Society for Classical Studies
The Society for Classical Studies, formerly known as the American Philological Association, is a non-profit North American scholarly organization devoted to all aspects of Greek and Roman civilization founded in 1869. It is the preeminent association in the field and publishes a journal, Transactions of the American Philological Association.
The SCS is currently based at New York University.
History
The APA was inaugurated by William D. Whitney, of Yale, at Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1869 as an outgrowth of the Classical Section of the Oriental Society. Of the 151 inaugural members, just 8 were women, including Alice Robinson Boise Wood, the first woman to study at the University of Michigan and to graduate with a B.A. from the Old University of Chicago. Originally its members studied a great variety of texts and languages, but as disciplines such as linguistics and modern languages have created their own societies, the APA came to be concerned with classical antiquity and fields closely related to the study of antiquity, while the definition of "philology" broadened to include many approaches to understanding the ancient world. In 2013, the American Philological Association elected to change its name to the Society for Classical Studies.Convention
The Society holds its annual convention in January, meeting jointly with the Archaeological Institute of America. About 400 scholarly papers are delivered at the Society's meeting, which is also the site for interviewing for college and university positions and for the meetings of the many committees and affiliated groups. It is also the occasion for the presentation of Society awards for teaching, public outreach, and scholarly publications publication, including the Goodwin Award of Merit, which recognizes a recently published book.At every meeting, an Outreach Division conducts two events that are open to the general public. One is a special panel that is of interest to non-specialists. Topics have included the movie Troy, Classics and Contemporary Fiction and the HBO series Rome and Classics and Comics. The second is the staged reading of a classical or classically themed play, by the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance. The productions have been: The Invention of Love, The Heavensgate Deposition, The Golden Age, Iran Man, Thespis, The Birds, Cyclops, Thersites, Thesmophoriazusae, The Jurymen and Alcestis.
Awards
The Society presents awards, fellowships and grants for teaching at both pre-collegiate and collegiate level, for projects that bring classics to a wider public, and for research and publication. In addition to the prestigious Goodwin Award of Merit, recognizing scholarly books by Society members, these include the SCS Awards for Excellence in Academic Advising and in Teaching and the Mary-Kay Gamel Outreach Prize. The Society also recognizes graduate student writing through the Erich S. Gruen Prize and literary translation through the Raffaella Cribiore Award for Outstanding Literary Translation.Goodwin Award of Merit
The Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit is the Society's annual prize for outstanding publications in the field of classics, named in honor of Charles Jaques Goodwin, a long-time member and benefactor of the Society. Award recipients are chosen by a five-member elected committee and presented at the Society's annual meeting. Prior to the creation of the Raffaella Cribiore Award in 2025, they were the only prizes for books given by the Society.Works eligible for the award must be published by a member of the Society during the preceding three years. Until 2013, the award had a single recipient; since then, the SCS Board of Directors mandated the Committee make three awards each year. The Goodwin Award is considered among the most prestigious accolades in classical studies and has had only one repeat winner, Peter T. Struck. Its inaugural recipient was David Magie of Princeton University in 1951.