Director
Dr. Renner received his BA from Yale in Classics and his MA and PhD in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan. A native of Indiana, he developed a strong interest in local history and Americana. Before joining the Montclair State faculty he taught at Lawrence University (Wisconsin) and at Rockford College (Illinois). He has chaired Montclair State’s Department of Classics and General Humanities and serves as Director of the Institute for the Humanities, which he founded. His teaching includes numerous courses in ancient Greco-Roman history, archaeology and culture; Greek; Latin; Roman Law; humanities; ancient urbanism; and a course on the influence of the Greeks and Romans on American culture. He has co-directed archaeological projects in the Southern Levant and traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean. He is particularly interested in the relationships between ancient cultures and modern cultural identities.
Professor Renner’s most extensive published research centers around Roman society of the early Empire, and on the information to be gleaned from the Greek papyri of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. He is co-editor of a volume of Columbia University papyri and has published numerous articles on documentary, literary, and so-called paraliterary papyri. The last include texts which shed light on such topics as the study of Greek grammar by inhabitants of Roman Egypt and the intermingling of Greek and Egyptian traditions about the gods. He is currently preparing several article-length studies of the administrative and economic activities of Roman imperial slaves and freedmen based on evidence from inscriptions, papyri, and archives of wooden tablets from Egypt, Campania and elsewhere. Professor Renner has served as president of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States and of the American Society of Papyrologists. He is an editor of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, which publishes articles on Greek, Latin, Coptic, Demotic and Arabic papyri, on archaeology, and on the social, administrative, and cultural history of Egypt from the conquest of Alexander to the Islamic period.
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