We show that the Lascar group $\operatorname {Gal}_L(T)$ of a first-order theory T is naturally isomorphic to the fundamental group $\pi _1(|\mathrm {Mod}(T)|)$ of the classifying space of the category of models of T and elementary embeddings. We use this identification to compute the Lascar groups of several example theories via homotopy-theoretic methods, and in fact completely characterize the homotopy type of $|\mathrm {Mod}(T)|$ for these theories T. It turns out that in each of these cases, $|\operatorname {Mod}(T)|$ is aspherical, i.e., its higher homotopy groups vanish. This raises the question of which homotopy types are of the form $|\mathrm {Mod}(T)|$ in general. As a preliminary step towards answering this question, we show that every homotopy type is of the form $|\mathcal {C}|$ where $\mathcal {C}$ is an Abstract Elementary Class with amalgamation for $\kappa $ -small objects, where $\kappa $ may be taken arbitrarily large. This result is improved in another paper.