Our mission statement
The Department offers major and minor programs that aim to examine in non-prescriptive fashion the culture, ideas and values of earlier civilizations with a view to promoting an understanding of the recurrent patterns but also enormous diversity of human culture, as well as an appreciation of the ways in which the past forms a basis for, and continuity with, the present.
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The Department supports its aspirations with a diverse pool of full-time and adjunct faculty committed to teach, research, and serve in ways that promote our mission at the level of both campus and wider community, local, national, and international.
Examine the human experience
Classics and General Humanities examine the culture, ideas and values of earlier Western and related civilizations both in their original time periods and as they have been appropriated and transmuted by later cultures, especially American. The common goals of our programs are to develop a sense of how to conduct critical inquiry into past cultures and modern manifestations of their ideas and values; to impart a feeling for the recurring patterns but also enormous diversity of human culture; and to explore how past cultures form the basis for modern cultures and cultural attitudes.
