Peter Pouncey

Peter R. Pouncey (born October 1, 1937) is an author, classicist, and university administrator.

The son of a British father and a French-British mother, he was born in Tsingtao (now Qingdao), China. At the end of World War II, after several dislocations and separations, his family reassembled in England, and Pouncey was educated there in boarding schools and at Oxford. For a time, he studied for the Jesuit priesthood but ultimately experienced a loss of faith.

Shortly after obtaining a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1969, he was appointed assistant professor of Greek and Latin in the Classics Department. In 1972, he took up the post of Dean at Columbia College. As Dean, he was a forceful proponent of admitting women to the college, going so far as to hold a faculty vote on the matter without the knowledge of the university's president, William McGill. Concerns about the future of Barnard College led to McGill's rejection of the proposal. In 1976, Pouncey resigned as Dean. As a member of the Classics Department, he produced a number of notable works of scholarship, including the book The necessities of war: a study of Thucydides' pessimism which won the university's Lionel Trilling Award.

In 1984, he became President of Amherst College. Upon his retirement in 1994, he returned to Columbia. His novel Rules for Old Men Waiting won the McKitterick Prize and was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2006. Pouncey currently divides his time between New York City and northern Connecticut.

• The necessities of war: a study of Thucydides' pessimism, Columbia University Press, (1980) ISBN 978-0-231-04994-8
• Rules for Old Men Waiting (2005) ISBN 0-8129-7396-8