This broad, interdisciplinary liberal arts program introduces students to the histories, literatures, and material cultures of the Greeks, Romans, and other related ancient cultures. The study of antiquity has always been fundamental to our understanding of the human condition, as many of the structures, values, and institutions that have shaped the history of humanity were formed in this epoch. Our Ancient World Studies program unifies disciplinary areas like Classical Studies (for the Greco-Roman world), Near Eastern Studies (for western Asia and Egypt), Ancient Chinese studies, and so on, framing the study of the ancient world around questions of liberty, justice, equity health, race, gender, and the environment, benefiting from new research and scholarship not only in languages, history, and linguistics, but in anthropology, archaeology, art history, economics, political science, sociology, and the natural sciences.
Ancient World Studies is also a particularly good laboratory for the study of diversity, along many dimensions — not just ethnic and racial, but linguistic, political, and ethical. For example, all ancient societies, whether organized into cities or as peoples scattered across a common homeland, had forms of political and social organization that anthropologists, political scientists, philosophers, and sociologists, have recognized as part of the fundamental structures of humanity across time and space. Observation of those diverse communities lets us see what has worked, what hasn’t, and why. Many of the societies we study practiced slavery, but with notably different social and legal boundaries between enslavement and freedom from those found in the modern period. Some of these societies had a strong code of honor, a shame culture in anthropological terms, within which their principles and values are somewhat different from those of modern Western societies, so that some behaviors, entirely appropriate in their social context, seem almost irrational to people who aren’t familiar with that context. In Ancient World Studies, a breadth of human experience is available for study.
