Graduate

The goal of our program is to provide advanced course work in Latin and/or Greek language and literature and to place ancient literary texts in the broader context of ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization.  To accommodate secondary school teachers and students with employment and other obligations during the daytime, all of our advanced Latin and Greek courses are held in the late afternoon and early evening, or in the form of Saturday workshops.  Students may enroll on a full-time or part-time basis.  For more information, please contact our Graduate Director, Professor Francisco Barrenechea (fbarrene@umd.edu).

Opportunities for professional development

The department furnishes numerous further opportunities for graduate students seeking professional training and intellectual enrichment.  The faculty has a history of working closely with pre-collegiate Latin and classical humanities teachers, among them many of the department’s former and current graduate students, on Latin pedagogy, curriculum development, and other projects for the K-12 level.  Graduate students in the department serve as teaching assistants in lower-level literature and classical civilization courses and actively participate in its conferences and workshops for secondary school and university faculty on diverse topics—which in recent years have included gendered responses to Latin literature and its reception, classical influences in the work of Thornton Wilder, and classics in the historically black colleges and universities.  Our graduate students also present individual and collaborative papers at regional classics conferences.

Outside the Department of Classics, we have a large network of affiliate faculty in related areas of study.  A faculty seminar brings departmental and affiliate faculty and students together to share their research several times each semester. A graduate field committee is planned which would further facilitate scholarly exchanges and multi-disciplinary teaching and research supervision in the field of ancient Mediterranean and classical studies, particularly classical reception.

Our Students

The M.A. in Latin, or Latin and Greek, is designed to meet the needs of students who seek post-baccalaureate training in classics to prepare for a career in teaching or for advanced graduate work in the field.  Many students come to classics late in their undergraduate years and require further work in one or both of the classical languages; others are returning to the field after intervening years in other professions.  Our department is small enough to offer students close direction and individualized attention in their work but large enough to provide a faculty which represents a wide range of special interests and talents.  Our program has particular strengths in the study of gender in classical antiquity, and in its longstanding pedagogical and curriculum-based efforts to support Latin at the K-12 level.

The graduate students in our program have been a diverse body, ranging in age from their early twenties to their late sixties.  A large number have been secondary school teachers of Latin (often in combination with other subjects such as Greek, English, history, mathematics, and modern languages).  Among the ways that we address the increasing demand for Latin teachers at the secondary level is by coordinating the content of our course offerings with those of the College Entrance Examination Board’s Advanced Placement examinations in Latin.  Many of our graduate students have, however, gone on to do doctoral work in Classics and other allied disciplines and to pursue other advanced degrees.  Our graduate program also attracts a sizeable group of working professionals in such fields as government, law, medicine, business, computer science, and information technology.