Biography
Dr. Mark Usher was the first professor of Classics hired after Willamette University founded its new, interdisciplinary Classical Studies Program in 1998. Within a few years, he managed to attract so many students to his Latin classes that two sections of Beginning Latin were needed. He also recruited a number of enthusiastic majors, some of whom even participated in the American excavations of the Agora in Athens. One of the highlights of his tenure was the 1999 performance of an opera-oratorio, Voces Vergilianae, based on Vergil's Aeneid and composed by Willamette Professor of Music John Peel, for which Dr. Usher wrote the Latin libretto.After three years at Willamette, however, Dr. Usher accepted a tenure-track appointment at his alma mater, the University of Vermont, where he is currently a Professor of Classics. Apart from articles and books on the Homeric Centos, Euripides, Plato, and Ezra Pound, Dr. Usher has also written two illustrated children's books, Wise Guy: The Life and Philosophy of Socrates (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005) and Diogenes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009).