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Dr. Renner received his B.A. from Yale in Classics and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan. A native of Indiana, where he developed a strong interest in local history and Americana, before joining the Montclair State faculty he taught at Lawrence University (Appleton, Wisconsin) and at Rockford College (Illinois). He has chaired Montclair State’s Department of Classics and General Humanities and serves as Director of the Institute for the Humanities, which he founded. His teaching includes numerous courses in ancient Greco-Roman history, archaeology, and culture; Greek; Latin; Roman Law; humanities; ancient urbanism; and a course on the influence of the Greeks and Romans on American culture. He has co-directed archaeological projects in the Southern Levant and traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean. He is particularly interested in the relationships between ancient cultures and modern cultural identities.
Professor Renner’s most extensive published research centers around Roman society of the early Empire, and on the information to be gleaned from the Greek papyri of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. He is co-editor of a volume of Columbia University papyri and has published numerous articles on documentary, literary, and so-called paraliterary papyri. The last are of particular interesf for the information they can give us about the tastes and habits of a culturally diverse society. He is currently working to assess the significance of a series of Greek papyrus texts which discuss Egyptian gods, and he is also preparing a study on Roman imperial slaves. Professor Renner has served as president of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States and of the American Society of Papyrologists. He is an editor of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, which publishes articles on Greek, Latin, Coptic, Demotic, and Arabic papyri, on archaeology, and on the social, administrative, and cultural history of Egypt from the conquest of Alexander to the Islamic period.