Prior to working at UW, Dr. Michael Ritter was an instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill. Dr. Ritter has long been interested in the function of Satire in modern American society and in the pursuit of his doctorate in Classical Studies at the University of Florida, became enamored with ancient poetry and particularly the Roman satirists (who claim to have invented the genre) with their philosophical and ethical inquiries into human behavior. Dr. Ritter's studies of the authorial voice in the satirist Juvenal have been published in Syllecta Classica as well as Classical Antiquity. Through his courses in Latin as well as those investigating various aspects of Graeco-Roman history, such as mythology and social life, Dr. Ritter has sought to glimpse with students a world both familiar and strikingly alien in their joint endeavor of piecing together how these cultures explore and make sense of the human condition.
