Sander M. Goldberg

A native New Yorker, Sander Goldberg has spent most of his professional life in California. He has taught at Stanford and Berkeley, and since 1985 at UCLA, where he is currently Professor of Classics.

His interest in Greco-Roman antiquity has evolved over the years from author-specific studies of comedy (The Making of Menander’s Comedy, 1980; Understanding Terence, 1986), to a wider study of early Roman epic (Epic in Republican Rome, 1995), and on to the larger cultural question of how the Romans came to have a ‘literature’ in the first place (Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic, 2005). An enduring interest in performance has also encouraged studies, some traditional and others less so, in the theory and practice of rhetoric. A distillation of practical experiments in Roman rhetoric can be found here; a broader interest in rhetoric and its legacy culminated in a collection of essays co-edited with the musicologist Tom Beghin, Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric (Chicago 2007), that in 2009 won the Ruth A. Solie Award of the American Musicological Society. Professor Goldberg is a past editor of the Transactions of the American Philological Association and is the current APA editor for Textbooks and Classical Resources.

His longstanding interests in drama as both performative art and cultural phenomenon are explored in a commentary on Terence’s comedy Hecyra (The Mother-in-law) currently under contract for Cambridge University Press and generated the project to be pursued with Foundation support, which brings the expanding capabilities of digital technology to bear on the question of how Romans of the third and second centuries BCE produced their plays without formal theaters to stage them in.