This year will be a monumental one for Lawrence’s humanities department; senior Delia Lipkin, our university’s last Classics major, is expected to graduate this coming spring. A long string of happy coincidences led her to Classics, a major that she described as antiquated because of the ambiguous nature of the term “classics” — they’re a little farther back than Jane Eyre, she joked — explaining it instead as a field of study on the history, culture, art and beyond of the ancient Mediterranean.
The ancient Greek Parthenon. Photo courtesy of Phanatic, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Lipkin began her journey like she believes many Classics students her age did — by reading the “Percy Jackson” series growing up. It wasn’t until high school, however, that she became seriously invested in pursuing further Classics studies. Lipkins’ best friend, who was taking Latin with her at the time, invited her to a lecture on adaptations of Sophocles’ play “Antigone” through the ages. Though she went on nothing more than her friend’s insistence, she came out of that lecture a changed woman.
“I left this talk thinking ‘okay, yeah. I’m going to get a Classics degree,’” Lipkin reminisced. “Sitting there listening to that professor talk and I was like … I cannot imagine studying literally anything else. It was my villain origin story.”
All that was left was to find somewhere to pursue Classics. As a graduate of the high school class of 2021, however, Lipkin graduated during the COVID-19 pandemic, restricting her ability to formally tour colleges. So, being familiar with the campus due to her older sister attending, she decided to choose Classics at Lawrence.
Unfortunately, a huge obstacle posed itself at the end of her first year when she decided to formally declare her field of study. Her advisor, Ottilia Buerger Professor of Classical Studies and Associate Professor of Classics Randall McNeill, was the one to break it to her: the Classics major would no longer be offered after that year. Lipkin, shocked by the sudden news, was determined to complete what she had started. After many talks with both McNeill and administration, Lipkin was grandfathered into the major, having come to Lawrence specifically for it. Come Fall Term 2022, she would begin her time becoming “the last one standing” as her Classics major friends began to graduate.
Lipkin expressed sadness over the choice to discontinue the Classics major at Lawrence, especially because of the expansion of Classics as an academic discipline in the last century. The field of study was, at one time, only accessible to people of privileged identities, impermeable to those who fell outside that circle. Presently, the field has become more open to historically underrepresented groups due to what Lipkin believes to be wider and earlier exposure to Classics-related pop culture, such as “Percy Jackson.” Despite the increased accessibility and therefore greater interest in the subject, Lipkin pointed out the irony of fewer chances to study it at Lawrence and beyond. Even on the first day of Fall Term this year, she recalls talking to peers about their love for all things classical.
“It’s not that interest in [Classics] itself is dwindling; it’s opportunities to study that are dwindling,” Lipkin said. “It breaks my heart.”
Despite her sadness that Classics is no longer a major option, Lipkin is making the most of the opportunity she’s been given. She especially enjoys studying literature in her “In Translation” classes, where she and her classmates engage with works of classic drama and literature in open discussion, which in turn help foster her own ideas and theories that she explores extensively in her work.
When she was a junior, she took her studies to one of the most prominent sites of Classic studies: Rome. There, her program took “studying on site” to an even greater level; many of Lipkin’s classes, especially in her “Art and Architecture in the Roman Empire” course, happened at the actual locations of the work she studied.
“If we were talking about the Pantheon, we would meet at the Pantheon,” Lipkin said. “It was just incredible getting to talk about and learn about that history while standing in that history.”
As a senior this year, Lipkin is coming up on her capstone project. Though still in the early stages of it, she made it clear she intends to write on modern usage of classical tropes, specifically katabasis, a trope where a hero journeys into the underworld. Though katabasis most often refers to a literal descent, Lipkin plans to examine instances in which the trope may manifest thematically.
Lipkin encouraged Lawrentians to take a Classics course if they can, because she knows better than anyone that it might just lead to something.
“I sort of just fell into these things, I fell into being interested in Classics, I fell into finding Lawrence,” Lipkin admitted. Still, she declared: “But I feel strongly about them now having fallen into them.”