Alan Sommerstein

Alan Herbert Sommerstein (born 1947) is a British classical scholar, known above all for his work on ancient Greek tragedy and comedy.

Biography Sommerstein was born in Birmingham in 1947. After being educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, he studied classics at King's College, Cambridge. He then studied linguistics for a semester at Indiana University before returning to King's, where he was elected a research fellow in 1970 and obtained his doctorate in 1971. His thesis, written under the supervision of W. Sidney Allen and then Pieter Seuren, was titled "Phonological Theory and Ancient Greek", and a revised version of the second part of this thesis was published in 1973 as a book, The Sound Pattern of Ancient Greek.

In 1974, Sommerstein was appointed as a lecturer in classics at the University of Nottingham, becoming a Reader in 1983 and Professor of Greek in 1988. He served as Head of department from 1992 to 1997, and again from 2001 to 2002 (following the death of Thomas Wiedemann). He also served as editor of the Journal of Hellenic Studies from 1989 to 1995. Sommerstein's complete text and translation of the plays and fragments of Aeschylus was released in the Loeb Classical Library series in 2008, and was described by Mark Griffith in the Times Literary Supplement as "in many respects the best critical edition of this playwright available in any format".

In 1998, the Centre for Ancient Drama and its Reception (CADRE) was founded at Nottingham, under Sommerstein's direction. Its first major project was on the fragments of the tragic playwright Sophocles, with a conference in 2000 leading to a collected volume published in 2003, Shards from Kolonos: Studies in Sophoclean Fragments. This project also led to the publication of an edition with translation and commentary on a selection of Sophocles' fragmentary plays, in collaboration with David Fitzpatrick and Thomas Talboy, in 2006, with a second volume appearing in 2012. The reconstruction of fragmentary tragedies also formed the topic of Sommerstein's Gaisford Lecture at the University of Oxford in 2007, "Sherlockismus and the Study of Fragmentary Tragedies", which was then published in 2010 as part of a collection of Sommerstein's essays relating to Greek tragedy.

From 2004 to 2007, Sommerstein was the director of a research project at Nottingham funded by the Leverhulme Trust, "The Oath in Archaic and Classical Greece". This project involved the construction of a database of all references to oaths in Greek texts up to 322 BC, and led to the publication of three jointly authored books between 2007 and 2014.

Sommerstein retired from his Nottingham professorship in January 2014.

Selected publications

Monographs

Editions of ancient texts

In 12 volumes (with various ISBN numbers).

In 3 volumes (with various ISBN numbers).

Collections of articles

Edited volumes