Classics and Religious Studies Bachelor's Degree

The Classics and Religious Studies Bachelor of Arts degree offers an interdisciplinary exploration of human cultures, ideas, and material worlds across time and around the globe. Students study ancient civilizations and their material and intellectual legacies alongside global religious traditions and the political, cultural, and civic debates that shape human societies. The program encourages students to ask big questions about how people understand the world, create identities, establish communities, and decide how to live together.

Shape Your Studies: Classics and Religious Studies majors have a great deal of freedom to create their program. Rather than following a predetermined track, students work with faculty to shape an education around their individual interests. The department's strengths include the study of classical literature, material culture, and archaeology; cross-cultural dialogue with attention to traditions such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Islam; and engagement with questions of religion, power, and politics, including the relationships among religion, science, medicine, and law. We also offer courses that examine these themes in the present-day United States. These offerings explore American civic institutions, public life, and the quandaries that arise when different beliefs and values meet in a democratic society.

Engage Broader Questions: The program emphasizes critical thinking, historical and social inquiry, careful analysis of evidence, and thoughtful dialogue across differences. Students learn to interpret texts and material culture, contextualize ideas and institutions, and consider how different ways of understanding the world come into conversation with one another. Through this approach, the study of ancient civilizations and religious traditions becomes a way of engaging broader questions about belief, ethics, authority, and public life.

Study Abroad: With generous alumni support, the department strongly encourages and helps fund study abroad for its majors.

Admission Requirements

Classics and Religious Studies Courses & Curriculum

View Courses & Resources in the Official Academic Catalog

Among the courses students take are Class I–Breadth-of-Knowledge courses, which are meant to broaden your understanding of classical civilizations and religious traditions and develop critical thinking, analysis, and communication.

Class II Depth of Knowledge courses are meant to deepen students’ knowledge of classical civilizations and religious traditions. These offerings encompass topical and comparative courses that involve complex analyses of ancient cultures and religions and/or connect Greek and Roman cultures and religions to other classical civilizations and religious systems.

Class III Open Electives give students latitude to choose courses they wish to take. In consultation with our advising coordinator, students may select classes from all three areas of the curriculum or focus their choices in one of the three curricular areas (Classical Language, Classical Civilization, or Religious Studies).

Students culminate their studies with a capstone course.