Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity, and in the Western world traditionally refers to the study of Classical Greek and Latin literature and the related languages. It also includes Greco-Roman philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, art, mythology, and society as secondary subjects.
Homer was an ancient Greek author and epic poet. He is the reputed author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epic poems that are the foundational works of ancient Greek literature. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time: for example, in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Virgil refers to him as "Poet sovereign", king of all poets; in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest of poets".
Richard John Alexander Talbert is a British-American contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Ancient History and Classics. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and the idea of space in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Elizabeth Vandiver is an American classical scholar. She is the Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics at Whitman College, having previously taught at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received the prestigious Excellence in Teaching Award from the American Philological Association in 1998. She garnered awards for her teaching from Northwestern University and the University of Georgia. In May 2013, she was awarded Whitman College's "G. Thomas Edwards Award for Excellence in Teaching and Scholarship," the highest award that Whitman College gives to a faculty member.
Nick Lowe is a British classical scholar and film critic.
John Richard "Jaś" Elsner, is a British art historian and classicist, who in 2013 was Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, based at Corpus Christi College, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is mainly known for his work on Roman art, including Late Antiquity and Byzantine art, as well as the historiography of art history, and is a prolific writer on these and other topics. Elsner has been described as "one of the most well-known figures in the field of ancient art history, respected for his notable erudition, extensive range of interests and expertise, his continuing productivity, and above all, for the originality of his mind", and by Shadi Bartsch, a colleague at Chicago, as "the predominant contemporary scholar of the relationship between classical art and ancient subjectivity".
Classical reception studies is the study of how the classical world, especially Ancient Greek literature and Latin literature, have been received since antiquity. It is the study of the portrayal and representation of the ancient world from ancient to modern times. The nature of reception studies is highly interdisciplinary, including literature, art, music, and film. The field of study has, within the past few decades, become an increasingly popular and legitimized topic of interest in Classical studies.
Lorna Hardwick is professor emeritus of classical studies at the Open University. She is a leading authority on classical reception studies and has published several books and articles on the subject, as well being the first editor of the Classical Receptions Journal.
Barbara Elizabeth Goff is a Classics Professor at the University of Reading. She specialises in Greek tragedy and its reception; women in antiquity; postcolonial classics and reception of Greek political thought.
Barbara Graziosi is an Italian classicist and academic. She is Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Her interests lie in ancient Greek literature, and the way in which readers make it their own. She has written extensively on the subject of Homeric literature, in particular the Iliad, and more generally on the transition of the Twelve Olympians from antiquity to the Renaissance. Her most recent research was a project entitled 'Living Poets: A New Approach to Ancient Poetry, which was funded by the European Research Council.
Jennifer Ingleheart is a British classical scholar, who is known for her work on Ovid, Classical reception, and the influence of Rome on the modern understanding of homosexuality. She is Professor of Latin at the University of Durham.
Emily Joanna Gowers, is a British classical scholar. She is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She is an expert on Horace, Augustan literature, and the history of food in the Roman world.
Emily Greenwood is professor of Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She was formerly John M. Musser Professor of Classics and Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek historiography, particularly Thucydides and Herodotus, the development of History as a genre and a modern critical discipline, and local and transnational black traditions of interpreting Greek and Roman classics. Her work explores the appropriation and reinvention of Greco-Roman classical antiquity from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Helen Dale Moore is a British literary scholar, who specialises in medieval and early modern literature. Since 2018, she has served as the President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She is the first woman to hold that position in the college's 500-year history. She is also an associate professor in the Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford. In 2021, she received the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for Amadis in English: A Study in the Reading of Romance as one of the co-winners.
Katherine Harloe is Professor of Classics and Director of the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. Previously she was Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She is an expert on the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the eighteenth-century German classicist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. She is the first black professor of Classics in the UK, and the first woman director of the ICS.
Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis is Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews where she researchers the cultural history of objects and spaces. She is an expert on the reception of Classical material in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Christopher Allan Stray is a British historian of classical scholarship and teaching.
Sarah B. Pomeroy is an American Professor of Classics.
Julia Haig Gaisser is an American classical scholar whose intelligent and entertaining scholarship made the classics much more accessible to students and a wider audience. She is Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus of the Humanities and Professor of Latin at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. She specializes in Latin poetry and its reception by Renaissance humanists.
S. Sara Monoson is Professor of Political Science, Classics and Philosophy at Northwestern University. She specialises in the history of political theory, politics in ancient Greece, and classical receptions.
