Classics

Specialist seminars form the core of the Cambridge MPhil experience. All MPhil students in Classics attend a series of research skills seminars on key topics, intellectual and practical. Seminars are targeted to evolving student needs, starting – for example – with sessions on finding a topic, identifying a question and getting the most from one’s supervisor, through fundamental training in handling and, if appropriate, building databases, interpreting primary sources and so on, to writing research proposals and preparing for the next career stage.

In addition, each MPhil student enrols in two sets of weekly ‘Text and Topic’ seminars (one in Michaelmas Term, and one in Lent). This year's topics can be found in the MPhil handbook. In Easter Term, all students give short presentations on their thesis topics in small-group work-in-progress seminars. Together, these seminars are a great forum for exchanging ideas, experimenting with arguments, and getting to know fellow students and Faculty.

These MPhil seminars are supplemented by optional postgraduate classes in Greek and Roman Epigraphy, Greek and Roman Numismatics, Mycenaean Epigraphy, and Palaeography and Textual Criticism. MPhil students are also warmly invited to attend undergraduate lecture courses in Classics (current undergraduate courses) and encouraged to take part in the Faculty’s weekly research seminars (including a postgraduate-run interdisciplinary seminar).

For those who need more or less intensive instruction in ancient Greek or Latin, this is available at beginner and intermediate levels. There is also (unexamined) training available in academic German, and (through the University's Language Centre) in a wide range of modern languages at different levels.