Classics

Engaged Classics

Engaged Classics takes what you’re learning in your courses and puts it into practice through internships, research, study away, winter term, career exploration, and beyond.

Here’s a sampling of recent projects, field experiences, and post-graduate destinations for majors in the classics department.

RISE at Oberlin
Research. Internships. Study Away. Experiential Learning.

Ways Majors in the Classics Department Rise

Research

  • If These Walls Could Talk: Elevating Latin Love Elegy in Pompeian Graffiti
  • Women and Magic in Classical Athens (Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Research Fellow)
  • Friends, Barbarians, Future Countrymen: Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and the Rhetoric of Empire
  • Narratorial Voice and the Self in Propertius Book 4
  • Student-faculty collaborative research projects include Creating a Commentary for Seneca’s Natural Questions, Book VI, and The Karanis Housing Project: An Interactive Map of the University of Michigan Excavations at Karanis, Egypt

Internships

  • Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC
  • University of Pennsylvania, University Museum
  • Morgantina Archaeological Project, Aidone, Italy

Study Away

  • Oberlin-in-London, Spring 2017: History of Medicine, Cancer, Magic
  • Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (ICCS), Rome, Italy
  • Oxford-St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, England
  • College Year in Athens, Semester and Academic Year Program, Greece

Experiential Learning

  • Winter term in Greece, led by Professor Kirk Ormand
  • Students learn from visiting scholars through the Charles Beebe Martin Classical Lecture, an annual series that ranks among the most distinguished in the field of Classics in the United States.
  • Outside the classroom, students hone language and research skills by visiting Special Collections in the main library to peruse Byzantine manuscripts or Greek papyri.
  • The Allen Memorial Art Museum has a collection of ancient Greek and Roman art, as well as works from the Renaissance and later that reflect the Classical tradition.

First Destinations of Recent Majors in the classics department

  • Positions:
    • Business manager at Norton Publishing
    • Product management specialist III at Thermo Fisher Scientific
    • Editor at the Minnesota Historical Society
    • Information specialist at Vertex Pharmaceuticals
    • Director of recruitment at Teach for America
    • Senior associate producer at MTV
    • Museum coordinator at American Bookbinders Museum in San Francisco
    • And crisis services supervisor at National Runaway Safeline in Chicago
  • Graduate Schools:

    Our students attend law school, medical school, and business school and pursue graduate study in Classics at Yale; University of Chicago; Bryn Mawr; University of California, Berkeley; University of Edinburgh; Princeton University; University of Cincinnati; University of Michigan; and University of Pennsylvania. Specific degrees include an MFA at Northwestern and a PhD in Classical and Ancient Studies at Ohio State. A current student won a Beinecke Fellowship