Name David Runia | Role Classical Scholar | |
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Books Philo in early Christian literature | ||
David Theunis Runia (born 14 December 1951) is a Dutch-Australian classical scholar and educational administrator who has worked in both Australia and the Netherlands.
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Early life
Runia was born in the Noord Oost Polder, The Netherlands. At the age of four he immigrated to Australia when his father Klaas Runia took up a chair at the Reformed Theological College in Geelong. After attending Newtown State School and The Geelong College, he studied Classics at the University of Melbourne from 1969 to 1976 and was a resident of Queen’s College from 1969 to 1971. In 1977 he returned to the Netherlands, where he obtained his doctorate at the Free University, Amsterdam in 1983.
Academic career
In 1992 David T. Runia was appointed to the Chair of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at Leiden University. In 2002 he returned to Australia on his appointment as Master of Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne, a position he still holds. He is also Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Runia was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1999 and a Correspondent of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
Runia’s scholarship research has focused on two main areas: (1) the interaction of Greek philosophy and Jewish-Christian thought, with particular attention paid to the contribution of the Hellenistic-Jewish author Philo of Alexandria and (2) the genre of ancient doxography, which gives us valuable information on the thought of early Greek philosophers.
Publications
Editor of The Studia Philonica Annual", 10 volumes 1989–1998; with Gregory E. Sterling, 15 volumes 1999–2013