Taking the Road to Antiquity
The Colosseum in Rome, the ruins of ancient Greece, ancient forts like Vindolanda in England—remnants of the ancient world exist in the modern age, waiting to be explored. The Classics Department takes its students beyond the classroom, giving them up close and personal experiences with historic locations.
The department houses one of UGA’s founding faculty-led study abroad programs, UGA in Rome, which began in 1970. Since then, the department has added two more programs—UGA Classics Europe: Unearthing the Past and UGA-Franklin Croatia: Heritage Conservation and Archaeology—and offers affiliate programs with UGA at Oxford and Cortona, Italy.
Erasmo leads Unearthing the Past, a faculty-led Maymester program traversing Europe from Greece to Scotland, stopping at ancient sites along the way.
“I think it’s good for our students to see other cultures in their contexts,” Erasmo says. “It’s essential for students to get out there and for us to lead them in our own groups. We teach at locations and at museums, on street corners, in churches, archaeological sites, anywhere we can.”
These programs are open to UGA students of all disciplines. The study abroad programs have become something of a recruiting tool for the department, with many students adding second majors or minors inspired by their trips.
“We put a lot of work into it,” Erasmo says. “But what we get out of it is seeing students completely engaged, completely immersed in classical antiquity and its reception, and it helps us broaden our major and minor bases.”