CLHI-BA-Major - Classics/History/Politics, Major

Advisors; Professors CRAMER, FULLER, NEEL

The Classics–History–Politics major offers students interested in the Western intellectual tradition the opportunity for multidisciplinary study supported by training in languages central to that tradition. It culminates in a senior thesis requiring students each to address a major problem in the history of ideas in its historical context. The CHP major is highly flexible, allowing students to fulfill its requirements through varied options within the respective departments. Individuals’ programs, however, must be carefully chosen in consultation with CHP staff so that courses within the constituent disciplines form an integrated whole fully supportive of their eventual senior projects.

All students opting for this major will complete an array of courses establishing their familiarity with the major political, social, and intellectual developments of the Mediterranean and Europe from antiquity to the contemporary world. Further, all will explore the Western tradition’s ways of interpreting its past by attention to both classical and subsequent models. Students’ historical and historiographical coursework will be distributed among the three constituent departments. Meanwhile, they will develop skills in at least one classical and one modern language to the point that they are able to use each in independent reading and research. Declared CHP majors in all undergraduate years will participate in an informal seminar meeting once a block, in which they establish intellectual community with their peers and advisers in discussion of significant texts outside their course material.

Finally, all CHP majors will complete substantial projects of research and criticism integrative of their experience throughout this program; their respective theses will be enriched by consideration of the primary sources in which they are based in the original languages, where possible.

Students may choose as primary advisers for their respective thesis projects any faculty members in a constituent department; other members of the college faculty may be invited to consult on or advise theses by student petition and approval of the CHP staff. One of the major’s core advisers, however, will always serve as first or second reader of thesis work, and advisory faculty will annually approve and, as appropriate, grant honors for all theses in classics–history–politics.