Welcome to Contexts for Classics

Contexts for Classics (CfC) was founded in 2001 to explore the reception of classical antiquity in various historical, critical, and creative contexts. We are an interdepartmental consortium of faculty at the University of Michigan, actively engaged in expanding the field of classical reception studies through interdisciplinary collaboration, research, and teaching.

We invite you to browse our website to learn more about our mission,  affiliated faculty,  resources for research in classical reception studies, and information about our annual classical translations contest. We coordinate events around campus and we encourage UM faculty and students to submit event proposals for seed funding and co-sponsorship from Contexts for Classics. 

To join our email list for news and events, please send an email request to CFCInformation@umich.edu.

Contexts for Classics oversees an interdisciplinary and interdepartmental graduate certificate program, open to masters and doctoral students in any department at the University of Michigan with an interest in "classical" languages, literatures, and traditions (including but not limited to Greek, Latin, Tamil, Armenian, Assyrian, Sanskrit, Coptic, Persian, Syriac, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Middle Egyptian, Sumerian and other ancient languages).    

The Graduate Certificate in Classical Reception Studies encourages students to explore the longer history of "the classical" (as idea, ideal, ideology) and to analyze the mediated, situated, and contingent ways in which classical languages and cultures are reimagined in other contexts.  It offers an opportunity to develop an area of expertise in classical reception studies through coursework and a flexible capstone that may take the form of scholarly research, creative work, pedagogical training, and public-facing projects. 

We welcome students interested in exploring and comparing afterlives of "classics" in a wide range of disciplines, including African and African American studies, anthropology, Asian languages and cultures comparative literature, English literature, Germanic studies, history, Latin American studies, Middle East studies, Romance Languages and Literatures, as well as gender and sexuality studies, political theory, musicology, art and architecture, screen arts, visual arts, and the performing arts. 

By supporting the graduate certificate and activities related to this new program, Contexts for Classics strives to create an intellectual community for graduate students across departments, and a space for interdisciplinary dialogue about the meaning and value, the translation and transmission, and the multiple uses (and abuses) of ancient languages and cultures, within diverse cultural and historical contexts.

We also strive to make connections with the public through initiatives like Local Classics, which seeks to expand and complicate what it means for Classics to play out in the public spheres closest to us at U-M and in Ann Arbor.