Nationality Swiss Occupation Classical scholar | Name Georg Luck | |
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Born February 17, 1926 Bern, Switzerland Died February 17, 2013, Towson, Maryland, United States Books Arcana Mundi, The Latin Love Elegy Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada | ||
Education University of Bern (1953) | ||
Georg Hans Bhawani Luck (February 17, 1926 – February 17, 2013) was a Swiss classicist known for his studies of magical beliefs and practices in the Classical world. For over twenty years he was a professor at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
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In a scholarly debate in the late 1980s concerning methodology in the classics, Luck was a leader on the side of traditional rigorous scholarly methods and against what he viewed as unfounded speculation based on multiculturalism.
Education and academic career
Luck was born in Bern, Switzerland, and attended the Kirchenfeld Gymnasium (high school) in Bern. During and after World War II, he served in the Swiss Army, eventually being promoted to lieutenant. After this, he earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Bern, also with studies at the University of Paris. He came to the U.S. for graduate studies, at Harvard University, where he earned a master's degree in classics in 1951. Returning to the University of Bern, he earned a doctorate in 1953.
He taught classics at Yale University in 1952 and at Brown University in 1953 and 1954. Next, he taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1958, and the University of Mainz from 1958 to 1962. He became a full professor at the University of Bonn, and then moved to Johns Hopkins in 1970, where he remained for the rest of his career. For twelve years, he was the editor in chief of the American Journal of Philology. He retired in 1990.