About Us

The UCLA Department of Classics is one of three Humanities departments at UCLA ranked in the top ten nationally in the last National Research Council report. Classics forms the foundation for the Humanities. Philology, philosophy, government (including democracy), the theater, linguistics, archaeology, literary theory and many other fields have their origins in the Classics.

The UCLA Department of Classics has a robust undergraduate and graduate program. Each year we teach an average of 2,000 undergraduate students various aspects of Greek and Roman culture, literature, philology, archaeology, and history.

We have a dedicated and diverse faculty of scholars and teachers, many at mid-career, whose areas of expertise represent a variety of disciplines at the heart of classical antiquity. Areas of faculty strength have long been in Classical philology and subfields of paleography, Classical linguistics, Byzantine studies, and medieval Latin, now supplemented with new fields of excellence in Greek and Mediterranean archaeology, Indo-European linguistics, ancient and medieval philosophy, particularly Greek philosophy, ancient Greek political thought, ancient sexuality and gender studies, and Neo-Latin and Renaissance studies. We have the highest number and proportion of women faculty in any Classics department of our size at a major research university.

The Department enjoys strong bonds with related departments and disciplines within UCLA. It maintains a variety of cross-listed, exchange, or co-taught courses, as well as joint faculty appointments, with the Departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, English, History, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Philosophy, and Political Science, as well as continuing close links with the Interdepartmental Programs in Archaeology and Indo-European Studies.

Classics faculty have been awarded the national teaching award by the American Philological Association (APA) three times, and they have received the the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award four times. This tradition of dedicated teaching has rubbed off on our graduate students. In the past decade, Teaching Assistants in the Department of Classics have won the prestigious UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award no fewer than nine times!