William FreiertEmeriti

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William K. Freiert retired from full-time teaching in 2010. The following year he was elected to honorary membership in Phi Beta Kappa.  Since retirement, he has regularly taught a First-Term-Seminar on the topic of Mindfulness as well as several Classics courses and has taught annually in the Osher Life Long Learning Program in Minneapolis and lectured many times for the Learning is Forever program in Rochester.  At Gustavus, he had been Hanson-Peterson Professor of Liberal Studies and Chair of the Classics Department. He has graduate degrees from St. Louis University and the University of Minnesota and he has done further study at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens and at Harvard University.

Most of his publications deal with the influence of the Classics on twentieth-century literature and the arts. His most recent article dealt with the Ojibwe novelist, David Treuer.  He has delivered dozens of conference papers or invited lectures at other colleges. He spent 1992 as an exchange professor in Japan and has taught a first-term seminar on Japanese culture. Most of his other teaching involved Greco-Roman myth, drama, and poetry and he was a frequent contributor to Curriculum II. He has participated in NEH summer seminars on Japanese philosophy and on Greek mythology and has been the president of two state professional organizations.

During the 1997-98 academic year, Freiert was a Fulbright lecturer at Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. He was the 1986 recipient of Gustavus' Edgar M. Carlson Award for Distinguished Teaching and the 2005 Faculty Service Award. He has also received the American Philological Association's Award for Excellence in Teaching. Freiert served for eight years on the Board of the Minnesota Humanities Center.

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