Classics (research) (MA)

About the programme

The Research MA Classics and Ancient Civilizations covers two years and can be studied in four tracks: Classics is one of them. While diving into the literary, cultural and intellectual worlds of Greece and Rome, you will be involved in current research, and stimulated to reflect on the significance of Classics to the 21st century.

About our Common Courses
The Research Master Classics shares two Common Courses with Assyriology, Egyptology and Hebrew and Aramaic Studies (the other Classics and Ancient Civilizations specializations). These courses are geared towards connecting the various disciplines and cross-fertilizing work in your own specialization. Students are invited to examine cultural phenomena that transcend their own discipline and engage in discussions with fellows from neighbouring fields. Since classes in the Research Master level always follow recent trends in research, specific topics presented in the Common Courses may change every year.

Thesis and Research Career Seminar
In the fourth semester, you are expected to start writing your thesis. In addition to individual guidance by your supervisor, the Research Career seminar will bolster up your work on the thesis by training you in specific writing and presentation skills. You will also learn, based on your thesis preparation, how to write a research proposal on the basis of academic requirements used by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Moreover, you will learn how to the process of blind peer-review works and how to write a paper that is admissible to a peer-reviewed journal.

Research school course
Research master’s students also take courses offered by the national research school in classical studies, OIKOS (up to 5 EC per academic year; 10 EC in the entire study programme).

Programme structure

First year
Course	EC
Common Course: Fragments	10
Seminar Greek: Ancient Narratives of Migration	10
Seminar Latin: Talking Objects: Poetry, Materiality, and the Epigrammatic Tradition	10
Administration, society and culture in Roman North Africa, 46 BC - AD 429	10
Research Workshop: Greek and Latin Epigraphy (5 EC)	5
Research Workshop: Greek and Latin Epigraphy (10 EC)	10
Greek Papyrology	10
Seminar Ancient Philosophy: Plato’s Theaetetus: Ancient and Modern Readings	10
OIKOS Reading List Greek/Latin	variable
Concepts & Methods in the Ancient Near East: Social Worlds of Ancient Art Producers	10
Seminar Greek: Ancient Greek and Roman Theories of Beauty and Art	10
Seminar Latin: Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights: Canons and Canonization	10
Editing Greek Papyri	10
Core Course: Methodologies and Theories – Medieval & Early Modern	10
Jesus of Nazareth in his 1st century Jewish-Palestinian Context	10
Natural Disasters in Antiquity	10
Philosophy in Late Antiquity	10
OIKOS seminar: Neo-Latin Literature: Augustus, the Augustan Era and its Renaissance Reception	10

Second year
Course	EC
Research Career Seminar	10
MA Thesis Classics and Ancient Civilizations (Research)	30
Common Course: Fragments	10
Seminar Greek: Ancient Narratives of Migration	10
Seminar Latin: Talking Objects: Poetry, Materiality, and the Epigrammatic Tradition	10
Administration, society and culture in Roman North Africa, 46 BC - AD 429	10
Research Workshop: Greek and Latin Epigraphy (5 EC)	5
Research Workshop: Greek and Latin Epigraphy (10 EC)	10
Greek Papyrology	10
Seminar Ancient Philosophy: Plato’s Theaetetus: Ancient and Modern Readings	10
OIKOS Reading List Greek/Latin	variable
Concepts & Methods in the Ancient Near East: Social Worlds of Ancient Art Producers	10
Seminar Greek: Ancient Greek and Roman Theories of Beauty and Art	10
Seminar Latin: Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights: Canons and Canonization	10
Core Course: Methodologies and Theories – Medieval & Early Modern	10
Editing Greek Papyri	10
Natural Disasters in Antiquity	10
Philosophy in Late Antiquity	10
OIKOS seminar: Neo-Latin Literature: Augustus, the Augustan Era and its Renaissance Reception	10

For a more detailed programme, see the Prospectus.

Please note that this guide applies to the current academic year, which means that the curriculum for next year may slightly differ.

Ineke Sluiter

Professor of Greek Language and Literature

“We have a wonderful and international team of colleagues here at Leiden: Dutch, German and American classicists and guest-researchers come together to work side-by-side in a friendly yet competitive and challenging academic environment.Between us, we offer a wide range of expertise, including Homer, rhetoric, Greek and Roman drama, papyrology, philosophy, or Neo-Latin.”

Research enterprises

"I personally love to involve students in research enterprises – and they are very active and enterprising themselves: we have a manuscript club, where we decipher the oldest manuscript of Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad text is surrounded on all sides by very hard-to-read commentaries that go back to the 3rd century BCE. Our students are currently helping to create a digital edition of this as part of the Homer Multi-text Project, which we are working on together with Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies."

Approaches to Classics

"Our courses offers a great mix: on the one hand we teach the continental approach to Classics, with its emphasis on technical skills and philology and, on the other, the more problem-driven and theory-oriented approach from the Anglo-American world.”