December 19, 2025
(Originally posted here)
Timothy Renner, only child of Orville R. and Hester F. (Muessel) Renner, was born in 1946 in South Bend, Indiana, growing up and attending Central High School there. Although he spent by far the more years of his life on the East Coast, he never lost his respectful affection for the country and people of the Midwest—nor for his family home, which he kept till the end, making occasional lengthy cross-country drives by way of periodic pilgrimages there.
Graduating magna cum laude in Latin/Classics with a concentration in archaeology from Yale University in 1968 and armed with a doctoral dissertation from the University of Michigan on Greek papyri, Tim's first job was a one-year instructorship (1972-73) at Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin, followed by another one-year instructorship (1973-74) at Rockford College (now University), at Rockford, Illinois. It was at that point, in September, 1974, that Tim took up what would turn out to be a fifty-one-year career at Montclair State College (now University), joining a department of one—David Kelly—its two senior faculty members (Doris Kibbe, Carolyn Boch) having just retired.
Tim assumed the duties of Chair of the Department in 1980 and served untiringly in this capacity for the next twenty-seven years. In this role, he invested all his dogged and indefatigable energies into expanding the department and growing its potential, building it up eventually to twelve tenured faculty. Teaching ancient history and civilization courses was just the beginning of what he did for the Department and University, his contributions to "service" on campus, as well as to his field more generally, being impressively many and varied. At Montclair, he was a member of numerous Department and University committees, the founding force behind the Center for Heritage and Archaeological Studies, enthusiastic promoter of its interdepartmental Archaeology minor, and responsible for bringing the local society of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and its lecture series to the campus. He was the Director of the Institute for the Humanities from 1984 to 2008, and Co-Director from 2008-2010. From the late 1980's onwards, he regularly spent his entire summer "break" digging at the New Jersey Archaeological Consortium excavation at Tel Hadar in Israel, and in more recent years participated with his colleague Deborah Chatr Aryamontri in many seasons at the University's excavation at the Villa of the Antonines site outside Rome. He was President of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States (CAAS) from 1989 to 1990 and Chair of the Cultural Diversity Subcommittee of the American Classical League from 2005 to 2010. He was President of the American Society of Papyrologists from 1998 to 2002, and for many years a co-editor of this society's scholarly journal, the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists (BASP).
Many by-now-well-established scholars are grateful to Tim for his friendly mentorship as they were beginning their careers. And all of us will miss his inspiring drive to keep on doing what needs to be done—and more—always with implacable and wry good humor.
