The Classics Department at UCSB invites applications for a graduate opportunity fellowship to support talented scholars who come from groups historically underrepresented in Classics and who would benefit from an additional year of graduate study. The successful applicant will receive, along with regular admission to the PhD program, a seven-year funding package that includes an initial “bridge” fellowship year and six additional years of support from a combination of fellowships and TAships. During the bridge year, the Department will provide a program of study tailored to the needs and interests of the fellow, including such components as courses in Greek, Latin, or other ancient languages; directed research in the fellow’s area(s) of interest; and faculty mentorship. Prospective fellows must be citizens or permanent residents of the United State at the time of application. Applicants who wish to be considered for this fellowship should submit a regular application to our PhD program (deadline Jan. 1, 2023).
News
Lynne Huffer (Emory University) will visit UCSB Classics on November 6
During her visit, Professor Huffer, who is a Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor at Emory University, will lead a collage workshop (“Cut, Layer, Create: A Thought Collage Workshop”) and give a lecture (“Foucault, Extinction, and the Erinyes”).
The lecture will rake place in HSSB 4080 from 3:30pm to 5pm. For more information about the workshop, please contact Helen Morales.
Sasha-Mae Eccleston to Give the 2026 J.P. Sullivan Memorial Lecture on October 9
The lecture, titled “Salvage the Song: Gender, Genealogy, and Speech in Hesiod and Ward,” will take place on Friday, October 9, from 3:30pm to 5pm in HSSB 4080.
Helen Morales to Give a Talk at SBMA
On Sunday, May 31st, at 11am, Professor Helen Morales will give a talk titled “Collages of the Classical: The Hallucinatory Brilliance of Elliott Hundley” at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. In her talk, Professor Morales will address art in the exhibition By Achilles’ Tomb: Elliott Hundley and Antiquity @ SBMA and will discuss how Hundley uses Greek myth to comment on contemporary concerns. She will consider stories about the tomb of the tragic hero Achilles, and make comparisons between Hundley’s art and the recent collages of Kara Walker and Lynne Huffer, which also use the classical to raise urgent contemporary questions.
Admission is free for students with a valid ID. Tickets for the talk can be reserved here.
Annie Lamar and Julio Vega-Payne Win an IHC Faculty Collaborative Award
Prof. Lamar and Prof. Vega-Payne have won one of the Faculty Collaborative Awards offered by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center for their project titled “Ancient Voices, Modern Landscapes: An Environmental Humanities Showcase.”
This project will create a dual-format environmental humanities showcase (digital and physically displayed) pairing short passages from ancient Mediterranean texts with contemporary environmental media. Prof. Lamar and Prof. Vega-Payne will produce 5-7 curated “eco-diptychs” that will illuminate how ecological knowledge circulates across time. Each diptych will feature a brief ancient passage on themes such as agriculture, water scarcity, flood narratives, wildfire, extraction, or environmental transformation, alongside modern material such as wildfire severity maps, sea-level-rise projections, satellite images of drought, photographs of local degradation, or visualized biodiversity and pollution datasets. Each pairing will include a 200-300 word interpretive commentary.
Congratulations, Annie and Julio!
Harmonia Rosales to Discuss Her Debut Book with Helen Morales
The renowned artist Harmonia Rosales will discuss with Helen Moral her debut book, Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic (2025), in which Rosales weaves age-old and her own ancestral knowledge to shape a sweeping and singular literary experience. The event will take place inside the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025, from 5:30 to 7:30pm. A book signing will follow immediately after the discussion, and books will be available for purchase at the Museum.
For more detail, please consult this page.
Prof. Lamar Publishes Op-Ed on Language Learning and AI
Prof. Lamar’s latest op-ed focuses on a very timely issue: the salience of language degrees in an age when words can be translated by machines. You can read it here.
Helen Morales delivers J.H. Gray Lectures at Cambridge
Professor Helen Morales will deliver the prestigious J.H. Gray Lectures at Cambridge University, May 13-15, 2025. The lecture series was established in 1928 by an endowment from Reverend J.H. Gray, a former Fellow and Vice-President of Queens’ College, and canon of Peterborough. Professor Morales’ Gray Lectures will showcase her pathbreaking research on Modern Art, Race, and Ancient Fiction, including lectures entitled “Re-encountering antiquity with Harmonia Rosales: classical education and aesthetic dissent” and “Meeting Apollo and Daphne again: theorizing race through the art of Firelei Báez,” and a seminar on “Beyond metaphor. somatic transformations in Heliodorus, Aesop and Homer.”
Helen Morales has been awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University
The Faculty of Languages of Uppsala University has appointed Helen Morales as honorary doctor. As they note in their press release, Helen “writes about the ancient world and its reception in modern times for both subject experts and the broader public” and “has thus become one of the most important voices in classical studies of the decade.”
Congratulations, Helen!
UCSB Classics Welcomes New Faculty Member Julio Vega-Payne
We are delighted to announce that, effective November 1, has joined the Classics faculty as an Assistant Professor. Professor Vega-Payne graduated from UCSB with a PhD in Classics in 2022 and, for the past two years, has held a prestigious UC President’s Post-Doctoral Fellowship at UCLA. His addition to our faculty will open up new connections with Environmental Humanities and will establish (with Annie Lamar) a cluster of excellence in archaic Greek poetry. He will teach the full range of Classics courses, including new courses on literature & the environment, the reception of myth in Japanese anime and manga, and Latin for Spanish speakers.
Welcome, Professor Vega-Payne!