Professor Edward Bradley of the classics department, who also founded the Rome Foreign Study Program, will retire at the end of this term after 43 years of teaching at the College.
"The founding of the Roman FSP, and my close association with it for so many years, has been tantamount to kind of a revolution in my life," Bradley said. "It's given me an opportunity to expand my interest and my teaching into areas for which I had no former professional training."
Bradley, who originally came to Dartmouth as a Greek professor, also helped establish the Classical Association of New England Summer Institute in 1983. This program brings high school classics teachers from across the country to Dartmouth for seminars and conversation with classics professors, giving them the opportunity to escape the restrictions of high school teaching and immerse themselves for a week in a scholarly, intellectual setting.
"Studying Latin or Greek literature, studying ancient art or architecture, or early Christian art or architecture, all of these things are of course as relevant as reading Shakespeare or Dickens or Hemingway ... They're at the heart of a liberal arts education," Bradley said.
Bradley has earned praise from both colleagues and pupils for his ability to make ancient texts relevant and interesting to students.
"One thing professor Bradley always does is to treat texts as friends that you can go back to and continue to learn from," Rob Hale '07 said.
"My first class [with Bradley] was Virgil's Aeneid, which is one of his favorite texts. I still have a copy on my bookshelf and I still consider it a friend."
Last winter, Bradley taught a course focusing on Virgil's Aeneid. The course's enrollment reached over double the average enrollment for an upper level Latin class.
"A lot of people who hadn't taken Latin in forever just fought to be in that class, which I think really says something about him. And it wasn't Virgil, it was Bradley," said Amanda Dobbins '06, who has taken three classes with Bradley.
Some of Bradley's closest friends and former students will travel from afar -- one will even fly in from Italy -- to hold a dinner in his honor on June 2.
"I've never really witnessed such an outpouring of affection and love that's been expressed by former students," classics professor Roger Ulrich said.
After retiring, Bradley hopes to research early Christian art and architecture and continue to teach part-time, possibly through the Rassias Foundation. He and his wife are also renovating a house they own in France.
Dartmouth had a powerful impact on his life, Bradley said.
"In the end, as I look back on my career, I'm immensely grateful to Dartmouth for having given me all these opportunities and for having conveyed to me all these riches," Bradley said. "I'm a happy man."
