Student Work
When Anika Copp transferred to the UO as a sophomore, she was “planning to study philosophy and mathematics, and had decided to take Latin as my foreign language.” She immediately fell in love. “After translating the first four lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the second term of my first-year Latin class, I made my final decision to major in classics.” Copp will pursue a master’s in classics and intends to teach Latin at a secondary-school level. “I hope to spread my own enthusiasm for the classics to others, and I will do everything in my power to provide my future students with an enlightening experience akin to my own.”
When it came time to fulfill his second language requirement, Daemion Lee thought “Greek sounded interesting.” He immediately found his niche and added a major in classics to his philosophy major. Lee will be assisting in Associate Professor Malcolm Wilson’s Basic Greek course, leading first-year classics students in their discussions once a week. Still two years away from graduation, Lee is uncertain of his future career. “I like teaching,” he says, but he’s also thinking about law school and other graduate studies.
Selected Faculty Work
Associate Professor and department head P. Lowell Bowditch teaches a range of language courses as well as courses on classical tragedy, gender and sexuality in antiquity, and Augustan literature. Her research emphasis is on Late Republican and Augustan lyric and elegy as it intersects with the social discourses of patronage, empire, and sexuality.“My first book was on the poet Horace and it dealt with issues of literary patronage and the degree to which this poet was writing poems that were propagandistic in nature,” says Bowditch. “Currently I am working on other poets under Augustus and looking at the images of empire and empirical expansion in those poems.”
Assistant Professor Jose González’s interests include Greek poetry (archaic to Hellenistic), ancient rhetoric and literary criticism, historical linguistics, and Greek dialects. His research focuses on the intersection between literary and other modes of social performance (such as religious rituals and festivals). He is particularly interested in the ways literary performance (poetry and prose) serves the symbolic articulation of culture; and in the dialectic between performer, his or her work, and the larger cultural matrix. Current projects include a study of the nature and function of the Homeric Hymns in the oral culture of ancient Greece and an analysis of the connection between mimesis and performance.
Associate Professor Mary Jaeger chose an academic career in classics because she loves Latin. She has been at the UO since 1990. She teaches both Latin and Greek, as well as lecture courses on epic, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and topics in Roman culture. Jaeger researches stories that Romans told and the monuments they built to preserve their history.
English Professor Steven Shankman teaches eighteenth-century literature, the classical tradition, and comparative literature. He is a Distinguished Professor of English and Classics in the College of Arts and Sciences at the UO and Director of the Oregon Humanities Center. He is also a participating faculty member in the Comparative Literature program. Recent books by Shankman include The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China, Plato and Postmodernism, and In Search of the Classic: Reconsidering the Greco-Roman Tradition, Homer to Valéry and Beyond.
Career Prospects
With strong liberal-arts training in classics, you can go on to study law, finance, education, or a variety of other professions. High school Latin teachers are in high demand, and many prestigious professional schools look for students with the kind of broad-based liberal arts training offered by the UO classics department. A bachelor’s degree in classics prepares students for entry into graduate programs in classics, law, finances, linguistics, comparative literature, ancient history, education, and archaeology.