Dr. Terry Papillon

Director

Terry Papillon grew up in Minnesota and still harbors great fondness for the Midwest. He has a BA in Classics from St. Olaf College (1980), even though he started college as a math major and did a good portion of a music major along the way. He has a PhD in Classical Philology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1986). He taught in North Carolina, Minnesota, and Wisconsin before returning to the South in 1992 to join the faculty at Virginia Tech in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures.

Dr. Papillon teaches ancient Greek, Latin, classical civilization, mythology, and rhetoric. He regularly leads study abroad programs in Greece. He received the Diggs Teaching Scholar Award in 1997 and the Sporn Award for excellence in teaching introductory subjects in 2000, as a result becoming a member of the Academy of Teaching Excellence.

His research specialty is Greek rhetoric, particularly the Greek rhetorician Isocrates. He is the author of numerous articles and two books, one on Demosthenes (1998) and one on Isocrates (2004). He is also Editor of the online Classics journal Electronic Antiquity.

Dr. Papillon became director of the University Honors Program in 2008 after working on the staff as a faculty preceptor for several years.