Academics

Undergraduate Program

The undergraduate program in Classics offers a challenging and rewarding course of study in the unified field of Graeco-Roman culture. It is designed to accommodate both the aspirant to graduate studies in Classics or related fields and the student primarily interested in an undergraduate, liberal arts major.

Classics is an excellent all-round Liberal Arts degree that serves as a superb preparation for virtually any field of professional endeavor. Through their exposure to Latin or Greek and many of the greatest works of world literature, Classics majors often come to excel at writing and verbal communication. It’s a tough curriculum, so Medical and Law Schools take notice. It’s also a comfortable, small environment where you are likely to know your teachers: the majors-to-faculty ratio at UCSB is around 5 to 1, so majors are assured of the kind of close attention that enriches the undergraduate experience and often yields persuasive letters of recommendation.

Graduate Program

At the graduate level, we offer both the MA and PhD with optional emphases in Literature & Theory and Ancient History. The strength of our Master’s program is well known. We have been very successful over the years in placing our best MA students in some of the nation’s top programs, and our MA alumni now teach at some of the leading universities and colleges across the country. More recently we have been developing our PhD program, which while relatively small (3 PhDs in the last 3 years, with 3 students now advanced to candidacy) enjoys a very good placement record (all recent PhDs currently employed in college-level positions). The relatively small size of our program ensures a high degree of faculty attention, and our popular undergraduate courses offer a great deal of teaching experience (normally as Teaching Assistants, but sometimes as independent Latin instructors) to our graduate students—a distinct strength of our program now augmented by our new pedagogical courses (Teaching Assistant Practicum and Language Teaching Practicum).