By Brett Tomlinson, Princeton Alumni Weekly

Jack Tannous *10, an associate professor of history and Hellenic studies, met Shaun Cason ’23 in classic pandemic fashion when he drove his daughter to drop off a present for a friend whose birthday party was canceled in the early weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown. The friend, Cason’s daughter, met them outside, accompanied by her dad.

“I talked to him from the window, out on the curb, for like 10 or 20 minutes,” Tannous recalls. “And I discovered — this is my first memory of him — he’s this undergraduate at Princeton who is basically my age.”

Cason, a Marine veteran and transfer student then finishing his first year at the University, was interested in history, and Tannous, ever eager to recruit undergrads to his department, told him about Princeton’s extraordinary tradition in his specialty, Late Antiquity, as well as its strength in medieval studies.