DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS AND ANCIENT HISTORY
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About the department
Research
Robert Fowler
Henry Overton Wills Professor of Greek
Phone: +44 (0)117 928 8258
Email: robert.fowler@bristol.ac.uk
Research
Prof Fowler’s research interests lie in the area of early Greek language and literature, as well as Greek myth and religion. He has also done work on the history of classical scholarship. His major focus in recent years has been on early historiography and mythography, editing and commenting on the fragments of the early “mythographers” (e.g. Hecataeus, Pherecydes, and other lost predecessors and contemporaries of the “historians” Herodotus and Thucydides), and writing articles on Herodotus and his intellectual milieu. He has published articles also on Homer, Greek lyric poetry, and reception.
Professor Fowler would be interested in supervising PhD work in Homer, Greek lyric, Herodotus, myth and religion.
Teaching
Professor Fowler teaches units on Greek language and literature, myth, historiography and history. In 2012-13 his units include Citizenship and the Polis, Law and Order in Greece and Rome, and Myth and History in Fifth-Century Athens.
Selected publications
- Early Greek Mythography II: Commentary. Forthcoming 2013 with Oxford University Press.
- 'Mythos and Logos', Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011) 45-66
- 'Gods in Early Greek Historiography', in J.N. Bremmer, A. Erskine, edd., The Gods of Ancient Greece. Identities and Transformations (Edinburgh University Press 2010) 318–34
- 'Thoughts on Myth and Religion in Early Greek Historiography', Minerva 22 (2009) 21–39
- 'Blood for the Ghosts: Wilamowitz in Oxford', Syllecta Classica 20 (2009) 171–213
- ‘Herodotus and his Prose Predecessors’, in C. Dewald, J. Marincola (edd.), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge 2006) 29-45
- ‘How to Tell a Myth: Genealogy, Mythology, Mythography’, Kernos 19 (2006)
- (Ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge 2004)
- Early Greek Mythography (Oxford 2000)