Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Language, Literature and Humanities - Department of Classics, HU Berlin

Classical Philology is one of the founding disciplines of the University of Berlin. August Boeckh’s Philological Seminar (starting in 1811) and the Institute for Classical Studies founded by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in 1897 set internationally recognised academic standards. The decline during the Nazi era and in the GDR led to the de facto end of classical-philological studies and research around 1968. The period from 1990 on, however, marked a real new beginning, seeing appointments to two core professorships in Classical Philology and the revitalisation of subject-specifics didactics. In 2007, the previous position of Assistant Professor of Latin Philology was converted into a junior professorship, and in 2009 the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship was established at the Institute.

Ever since German reunification, Classical Studies at the Humboldt University is no longer combined in a single institute, but is spread across various faculties and thus integrated into diachronic, interdisciplinary structures. For example, our department of Classical Philology works together closely with various Modern Philology departments within the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies, indeed to our mutual benefit. The “Berliner Antike-Kolleg” (BAK) forms the institutional basis for intra- and inter-university cooperation between the disciplines of Classical Studies.

The number of students rose sharply in the 1990s and 2000s; in the 2010s, as everywhere in the German-speaking world, it fell significantly due to the labour market situation, but HU’s Institute for Classical Philology still boasts the highest number of students amongst comparable institutions within Berlin and Brandenburg.