Penn State Penn State: College of the Liberal Arts

Department ofClassics and Ancient
Mediterranean Studies

Welcome to Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CAMS) at Penn State!

CAMS is the study of cultures that arose and flourished around the Mediterranean basin (including Egypt, Greece, Rome, Anatolia, Israel, Mesopotamia, and North Africa) from ancient Mesopotamia (ca. 4000 BCE) to the end of Greco-Roman antiquity (ca. 600 CE). CAMS investigates the whole scope of the ancient Mediterranean world and trains students to interpret the linguistic, historical, and archaeological evidence of its cultures.

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Committed to Diversity

The Department of Classics & Ancient Mediterranean Studies (CAMS) at Penn State is devoted to fostering an environment of diversity, equity, and inclusion for all who study the ancient world. As an open and welcoming academic community, we embrace a view of the ancient Mediterranean and its legacies as the common heritage of all people, regardless of gender, color, race, nationality, religion, age, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

In keeping with our conviction that scholarship on antiquity benefits from a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, CAMS supports diversity in research areas, classroom activities, and above all in its membership, especially among groups historically under-represented in the field.

We affirm Penn State’s commitment as a public institution of higher education to effectively serve the members of our communities at all levels – on campus, across the state, and beyond – and we welcome the input of our students, colleagues, and friends as we pursue this goal.

Monica Pineiro named Liberal Arts college marshal for summer 2024 commencement

Monica Pineiro will represent the Penn State College of the Liberal Arts as its college marshal at the summer 2024 commencement ceremony on Aug. 10 in the Bryce Jordan Center at Penn State University Park. Pineiro will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in classics and ancient Mediterranean studies and a minor in history.

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Profs. Killebrew and Moore promoted!

The Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies is excited to congratulate Prof. Ann Killebrew and Prof. Christopher Moore on their recent promotions to full professor!

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Acclaimed Egyptologist Donald Redford retires after six-decade career

The Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies congratulates Prof. Donald Redford on his retirement after a six-decade career. Prof. Redford made Penn State an authority on the study of ancient Egyptian civilization and he will be missed by his students and colleagues!

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CAMS 45 gets shout-out in Penn Stater magazine

In CAMS 45, students get creative in exploring the modern relevance of ancient myths.

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CAMS professors win Liberal Arts teaching awards!

Prof. Laura Marshall is the recipient of the College of the Liberal Arts’ Outstanding Teaching Award for Tenure Line Faculty and Prof. Erin Hanses is the recipient of the College’s Outstanding Teaching Award for Teaching Faculty. Congratulations, Laura and Erin!

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Featured Graduate

Grace Blaha selected student marshal in CAMS

Congratulations to Grace Blaha, our spring 2024 Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies student marshal in Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts!

Grace is the daughter of Martha and John Blaha of Los Altos, California. A Paterno Fellow and Schreyer Scholar, she is graduating with bachelor of arts degrees in Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Labor and Human Resources, a bachelor of science degree in Anthropology, and a minor in Jewish Studies. 

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February 23, 2024
12:15 pm
102 Weaver and via Zoom
This talk proposes a novel, working hypothesis of the socio-material conditions driving early Christian collecting, compositional, and interpretive habits in the latter part of the second century. Integrating recent scholarship that considers Pauline influence on the Gospels with work in classics on the editorial and authorial logics of collections and miscellany, it situates the textual practices of so-called Christian intellectuals within the broader literary and agonistic intellectual scene of imperial Rome.
December 1, 2023
4:00 pm
Weaver Building, 102 and Online via Zoom
The Babylonian Epic of Creation, also known as Enuma Elish, was the most widely studied cuneiform text in first millennium BCE Mesopotamia. Initially composed to extol the Babylonian god Marduk and his home city Babylon, it was also popular in Assyria, where it served as a blueprint for the autocratic model promoted by the rulers of the Assyrian Empire. As time went by, the epic informed the religious identities of a variety of cities and states in the Levant, and even left traces in the works of some Greek philosophers. But on several occasions, first in Assyria and later in the Biblical book of Genesis, the epic and the cultic festivals during which it was recited also became the target of newly introduced forms of polemical “deconstruction” that changed the religious discourse of the times in decisive ways. This lecture analyzes the volatile history of a text whose theo-ideological rigidity did not preclude it from being subjected to a number of radical reinterpretations over a period of some one-thousand years.
Dr. Daniel Falk and Dr. Jennifer Singletary have been awarded a grant from the Database of Religious History (DRH), a largescale quantitative-qualitative database for the cultural evolution of religions, hosted by the University of British Columbia. The award will fund a research project, titled “Prayer as Interaction: A Quantitative Study,” which aims to answer questions about the correlation between various features of prayers and conceptions of superhuman agents.
November 3, 2023
4:00 pm
Weaver Building, 102 and Online via Zoom
Textuality in the ancient world had many more dimensions than simply alphabetic words for individual or public reading. Potent texts, like the words of gods, could be accessed through touch and through washing, through wearing and through the visual gaze on assemblages of letters. This presentation introduces the sensory features of the written word by which the authority of institutions, priesthoods, and religious traditions came into the lives of ordinary people. I will begin with some comparative materials from modern Islam and ancient Egypt before focusing on early views of Christian scripture.
October 9, 2023
11:15 am
Weaver 102 or on Zoom
One of the major scholarly revolutions in the study of ancient Judaism is the rejection of outdated binaries that stratified Jews into the scholastic elite and the superstitious masses, dividing between rabbis and sorcerers. Instead, recent work offers a more complex portrait, where diverse social actors engaged in contests over the most effective and legitimate forms of prophylactics, as well as those individuals authorized to perform them. This talk engages these questions through three vignettes: a rabbinic tale featuring a Satanic encounter, the continued discovery of the invocation of rabbis and rabbinic formulae on Aramaic incantation bowls, and the enigmatic usage of “pseudo-script” on roughly a quarter of the incantation bowl corpus.