A distinguished academic career from UCalgary to Princeton

Andrew Zissos, MA'93, was the first graduate student enrolled in the Department of Classics’ master’s program in 1991.

He began at the University of Calgary as an undergraduate in computer science. Strong in mathematics and capable in programming, he also worked at Foothills Hospital developing data analysis software.

“I started in computer science actually,” he recalls. “I enjoyed it at the beginning and was doing quite well.”

By all appearances, he was on a clear and promising trajectory. Yet something felt misaligned. The conversations, the projected career path, the intellectual questions weren’t the ones he wanted to carry for a lifetime.

Looking back on his years at the University of Calgary, Zissos says his memory is “very, very vivid.” What stands out most are the mentors who appeared at exactly the right moment and quietly redirected the course of his life.

“It really was,” he says, “one of those things where you just feel very lucky that all of these people showed up.”

The turning point came through a general education course (Greek and Roman Studies 321 - Ancient Technology) taught by Dr. John Humphrey, PhD.

That class changed everything.

The Course That Opened a World

Dr. Humphrey, now Professor Emeritus in the Department of Classics and Religion, first taught Zissos in a Greek and Roman Studies class when he was still a computer science undergraduate, charting a very different course.

For Zissos, the course was electrifying. He recalls how Humphrey taught antiquity (Ancient Greece and Rome) as living intellectual worlds, accessible even to non-specialists.

“It was really a course designed for people in science who wanted a science-based perspective on antiquity,” he says. “And I just enjoyed that course so much.”

Encouraged by his older brother to enroll, Zissos quickly found himself captivated. It was the beginning of a new direction, one that would lead him into the Department of Classics’ inaugural master’s program.

“I decided to go with that just out of inspiration from one course,” he admits.

Humphrey’s influence made classics feel less like a subject and more like a shared intellectual life. “Every class, he would have a little get-together in his house at the end,” Zissos remembers. “It felt like really kind of a special experience.”

The Making of a Scholar: From Calgary to Princeton

The scholar Zissos has become was shaped decisively by some of the professors he encountered in the Department of Classics: Dr. John Humphrey, Dr. Michael Dewar and Dr. John Vanderspoel, among others.

Vanderspoel had encouraged Zissos to publish a seminar paper which resulted in his first scholarly article in a prominent journal.

Similarly, Dewar who was fresh from Oxford embodied the kind of intellectual life Zissos admired. “I could tell he was doing the kind of work that I really wanted to do myself,” he says. “He was an expert in Latin literature, which is what I became.”

Demanding yet generous, Dewar supervised Zissos’s master’s thesis. The standards were high, the work rigorous, and the experience transformative.

The mentorship opened doors. Dewar’s recommendation assisted in securing Zissos’ admission to Princeton University for his PhD.

Yet Zissos is clear about where his true formations began. “Obviously, when people look at my career now, they think the most prominent thing is I got a PhD from Princeton.” He admits. “But really, in terms of the formative steps, it was all the University of Calgary.”

He completed his doctorate in just four years at Princeton, an accelerated pace he credits to the discipline forged during his master’s at UCalgary.

The University of Calgary Campus in the ‘90s

In the early 1990s, the University of Calgary still felt young, a campus coming into its own. “It felt like a new world,” Zissos recalls. “There’s something about the spirit of new universities that are still building their place in the world. That’s kind of fun.”

The Classics department, in particular, felt intimate and close-knit. He remembers playing squash with professors, practicing martial arts in MacEwan Hall, and walking home through pine-lined paths heavy with snow.

“It was a really nice campus to walk through,” he says. “You’d be trudging through the snow… and it was just lovely.”

There was also a distinct Calgary warmth. “Every once in a while when it was really cold, someone would just fling their car door open and say, ‘Hey, get in, I’ll take you to campus.’”

That generosity shaped the atmosphere as much as the academics did.

Zissos is also candid about the material support he received as a student. “I remember fondly how little the tuition was back then,” he says. “Basically the government was covering about 85 percent of the cost.” 

Now teaching in the United States, where many students struggle with significant debt, he feels deeply grateful for that foundation.

And while he acknowledges that Princeton offered “some utterly amazing things” in terms of intellectual resources, he returns to a simple truth: “I never would have got to Princeton without my master’s degree at the University of Calgary.”