Professor Robert A Kaster FBA

Summary

A native of New York City, Robert (Bob) Kaster was educated at Dartmouth College (B.A. 1969) and Harvard University (M.A. 1971, Ph.D. 1975) and began his university teaching career at the University of Chicago, where he was the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities before joining the Princeton faculty in 1997 as Professor of Classics and Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin Language and Literature.

He transferred to emeritus status in 2018. Kaster has written and edited 20 books that treat the history of ancient education and scholarship, Roman ethics and the history of the emotions, and Latin textual criticism.

He has served terms as chair of the Department of Classics at both Chicago (1994–1997) and Princeton (2000–2003) and as president of the American Philological Association (now Society for Classical Studies), the primary learned society in North America devoted to ancient Greek and Roman history and culture (2006).

At Princeton he received both the Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities (2007) and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2017); his other honours include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013) and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.