The Department of Classics and Relgious Studies is committed to fostering interest in the ancient world not only among UI students, but within the wider community as well. To this end, the department hosts an event every spring called “Homerathon” where UI students, faculty, staff, and Iowa City locals gather for a public performance of Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey. Every fall around Halloween, Director of Undergraduate Studies Brandon Dean leads a Cemetery Walk in Iowa City popular with students and open to the entire community. Throughout the academic year, the Department also hosts a regular Colloquium series through which scholars from around the country are invited to the University of Iowa to give public lectures on a wide range of topics in Classics and Religious Studies. The department also features a Youtube Channel, Bible & Archaeology, founded by Professor Robert Cargill, and an open-access journal called Ancient Exchanges, edited by Associate Professor of Instruction Adrienne Ho Rose, that aims to publish polished translations of ancient texts from around the world.
Public engagement in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
The University of Iowa’s core mission extends beyond the classrooms, laboratories, studios, and libraries where we educate students, conduct our research, and create new artistic work. Equally important is our engagement with communities throughout Iowa, across the nation, and around the world.
Our faculty, students, and staff work to solve problems, imagine new approaches to challenges, and improve quality of life, often through service-learning courses in which students earn academic credit.
It’s a virtuous circle: When UI expertise is harnessed to help a community or region improve the lives of its residents, the experience adds unique educational value to students’ academic journeys, and advances the research and creative production of our faculty. In turn, that new knowledge empowers us to help more communities, solve more problems, and improve more lives.
The UI is not just the University of Iowa, we're the University for Iowa—and throughout the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we are proud to serve.