Harold E. Lurier

Harold Edmond Lurier (September 28, 1923 – June 30, 2000) was an American historian, academic and translator. He was known for his translations of Greek poetry and Chronicle of the Morea.

Biography

Lurier was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. His paternal grandparents were Russian Jewish emigrants, and his maternal grandparents were Greek. After matriculating at Clark University in 1941, he served as a Greek interpreter for the U.S. Army during World War II from 1943 to 1946, then received his B.A. (1948), M.A. (1949) and Ph.D. (1955), in Medieval History, all at the University of Pennsylvania.

He first held an academic position at Princeton University, and then moved in 1956 to Pace University, where he spent the rest of his career in the Social Sciences Department. He retired in 1997.

Lurier won Pace's Kenan Award for Teaching Excellence in 1962. In the early 1970s, after tensions inflamed by a failed attempt to unionize the Pace faculty, Lurier collaborated with mathematician William J. Adams to develop the Lurier–Adams plan for faculty promotion and tenure decision-making at Pace.

Speculum praised his annotated translation of Chronicle of the Morea into English for its accuracy and for conveying "the flavor" of the Greek.

Lurier died in New York in 2000.