Name Dirk Obbink Role Papyrologist | Education Stanford University Awards MacArthur Fellowship | |
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Imaging Papyri
Dirk D. Obbink (born 1957 in Lincoln, Nebraska) is an American-born papyrologist and Classicist. He is the Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project. Obbink is also Fellow and Tutor in the University of Oxford (Christ Church).
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Biography
Dirk Obbink's ancestors were originally from the Netherlands, later emigrating to the United States. Obbink took a BA in English at the University of Nebraska before going on to take an MA in Classical Studies and Papyrology at the same university. In 1986 he gained his PhD at Stanford University with his doctoral thesis On the Piety of the Greek Philosophers - Philodem. After an assistant professorship at Columbia University in New York in 1995 Obbink was appointed to the post of Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Christ Church, Oxford University and was appointed the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a large collection of ancient manuscripts discovered by archaeologists at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. They include thousands of Greek and Latin documents, letters and literary works. In addition, from 2003 to 2007 Obbink was a faculty member at the University of Michigan, as a professor of classical studies and the Ludwig Koenen Collegiate Professor of Papyrology.
From 1998 to circa 2015, Obbink was the Director of the Imaging Papyri Project at Oxford. This project is working to capture digitised images of Greek and Latin papyri held by the Ashmolean Museum (the Oxyrhynchus Papyri), and the Bodleian Library and the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples (the carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum), for the creation of an Oxford bank of digitised images of papyri. The newly digitised versions of the literary texts will be published. An international team of papyrologists combine traditional philological methods with more recent digital imaging techniques. They have made accessible heavily damaged texts from the ancient world, many of which had been regarded as being irretrievably lost. In this way the damaged texts of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri and the Villa of the Papyri can now be read for the first time.
Through his research Obbink has increased our knowledge of ancient literature, society and philosophy. He is familiar with the poetry of Sappho or Simonides discovered in the Egyptian Oxyrhynchus papyri, as he is with the technical-philosophical writings of the Epicurean Philodemus, the text of which he helped recover from the carbonized papyrus rolls discovered in The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.
In 2001, Obbink was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on the papyri from Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum. In May 2007, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven awarded him an honorary doctorate.
In March 2010 Obbink appeared in Channel 4's series Alexandria: The Greatest City, presented by Bettany Hughes. In the programme he talked about the ancient Library of Alexandria. He also featured briefly in the 2015 BBC documentary Love and Life on Lesbos with Margaret Mountford, in which he showed Mountford a papyrus brought to him by an anonymous private collector in 2012 and that is now believed to be a manuscript copy, executed in about A.D. 200, of a poem by written by Sappho in c. 600 B.C.