The UCD Classical Society, in conjunction with the UCD School of Classics, is proud to announce that the annual Inaugural Lecture this year will be given by historian and novelist Dr Adrian Goldsworthy! Check out Dr Goldsworthy’s website for an overview of his extensive fiction and non-fiction books! Everyone is welcome, and you can register here (registering will help with planning the reception!).
The details of this year’s lecture are as follows:
Dr Adrian Goldsworthy
“Parthians, Persians and Romans: Empires, War, Cold War and Co-Existence in the Ancient World“
The Classical Association of Ireland is delighted to announce the 2024 Latin Summer school, an exciting opportunity to learn Latin through a two-week immersion.
The Latin Summer School is designed for secondary school students between the ages of 12 and 18, with little or no knowledge of Latin and/or Classics.
If you are not studying Latin or Classics, but you are interested in ancient languages and history, this is the place for you! Whether you are studying Classical Studies or the new Junior Certificate Classics or not, the Summer School offers an exciting opportunity to explore the culture of the Romans through their language. Perhaps you want to improve your language learning skills or understanding, communicating and writing in English? Or you are exploring your academic future? If you are you thinking about studying Classical Civilisation, Archaeology, Classical Languages, Ancient or Medieval History, Philosophy, Religion, History of Art, Romance languages in college, the CAI Summer school is a great place to start!
Over the course of two weeks (17-28 June), you will immerse yourself in the language and history of Rome and engage in a variety of fun activities, led by experienced and passionate teachers. There will be interactive and online games, singing contests, Latin cartoons, and a bit of spoken Latin, too!
The Latin Summer School offers courses at Beginners level for students who have not studied Latin before. Each course has three 50-minute classes per day. All resources and learning materials are provided. After two weeks, students will be able to read simple Latin texts and have sufficient knowledge of the language to continue studying it independently or enter a higher-level course.
The Summer School will be conducted in a hybrid format this year, i.e. in presence for those who choose to do so (venue: Trinity College Dublin), and online via Zoom.
Contact hours: three classes/per day for two weeks
If you missed the wonderful Careers with Classics events run by our colleagues in Maynooth University in September, worry not! You can see a full recording of the event on YouTube (below). It’s very inspiring to hear the diverse careers people have undertaken with a Classics degree! Where will Classics take you!?
Prepare to be blown away by the series of evening events in the UCD Classical Museum celebrating the Arts! From storytelling to art, music and poetry, Muses @ UCD has something for everyone! Click on the image above to see the great range of evening events (7.30 -9 pm) taking place over October and November. All events are free, but booking is essential (contact Sasha Smith at sasha.smith@ucd.ie for more information or to book your place, citing which evening/s you would like to attend). We can’t wait to come along and meet the ridiculously talented event leaders and to see the Classical Museum in its evening and nighttime glory!
These events are made possible by the kind support of the Night Time Economy Unit of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media (After Hours at the Museum Scheme).
Are you a budding composer? Would you like to hear your own original music performed live in the National Concert Hall!? Are you a TY, 5th or 6th year student resident on the island of Ireland? If so, our colleagues in the UCD School of Music and the UCD Composition Ensemble have some exciting news for you!!
Send your original music to the UCD Composition Ensemble, and the Ensemble will perform the winning entry in the National Concert Hall (in addition to €500 prize money)! Full details of the competition can be found here, or you can email composition@ucd.ie with any queries. Good luck, everyone, and maybe the ancient world can offer some inspiration!?
Where can a Classics degree take me? What transferable skills can I gain from a Classics degree? What kind of jobs might I pursue after my Classics degree? These are just some of the questions that will be discussed at the Careers with Classics event held in Maynooth University (online and in person) on 21 September. The event is open to undergraduate and postgraduate students of all Irish universities, secondary-school students and anyone interested in studying Classics. Come along and be inspired by the diverse experiences and career journeys of Classics graduates!
The event will be hosted by Maynooth University on Thursday, 21 September 2023, 11:00-13:00. This is a hybrid event: you can attend in person (Classhall F, Arts Building) or online (though Microsoft Teams). For more information or to register your interest, please contact Dr Cosetta Cadau at cosetta.cadau@mu.ie.
