David Andrew Lupher – 50th Reunion Essay

David Andrew Lupher

721 S. Palouse St.

Walla Walla, WA 99362

dlupher@pugetsound.edu

College: Morse

After graduating from Yale and flunking my army physical, I became a graduate student in classics at Stanford, which proved a pleasant resort for recovering from being a classics major in one of the most dysfunctional classics departments in US academic history. Unlike Yale’s, Stanford’s classics department encouraged a fluid boundary between literary and historical studies, and that suited me perfectly. My dissertation on political language in Euripides was supervised by a distinguished epigrapher and ancient historian.

After one-year stints teaching at Colby, Stanford, and Princeton, I secured a tenure-track position at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. I was the first classicist at UPS in half a century, and I was very gratified that during my 31 years there a classics department grew and flourished, and when I retired in 2012, it had four tenure-track faculty positions.

By a remarkable piece of luck, my appointment at Puget Sound landed me less than an hour’s drive from my widowed mother. Thus, during the last 12 years of her life she was able to enjoy the first years of her two delightful grandchildren. Though the first language of my son Antonio was Spanish (his mother is a Mexican-American Stanford grad), his current main language is Russian. He lives in Moscow and loves Russian music, literature, and life. His sister Sonia is currently in the PhD. program in Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

After retiring from Puget Sound, I moved to Walla Walla, where my companion (now my wife) Elizabeth Vandiver taught (and still teaches) classics at Whitman College. (Some of my classmates may know Elizabeth’s courses for the Teaching Company—now rechristened The Great Courses.) For five years I taught at Whitman, usually part-time, but now I seem to be fully retired from teaching, though my scholarly career continues. I work on classical reception (the uses of Greek and Roman culture) in early modern Spanish America and New England. It’s something of a “niche” field, but I love it.

I miss teaching, but not grading. I have no hobbies, apart from reading daily quotas of German, French, Latin, and Greek—not only a pleasurable expansion of my world, but also good mental exercise for an aging mind. I have not owned a TV since before my children were born, nor am I on Facebook. I enjoy films, preferably black-and-white, Japanese, and directed by Ozu or Mizoguchi. (The Yale Film Society and Yale Law School Film Society bear some responsibility for this.) I have a weakness for baroque opera (esp. Rameau, Handel, and Pergolesi), and for chamber music from Haydn to Shostakovich. My favorite novelist is Henry James, my favorite poets Homer, Dante, and Wallace Stevens. We enjoy traveling (as I write, we’re about to spend three months in Oxford, mainly in the Bodleian)—and spotting stylistic blunders in the New York Times and New Yorker. It’s a good life—while it lasts. I wish similar happiness for my surviving classmates.