Northampton, MA – Thalia Pandiri, March 12, 1943-December 16, 2025
Thalia Alexandra Pandiri-friend, teacher, daughter, and mother-died on December 16, 2025. She was 82. Born in New York City to Greek immigrant parents and educated in both New York and Athens, she earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University and joined the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature at Smith College, where she taught for fifty-six years. She was both brilliant and loving.
A scholar with a love of words and their histories, her career was marked by its range. Fluent in six modern languages and two ancient ones, she wrote about and translated works from ancient and modern Greek as well as from medieval Latin. For twenty-five years she served as editor of Metamorphoses, the Five College journal of translation, and in her teaching of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature she looked hard at uncomfortable topics, trying to understand, for instance, the many works from Euripides’ play Medea 2,400 years ago to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), in which mothers murder their children.
Thalia was generous to her students, colleagues, and friends and loved her children deeply. Students attest to the extraordinary care she gave both to their papers and to them. Sardonic when she saw incompetence or injustice, she was steadfast in defending those who needed help.
She loved books, travel, small but exceptional restaurants, the marvels of the natural world, and ordinary human beings. She was a powerful yet modest teacher and mentor.
Her last year was dogged by ill health and pain, which she bore stoically, supported by her love for her two children. She is survived by those children, Dimitri and Lydia Oram and by many relatives in Greece.
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