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Classicists and friends of Classics will be saddened to learn that Anne Pippin Burnett, a renowned scholar of Greek poetry and for many years a beloved teacher at the University of Chicago, died peacefully this past weekend at her home in Kingston, Ontario at the age of 91.

Anne was educated at Swarthmore (BA 1946), Columbia (MA 1947), and Berkeley (PhD 1953), and taught at Vassar (1957–1958) as well as Chicago. She was a gifted interpreter of Greek literature, especially tragedy and the lyric poetry of the archaic and early classical periods. Her many publications include Catastrophe Survived: Euripides’ Plays of Mixed Reversal (Oxford 1971), Three Archaic Poets: Archilochus, Alcaeus, Sappho (London 1983; rpt. Bristol 1998), The Art of Bacchylides (Cambridge, MA 1985), Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1998), and, most recently, three books on Pindar: Pindar’s Songs for Young Athletes of Aigina (Oxford 2005), Pindar: Ancients in Action (London 2008), and Pindar: Odes for Victorious Athletes (Baltimore 2010). In a long and distinguished career she received many honors; among them, she was Martin Lecturer at Oberlin in 1978, Mary White Lecturer at Trinity College, University of Toronto in 1984, Walsh Lecturer at Chicago in 1989–1990, Sather Lecturer at Berkeley in 1993–1994, and a Guggenheim fellow in 1981.

Anne Burnett is survived by two daughters, Maud Burnett McInerney, a medievalist and comparatist who is Professor of English at Haverford College, and Melissa Gromoff, who is the owner of Fallowfield Farm Equestrian Center in Trenton, Ontario; and by three grandchildren, James Barrett McInerney, who is a program facilitator at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, Lucy Anne McInerney, who will be entering the Classics PhD program at Brown in the fall, and Samuel Gromoff.

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(Photo: "Candle" by Shawn Carpenter, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

(Photos of Anne used with family permission)