Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Newsreel It’s not what you think. Unless you think I’ve started subscribing to the National Geographic school of post-naming, in which case you’re a little right. There’s a lot of neat things going on in classics and medieval studies this week. For scholarship, there’s a great article on the influence of J. R. R. Tolkien, […]

Newsreel This week I’ve got a pretty interesting selection here. A medieval medical manuscript that’s an odd mix of science and folklore, research on the criminal profiling done by the vikings, and…There was something else. Oh yes, archaeologists may have actually found the bones of Richard III. This is a really big deal. 

Resources If you’re looking for a quiet place to study, or a place to get some help with your Latin, look no further. In the Modern Languages building, you’ll find two rooms devoted to this task. The Classics (and Medieval) lounge in ML 245B is a second home to a lot of students, providing a […]

Newsreel Not just my Hot Hot Heat cover band or an amazing B movie title anymore! This week’s Newsreel starts in England with a curse scroll, and tours the world to bring you dog archaeologists from Australia and baby volcanoes in Germany. Strange things are afoot in the world of classical studies, but have no […]

Dear parents, You’ve been waiting a while for your child to declare their major, and you may be surprised when they come home for the summer and tell you that it’s classical studies. You were probably hoping for accounting, business, or even engineering, and you’re not sure how it’s different from a regular history degree. […]

This week we’re back with even more courses being offered in the fall, only this time we have some from the more advanced years. Later courses in the program start to develop your interests in a much more specialized way, toward history, textual analysis, art, or even field archaeology. I’ve taken a few of these […]

Newsreel There’s more to classics and medieval studies than field archaeology, though that’s what produces some of the best pictures, without a doubt. Still, there’s worlds of scholars who work with artifacts and ancient texts to better help us understand the stories of the ancient world. They translate manuscripts, write your textbooks, teach your classes, […]

The wind is starting to pick up and the nights are getting coolers, which means it’s almost certainly fall. New students, new classes, and new beginnings (all beginnings are new) await us in the term. It’s worth examining some of our course offerings this term from a student’s perspective, to get a picture of why […]