JOHN PERADOTTO: PROFESSIONAL PROFILE

Professor John 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.

Professor Peradotto was co-founder of the classical journal Arethusa, and 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','' "Mikhail Bakhtin and Ancient Studies: Dialogues and Dialogics," "The New Simonides," and "The Iliad and its Contexts." In 1995 he received 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 (now known as the Society for Classical Studies), the national professional association for classical studies in the United States and Canada. [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. He retired in August, 2000, and from then until 2009 was Visiting Scholar in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego during its Winter Quarters. In the Fall of 2003 he was Benedict Visiting Distinguished Professor at Carleton College.