John T. Quinn (2008)

It seems that for each octo- or nonagenarian we memorialize each year, we must remember one called away from us at an age which even the ancients would consider unripened. John T. Quinn received a B.A. from Notre Dame in 1984, an M.A. in 1986 and a Ph.D. in 1994 from the University of Texas at Austin, with a dissertation on Florus. He began his teaching career at Hope College in 1995, where he published on his academic specialty, translation, but where his true devotion was to the students in his Latin or Greek or Coptic classes. He is remembered for the extraordinary passion he brought to his teaching (and even to the papers he read at CAMWS meetings), which was rewarded with grants from the NEH, the U.S. Department of Education and the Fulbright-Hayes Group for Study Abroad. The students he led during summer tours of Greece and the alumni he guided through the monuments of ancient Rome declared that cold marble seemed almost to breathe with life when John's eyes lit up at a site that a figure of antiquity, sometimes his beloved Horace, might himself have witnessed. John died while running at the lunch hour on June 19, 2008.