Richard John Tarrant is an American classicist and Emeritus Pope Professor of Latin at Harvard University.
[1] A native of Brooklyn, Tarrant was educated at Fordham University, where he obtained a BA in 1966.
He then moved to Oxford University and graduated with a DPhil from Corpus Christi College (1972).
[2] In his time at the department, he served as its chairman (1988–94) and as the acting Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1995-6).
[3] Tarrant has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.