Examinations and Reading Lists

This exam has 3 main aims:

• To test students’ breadth of knowledge of historiographical and methodological issues pertaining to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
• To assess their ability to mobilize the methodological and historiographical skills that have been taught to them in three contexts:
  • Their graduate seminars
  • The ancient history methods course
  • The proseminars
• To test whether students can convey a coherent historical argument both in written and oral form.

This exam consists of 2 parts:

A take home written exam: Each student will be given a set of 8 to 10 questions. They are asked to answer one of these questions in writing within a period of 2 weeks (10 business days). Questions will be tailored to each student. Drawing upon skills learned across the three contexts, questions will be tailored to each student and formulated in a way that tests the student’s ability to position themselves coherently in an area that is outside of their particular area of specialization or interest. Their written paper should demonstrate the following:

• That they can answer in a way that provides the reader with a substantiated historiographical or methodological argument.
• That they can structure their answer in a coherent manner
• They engage with relevant primary evidence and secondary scholarship. They can also draw from other publications, including the references listed in the History stream “Reading List”, although the list is meant to be taken as suggestive of relevant historical approaches, and does not comprise a checklist for the exam. The expected length of the written response should be about 6000 words (+bibliography).

An oral defense: The oral defense will normally take place within a week of the submission of the written exam. This defense will normally not exceed 120 minutes. The purpose of the defense is to enable student to discuss their written exam with the examiners in a conversational manner. Students will be invited to clarify or expand on certain parts of their written response. Normally, the examiners will be the ancient history coordinators of the current year. Students will be informed of their examiners before taking the first part of the examination. Normally, students will be communicated the result of the exam immediately after the oral component.

Students can prepare for the exam primarily by broadly reviewing the methodological and historiographical skills learned in their 2 first years in the program.

Please see the "Reading Lists" above for suggested readings.

For their degree, students will need to pass the literary-specific qualifying exam in one language by the end of Year 2 (October examination), in the other by the end of Year 3 (October examination) with a grade of B+ or higher. Those entering the program before September 2019 may request to take the exam pass/fail. Normally students will first have passed the Reading List translation exam in that language, but students may also attempt the literary-specific qualifying exams beforehand.

The examinations committee will select passages from authors/genres familiar to the students from the Reading List or closely related to them. Students will NOT be tested specifically on reading list texts, but on their general ability to engage with ancient texts from a literary perspective. The exams will be given and evaluated by a team of two faculty members to be nominated by the Chair for any given year.

The qualifying exams specific to the literary stream consist of two open-book, take-home examinations (one in Greek, one in Latin literature). Students are asked to write a critical examination of a selected passage, which demonstrates their skills in literary analysis and their familiarity with crucial aspects of ancient literature. Students will be given a choice of ONE passage out of four (2 prose, 2 poetry). The discussion should not exceed 10 double-spaced pages.

There is a wide range of issues that students may choose to address in their discussion, including (but not limited to):

• formal qualities: language, diction, meter etc.
• genre
• literary motifs and themes
• salient intertextual and/or intratextual relationships
• scholarly trends in the criticism of the passage, work, and/or author different theoretical or methodological avenues for interpretation
• the relationship to other texts of the same era
• the passage’s relation to its social, cultural or historical context reception of the passage, work, and/or author

A good discussion will first and foremost closely engage with the text at hand, offering a substantial and coherent analysis. It will also demonstrate knowledge of the larger work, oeuvre, genre, and/or literary history to which it belongs. Students should not attempt to cover all of the aspects mentioned above, but to focus on issues they consider to be most relevant for a better understanding of the passage; they are free to choose from which angle to approach the text, and are encouraged to draw connections between (or to synthesize) different approaches. The essay should offer a thoughtful and, ideally, original close reading of the passage. Students may wish to engage with scholarly debates on the passage or work, but please note that this is not supposed to be a research paper (i.e. no footnotes vel. sim.).

Preparations for the reading list translation exams and the stream-specific qualifying exams should go hand in hand and mutually enforce each other. Students are encouraged to read broadly about ancient literary and study a wide variety of genres and authors. It is advised that they read standard texts only partially represented on the reading list in their entirety, at least in translation.

A good way to learn more about specific genres, authors, literary eras etc. is to consult the articles in relevant Companions (published by Cambridge, Oxford or Blackwell) and to follow up on “further readings”. Students are also invited to ask faculty members for reading recommendations (both with regard to secondary literature and commentaries). Last but not least, Research Seminars will expose students to a variety of texts, methods and scholarly discourses and help them hone their skills in literary analysis.