antiquity at Yale (MAY), which hosts an interdisciplinary workshop on ‘Ancient Societies’, the Yale Economic History Workshop, and a lecture and workshop in the Classical Tradition (together with Renaissance Studies). We also cooperate with the Department of Classics at Brown University in holding biannual Yale-Brown colloquia, and we have an annual Faculty exchange with the School of Classics at St Andrews University in Scotland.

Individual members of the department participate in international research networks: Egbert Bakker is an Associated member of the research group ‘Textual Cohesion’, organized by OIKOS, the Netherlands National Research School in Classical Studies, and Pauline LeVen is a member of Moisa, The International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music & its Cultural Heritage.

A number of the Faculty hold editorial positions on international journals and series, or serve on their advisory boards (Greenwood, Harte, Kraus), or have edited recent prominent companions: Egbert Bakker was a co-editor for Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (2002), and has recently edited Blackwell’s Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (2010). Kirk Freudenburg edited The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire (2005).