Bagg, Robert

Robert Bagg (1937- ) was born in Orange, New Jersey. He graduated from Amherst College in 1957, received an M.A. from the University of Connecticut in 1961 and a Ph.D. from the same institution in 1965. He taught English at the University of Washington in Seattle, Smith College, the University of Texas, and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, from which he retired in 1996. He served as chair of the UMass Amherst English Department for a portion of his tenure at that institution. Bagg has received several prizes and fellowships during his writing career, including the Glascock Poetry Prize (1957), Simpson Fellowship (1957-1958), Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and letters (1958-1959), Ingram-Merrill Fellowship (1961), and Guggenheim Fellowship (1979). His numerous publications include collections of poetry, Greek to English translations of Euripides and Sophocles, and plays. In 2007, he received a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship to write a biography of Richard Wilbur.

Bagg has five children from his first marriage, to Sarah "Sally" Robinson: Theodore, Christopher, Jonathan, Melissa, and Robert Hazzard. His second wife, Mary, has collaborated with him on several publications.

Thomas F. Gould (1927-1995) was born in East Liverpool, Ohio in 1927 and spent much of his childhood in Poland. He served in the U.S. Navy, and then went on to Cornell University, where he earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. He taught classics at several colleges and universities, including Amherst College from 1955 to 1963, before joining the Yale University Classics faculty in 1968. He served as Director of Undergraduate Studies at Yale from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s. Gould's publications include Platonic Love (1963) and The Ancient Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy (1978).

John Andrew Moore (1918-1972) was born May 10, 1918 in Trenton, N.J. He received his B.A. and M.A. from Harvard University and did additional graduate work at Oxford University. He taught as a junior fellow at Harvard from 1940 to 1942 and from 1946 to 1947, with an interruption in the middle to serve as a civilian in the U.S. Navy Department during World War II. Moore joined the Amherst College Classics Department faculty in 1947 and achieved the rank of full professor in 1958. He published a study of Sophocles and Aretê (1938) and Selections from the Greek Elegiac, Iambic and Lyric Poems (1947), as well as a translation of Sophocles' Ajax (1957). At the time of his death on June 22, 1972, Moore was chair of the Amherst Classics department.

James J. Scully, (1937- ) poet and professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut, has published several books of original poetry as well as several translations, including one in collaboration with Robert Bagg, The Complete Plays of Sophocles: A New Translation (2011). His writings, including his poetry, are shot through with political and social commentary.

From the guide to the Robert Bagg (AC 1957) Papers, 1822-2007, 1953-2007, (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)