<p>I’ve heard that Brown has one of the best Classics departments, but I haven’t been able to find out why. I intend to major in Classics, so any help would be useful.</p>
<p>I’m an English and Latin major who transferred into Brown and will be attending this spring. While I haven’t taken any classes there yet, I ended up decided between Brown and UC Berkeley (which also has an excellent classics department) and can tell you what my thinking was. I would say that the things I liked best about the department, just from looking at it, were:</p>
<p>1) size. I came from a liberal arts college that had just two Latinists and only one advanced Latin class (three Latin courses total) in any semester. Same for Greek. The Brown Classics department, on the other hand, is offering four advanced Latin courses this next semester, that I know of. The department is more expansive than most, offering instruction in Sanskrit and Modern Greek. They’ve got (for a Classics department) a pretty large faculty, specializing in topics all across the board, so you don’t get stuck with one professor who really only wants to talk about Hadrian or some other singular interest.</p>
<p>2) The Joukowsky School of Architecture–you haven’t mentioned what area of Classics interests you the most, but if you dig ancient archeology this sounds like an amazing resource. </p>
<p>3) I liked the look of the Classics classes that offered a broad perspective (on history, language, etc)–a lot of the times with Classics departments you end up just seeing higher level courses in which one studies one author–Livy, Horace, Sappho–and not being able to see how these things connect in a larger sense. I liked that, when I looked at the courses offered, I saw things like “Roman Reception of Greek Literature” and “The Ancient Novel and Its Influence”. </p>
<p>What sort of things would you like to study within Classics?</p>
<p>My favorite aspect is the Latin language and literature so I would take courses that mainly focus on translating Ovid, etc. I also wish to take Ancient Greek lang./lit courses. </p>
<p>Thanks for giving me some insight on Brown’s program!</p>
<p>My D graduated from Brown with a degree in Classics-Latin and Greek. She loved it. Her class sizes were small, but there were grad students in the classes too. What was the best part was that the students had very diverse interests, and most were double or even triple concentrators, so they were very interesting people. Many pre-meds, neuroscience, art history, women’s studies, etc. Not the usual group of “nerds”. The professors were wonderful and very approachable, and really knew their students. Just be prepared for a huge amount of required courses–Greek history was a killer! Good luck!</p>
<p>I’m currently in the process of filling out the concentration forms to declare a Latin and Greek concentration; I’ve enjoyed the classes I’ve taken within the department so far. As mentioned above, the professors have a wide range of specialties, including Medieval Latin and Byzantine Greek (which, I gather, are not common focuses for professors to have). Although there’s been a relatively large amount of turnover in the department lately (2 new Latin professors started this fall, I understand that at least 1 new Greek professor will be hired for the spring), the department is relatively large. The language courses are relatively strong, although those I’ve been in have gone more slowly than corresponding courses at other top schools at which I have friends. However, they’re not always on just one author, as mentioned above, which is helpful. I recently took a course on Catiline, which used texts from both Sallust and Cicero, and I plan to take a course on Eros in Greek literature from Plato up through the 13th century AD. One can also take courses with the readings in English if the literature interests you. Although there’s a lot of reading, and there’s something to be said for reading the texts in the original languages, one can read a lot more in translation in a semester than in Latin or Greek.</p>
<p>There are numerous tracks for a classics concentration if you go that route. Latin and Greek requires 12 courses (4 Latin, 4 Greek, 2 Roman History, 2 Greek History), but if you haven’t studied Ancient Greek before, the number is really 16 - the 4 semesters of intro and intermediate Greek don’t count towards this requirement. On the other hand, most of the concentrations require only 8 courses. You get a lot of flexibility and can take more courses if you desire.</p>
<p>Having graduate students in the classes can be intimidating at first, but they tend to be held to different standards, so you don’t have to worry about competing with them for your grades. With that said, unless you have taken Latin beyond AP level, the workload may be a bit of a shock at first. My first class reached 250 lines of poetry a week, while in high school I never exceeded 150 a week. Survey of Republican Literature will read 500 lines (or a corresponding amount of prose) of a different author each week. The pace is not overwhelming once you get used to it, however.</p>
<p>I chose Brown not because I was looking for the best classics department, but because I wanted a good classics department as well as a good computer science department, but I have found Brown’s department to be quite good.</p>