Professor George Kalogeris
For the first time in the University’s 101-year history, the College is offering a concentration in ancient classical literature. Students will be able to immerse themselves in the epics of Homer, Virgil and Dante. They will be charmed by Ovid and challenged by Aeschylus. They will sit on the shoulders of Tacitus and Suetonius in observing Imperial Rome at its apex.
For Professor George Kalogeris BS’78, the Classics program’s guiding force, it is the first time in a 20-year teaching and writing career that he can work full time with two things he loves most: ancient writers and the students who want to study them.
“When young people engage with these texts it helps them to develop an inner life, whether they know it or not,” says Kalogeris.
Raised in Winthrop with the smell of the oceans and the sounds of rebetika—a style of Greek folk music popular among 1930s day laborers—Kalogeris’ interest in words and language came from his mother, who understood and conversed in nearly every regional dialect of modern Greek. As an undergraduate, Kalogeris took the Blue Line for four years to Suffolk University where he studied literature and psychology. His undergraduate thesis was on Jim Morrison’s allusions to Sophocles in The Doors’ tune, “The End.”
After a brief stint as a psychologist, Kalogeris entered the University Professors Program at Boston University where he earned master’s and doctoral degrees in Comparative Literature. He recently released a collection of his translation of Albert Camus’ diary notebooks, Carnets (Pressed Wafer Publishing, 2006) and had his translation of a C.P. Cavafy poem read before a commencement audience at Oxford University.
Kalogeris believes the most valuable lesson he has learned as a Suffolk professor is the importance of students. “It’s about people seeing things for the first time,” he says. He fosters this awareness in students, from giving out his home phone number and taking calls night and day to spending countless hours hosting informal poetry discussions. “I kind of hate English and classical literature,” said a student at a discussion on Sappho, “but I like Kalogeris and I could never miss this seminar.”