As we reach the end of another hectic academic year, it’s time to look back on some of the visits and activities that made this Access Classics’ busiest year to date!
School visits
As ever, second-level school visits are the beating heart of Access Classics, and we were delighted to welcome hundreds of students to UCD and to travel to second-level schools: since September 2022, Access Classics has interacted with … wait for it … c. 1,300 second-level students!! Working closely with the UCD Classics Museum, and its curator Dr Jo Day, we welcomed second-level school groups from Dublin, Wexford and Leitrim to the UCD campus, where the students took part in lots of activities, including tours of the Museum collection, artefact handling, unlocking the mysteries of ancient languages and creating curse tablets!
We also continued our visits to schools. Highlights include meeting the Transition Year students and their teacher Chantelle Delahoy in Loreto Beaufort and chatting with the newly formed Classics Club in St Raphaela’s Secondary School in Stillorgan, run by former UCD Classics student Dylan McKeever. It was great to see such enthusiasm for Classics in a school that does not currently offer the subject at Junior or Senior Cycle! We were also delighted to continue the strong tradition of collaboration beyond the UCD Classics corridor, joining forces with the UCD College of Arts and Humanities to welcome visiting students from America during the summer, with UCD Global to introduce newly arrived international students to options available for study in university, and with UCD Access and Lifelong Learning to bring Classics to DEIS-school students during a UCD Experience day in March!
Classical Association of Ireland Teachers (CAI-T) Young Classicist Awards, 2023
March was a particularly busy month for Access Classics: we hosted school visits to UCD, travelled to Cork to chat about goddesses in University College Cork and, most importantly, collaborated with the Classical Association of Ireland-Teachers (always a huge pleasure!) on two events: the Young Classicist Awards and the Leaving Certificate Lecture Day.
Access Classics’ Dr Christopher Farrell and Dr Bridget Martin joined Trinity’s Dr Charlie Kerrigan to judge the Young Classicist Awards and were blown away by the high standard! On 14 March, we were delighted to facilitate CAI-T in hosting the Awards in UCD (in person for the first time since 2020!). On the day, the finalists in the four categories – Junior Award (1st-3rd year), Senior Award (4th-6th year), Languages Award (for a project based on/with a component of Latin or Ancient Greek) and the Sustainability Award (for a project connected to Global Sustainability Goals) – presented their projects to the hundreds-strong crowd of students and teachers, with CAI-T’s wonderful Caitríona Maher acting as MC!
The students did amazing work, producing creative projects ranging from stop-motion animation videos to hand-drawn comic strips, paintings, sculptures, posters, essays, PowerPoints and even some spoken Ancient Greek! To round out the day, Access Classics’ Bridget gave a short lecture on Greek tragic drama as a preface to an amazing student-production of Euripides’ Medea! With the amount and standard of entries going up each year, we can’t wait to see what next year’s competition will bring!
CAI-T Leaving Certificate Lecture Day
Close on the heels of the Young Classicist Awards, Access Classics’ Chris organised the in-person return of the CAI-T Leaving Certificate Lecture Day, which was held in UCD on 25 March. Huge thanks to the UCD School of Classics’ lecturers who kindly gave up their Saturday afternoon to present short lectures on aspects of the new Leaving Certificate curriculum to a full house of c. 180 students and teachers! All handouts and PowerPoints from the day are available by clicking on the “CAI-T lecture day 2023” tab above. The strands and topics covered are as follows:
Gods and Humans: Experiencing Ancient Temples (Dr Jo Day)
Gods and Humans: Funerary Practices (Dr Bridget Martin)
Judging them by the Enemies: Alexander and the Persians; Caesar and the Gauls (Assoc. Prof. Philip de Souza)
Gods and Humans: Morality and Living Well in Plato’s Crito (Dr Christopher Farrell)
Roman Spectacle: The Colosseum and Circus Maximus (Assoc. Prof. Alexander Thein)
World of Heroes: Odysseus and Aeneas as Heroes (Dr Nicholas Freer)
World of Heroes: The Aeneid as Propaganda (Dr Helen Dixon)
Student news
The Access Classics team was delighted to join forces with Dr Martin Brady to run the level-three Access Classics module in UCD for the third time this year! This module, which teaches students techniques of outreach and engagement, always attracts very dedicated and enthusiastic students, and this year was no exception! From conducting podcast interviews to producing posters explaining and advertising artefacts from the Classics museum, doing an amazing job with the module Twitter account (@AccessClassics) and being constant supports at Access Classics events, the students were a stellar bunch this year!
