Relate Bowdoin Sites:
Robert B. Sobak
Instructor
Spring 2008
- History of Ancient Greece: Bronze Age to the Death of Alexander (CLAS 211)
- Homer (GRK 204)
- Elementary Latin II (LATN 102)
| Phone | (207) 725-3664 |
| Title | Instructor |
| Department | CLASSICS |
| Work Location | 11 Sills Hall |
| rsobak@bowdoin.edu |
Rob Sobak received his undergraduate degree from Franklin and Marshall College, where he majored in Classics. After running a second-hand bookshop for four years, he returned to school to pursue graduate work in Classics. He spent one year at the University of Pennsylvania’s Post-Bac program in Classics, and then went on to the University of Georgia, where he earned an M.A. in Greek and Latin. He earned a second M.A. at Princeton University in Classics, and his now finishing his Ph.D. in Classics and Ancient History at Princeton.
He specializes in Greek Social History and Literature, with particular interests in ancient technology, travel, geography, and early conceptions of labor and education. He is currently working on three different research projects: a book that explores the role that artisans and manual laborers played in the development of Athenian democracy, an article on the interplay of language and landscape in Pindar, and an article on the rhetorical uses of geography in Tacitus’ Agricola and Germania. He has traveled extensively throughout Greece and parts of Turkey. As a sophomore in college he was awarded a grant which allowed him to tour the Peloponnese by mountain-bike for three months - an experience which he is glad to have had once, but will never attempt to replicate.
Education
Ph.D. Princeton University, Classics (expected Fall 2007)
M.A. Princeton University, Classics
M.A. University of Georgia, Greek and Latin
University of Pennsylvania Post-Baccalaureate
A.B. Franklin and Marshall College, Classics
Teaching and Research Interests
Greek social history, Greek literature, Greek & Roman historiography
Selected Papers Presented
“Political Shoemakers and the Making of the Athenian Democracy”
University of Michigan, February 2007
“Shoes, Shoemakers, and the Networks of Craft Production in Classical Athens”
University of Southern California, February 2006
“Knowledge and its Discontents in the Democratic City”
Princeton University, October 2005
“Craft, Complexity, and Social Interactions in the Classical Athenian Polis”
Princeton University, March 2004
“Time, Space, and Narrative Disjuncture in Pindar”
Princeton University, February 2003
“The Imperial Cosmologist: Rhetorical Geographies in Tacitus”
University of Michigan, March 2002
“Last Man Standing: Strabo and the End of Greek History”
Princeton University, December 2001.
“Britannia Perdomita: The Heroic Landscape of Tacitus’ Agricola”
University of Pennsylvania, September 2000