Classics department finds new home in renovated Horace Mann House

Nestled in a seminar room in the Horace Mann House are around 1,200 books formerly owned by Michael Putnam, who taught classics at Brown for 48 years. Over the summer, Professor and Chair of Classics Joseph Pucci spent a month unpacking, stamping and shelving the books in what would become the Michael C. J. Putnam Memorial Library of the new Classics building. The library now serves both as a memorial and as a resource for students.

“We would not have been able to house Putnam’s books if we hadn’t moved to Horace Mann,” Pucci wrote. The move, which took place in stages during the fall 2025 and spring 2026 semesters, gives the department seminar rooms, dedicated undergraduate and graduate student lounges and library and study spaces. 

The building also has spaces fit for hosting events and guest speakers, according to David Buchta, an associate teaching professor of classics. 

Using Putnam’s collection is “such a nice thing to think about,” said Lilla Attar GS, a doctoral student in classics. “There’s something really heartwarming about this room.”

In its new location, the Classics building replaces the Graduate School’s headquarters and unites the department’s books, faculty and students in a single building. 

Previously, Classics faculty had been housed across three buildings on the west side of campus, with postdoctoral researchers in one building and other faculty divided between the remaining two, Pucci wrote in an email to The Herald. “We had a diminished community, because we had no unified space in which to nurture one.”

For Pucci, solving the “decades-old” space problem was his “top priority” when he became chair. “I was working on it from day one,” Pucci wrote. Pucci first learned that moving was a possibility in summer 2024.

The move comes amid “concern in academia broadly about the future of the humanities,” Buchta said. 

The decision was “very reaffirming” for the Department of Classics, he added. “The University is not going to bother with moving a department if they don’t see a future like this.” 

The new building has made “informal interactions” among faculty and students easier, Buchta added.

“There’s something about meeting everyone when you make coffee, when you go up and down the stairs,” said Lilla Attar GS, a doctoral student in classics. “That doesn’t really happen when everyone’s spread across two, three buildings.”

Maggie Danaher GS, a fifth-year classics Ph.D. candidate added that it’s “definitely made a difference to kind of have everyone be in one regular space.” 

Emily Cook ’29, who plans to pursue classics, also finds it “a lot easier to find (their) professors’ office hours,” they said. “It’s also nice that all my professors are in one place now.”

Now taking a Sanskrit class housed in the Classics department, Cook said their learning experience is “more cohesive.”

Cook said the previous space at MacFarlane House was often too cramped for students to meet or work together. Buchta also noted there were concerns “about structural integrity (and) the healthiness of the air” in the MacFarlane House. 

The University did not respond to a request for comment about the safety of MacFarlane House.

Horace Mann House is located across the street from Wilbour Hall — which houses the Department of Egyptology and Assyriology — and diagonal from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. Pucci wrote the proximity creates a “natural ‘quad.’”

With the new proximity between departments, Cook hopes “that there will be more collaboration.”