Spreading the word
In exciting news, Access Classics will feature in an upcoming publication! Arising from a joint talk on Classics at second level in Ireland (for a Classical Influences and Irish Culture (CLIC) seminar in May 2022), Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson, Ms Aryn Penn and Access Classics’ Dr Bridget Martin wrote a chapter entitled “Green shoots on the Emerald Isle: an update on Classics in schools and communities in Ireland” for “Class and Classics”, a Trends in Classics volume by De Gruyter. This gives an overview of Classics in and outside the classroom in Ireland, and we are particularly pleased that the chapter will be available through Open Access, so keep an eye out!
In April 2023, Access Classics launched a survey of Classics at second level in Ireland!
We sent a questionnaire to all second-level schools to gain a greater understanding of the current landscape of Classics in second-level schools in Ireland (e.g. how many schools offer Classics in some form, how many students take Classics/Greek/Latin, how many schools offer Classics at TY level), uncover the reasons the majority of second-level schools cannot/ do not offer Classics, and measure the reach and impact of Access Classics at second level, particularly the use of the Access Classics Transition Year Unit on Classical Studies. This is just the first step in some far larger plans for Access Classics, and we look forward to seeing what emerges from the responses! If you would like more information on this, drop an email to bridget.martin@ucd.ie.
Thank you!
Finally, a huge thank you to all the students, teachers, colleagues (in and outside UCD) and friends for their help and enthusiasm over the past year! It was a particularly busy academic year, and we looked forward to doing it all again next year!
The Classical Association of Ireland (CAI) Summer School will take place on 18 and 19 August, 2023, in Maynooth University! Join the CAI for lots of Classics chat and for a great line-up of talks, including the intriguingly titled keynote by Dr Jane Masséglia (Leicester): “Hoodies with Knives: A Field Guide to the Romans of Inner Anatolia”. For more information on the Summer School, please contact Dr Maeve O’Brien at maeve.obrien@mu.ie, and click on the form below for registration details.
Since its creation in 2019, a fundamental aim of Access Classics has been to increase knowledge about and uptake of Classics in second-level schools in Ireland. To help us achieve this aim, we are conducting a survey of all second-level schools and adult-education institutes in Ireland to gain a greater understanding of the following:
(i) the current landscape of Classics in second-level schools in Ireland (e.g. how many schools offer Classics in some form, how many students take Classics/Greek/Latin, how many schools offer Classics at TY level);
(ii) the barriers to maintaining and introducing Classics in second-level schools (whether lack of knowledge about the subject, lack of interest from teachers and/or students, lack of resources, etc.)
(iii) the impact of Access Classics, particularly the use of the Access Classics Transition Year Unit on Classical Studies.
The data we receive from this survey will form part of a report on Classics in second-level education in Ireland that will be available on this website (keep an eye out for updates!) and will be used to lobby for greater support for the subject at government level.
A link to a questionnaire will be sent to all second-level schools and adult-education institutes. If your school does not receive the link and you would like to be involved, please email Dr Bridget Martin, Director of the Access Classics, at bridget.martin@ucd.ie.
The UCD Classical Society, in conjunction with the UCD School of Classics, is proud to announce that the annual Inaugural Lecture this year will be given by Dr Joseph Skinner (Newcastle University). Following the successful return of the Inaugural Lecture last year, we look forward to welcoming many students, staff and friends for a wonderful evening! All are welcome! The details of this year’s lecture are as follows:
Dr Joseph Skinner (Newcastle University)
“The Histories of the explored (the explored exploring…)“
Access Classics 