Emeritus Faculty
Susan Guettel Cole. (Professor Emerita). Ancient Greek history, religion, and gender. Susan Cole received her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Minnesota in 1975. She was Assistant Professor of Classics and Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago before coming to Buffalo and joining the Department of Classics in 1992. She served as Chair of the department in 1994 to 1995 and from 1998 to 2004. She has been a visiting Professor at Carleton College and The University of Michigan, and a visiting scholar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences Religieuses, Paris. Her work has been supported by the ACLS, the Center for Hellenic Studies, The National Humanities Center, NEH, and the Humboldt Foundation. She is the author of Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience (2004), Theoi Megaloi: The Cult of the Great Gods at Samothrace (1984), and numerous book chapters, articles, and reviews. She has recently contributed articles to A Companion to Greek Religion (Blackwell 2007); Ancient Religions (Cambridge University Press 2007); and Practitioners of the Divine (Center for Hellenic Studies 2008). She is working on two books: Epigraphica Dionysiaca and Pigs for Demeter.
Charles Garton. (Professor Emeritus) Classical and Medieval Literature, Drama, Educational History. Charles Garton took his bachelor's master's degrees from Cambridge, England (1949, 1953), and did graduate studies at Basel and Rome. He joined the Department in 1965 and has been a professor since 1972. He is the author of Personal Aspects of the Roman Theatre (1972), editor and translator of the Metrical life of Saint Hugh (1986) and has published other books, articles, and reviews. He was one of the founding editors of Arethusa and its first editor-in-chief.
George L. Kustas. (Professor Emeritus) Classical and Byzantine Rhetoric, Byzantine Literature, Numismatics. Dr. Kustas came to the University at Buffalo in 1954 from Harvard, where he had received his Ph.D. in the preceding year. He is well known for his publications on rhetoric, for example Studies in Byzantine Rhetoric (Thessalonica 1973). From the literature of Byzantium, his interests range to the study of ancient coinage, numismatics. He has published a monograph on A bronze hoard of the period of Zeno (New York 1962). Currently Professor Kustas continues his research on ancient rhetoric.
John Peradotto. (S.U.N.Y. Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus & Andrew V.V. Raymond Professor Emeritus). Greek Literature, Mythology, Literary Theory. Dr. Peradotto received his bachelor's degree in philosophy and his master's in Greek and Latin from St. Louis University, and his doctorate in classics from Northwestern University. He was a fellow of Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies. He came to the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1966, chaired the department of Classics from 1974 to 1977, and was Dean of Undergraduate Education from 1978 to 1982. In 1975 he received the S.U.N.Y. Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 1990 was named a Distinguished Teaching Professor by the State University Board of Trustees. He occupied the Andrew V. V. Raymond Chair of Classics from 1984 to 1999. He was twice awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Humanities to conduct summer seminars, one for college teachers, the other for secondary school teachers. A co-founder of the classical journal Arethusa, he was its editor-in-chief from 1975 to 1995. In that capacity he was responsible for such special theme-centered issues as Population Policy in Plato and Aristotle, Women in the Ancient World, Classical Literature and Contemporary Literary Theory, Virgil: 2000 Years, Semiotics and Classical Studies, Herodotus and the Invention of History, The Challenge of "Black Athena," and Mikhail Bakhtin and Ancient Studies: Dialogues and Dialogics. In 1995 his work as editor earned him a Distinguished Retiring Editor award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He is the author of Classical Mythology: An Annotated Bibliographical Survey (1973) and Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (1990), as well as articles and reviews on Greek myth, epic, and tragedy. His work explores ways in which classical studies may be enhanced by productive blending of traditional philology and current methodologies in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and literary analysis. He has delivered over 100 invited lectures on these and other topics at more than fifty universities and colleges and at meetings of professional associations. Among these presentations are the prestigious Charles Beebe Martin Lectures at Oberlin College. In 1990 he was elected President of the American Philological Association. (Click here for his APA presidential address.) In 1997 an international conference entitled "Interdisciplinarity and the Classics" was held in his honor at the University of Georgia. He was honored also in 2000 with a conference entitled Epos and Mythos: Language and Narrative in Homeric Epic at S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo. Click here for his detailed curriculum vitae. Click here for his home page.
Robert K. Sherk. (Professor Emeritus) Hellenistic and Roman History, Epigraphy, Ancient Biography. Dr. Sherk received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1950. He arrived at the University at Buffalo in 1962. Professor Sherk is perhaps best known for his work in epigraphy, in particular for his Roman Documents from the Greek East (Johns Hopkins 1969) and Municipal Decrees of the Roman West (Buffalo 1970). He also has published several other books and over 20 articles on Hellenistic and Roman history. In addition he has edited (with Ernst Badian of Harvard University) the Translated Documents of Greece and Rome, 4 vols. (Cambridge 1977-1985). His current research includes a book on The Roman Empire from Augustus to Hadrian, which was published by Cambridge in 1988.
Ronald A. Zirin. (Associate Professor Emeritus) Linguistics, Mythology, Sanskrit, Psychology and the Classics. Dr. Zirin came to the Department in 1966; the following year he received the first of his Ph.D.'s from Princeton in Classical Linguistics (1967). In 1985 he also received a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University at Buffalo. He has written articles on both Greek and Latin linguistics, as well as a book on The Phonological Basis of Latin Prosody, Mouton and Co., (1970). In recent years Professor Zirin has come to concentrate increasingly on applications of psychoanalysis to Classical traditions.