Martin Ostwald
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| Martin Ostwald | |
| Born | January 15, 1922 Dortmund, Germany |
|---|---|
| Citizenship |  United States |
| Fields | Classical studies |
| Institutions | Swarthmore College |
| Alma mater | University of Toronto (B.A.) University of Chicago (M.A.) Columbia University (Ph.D.) |
| Doctoral advisor | Kurt von Fritz |
| Religious stance | Jewish |
Martin Ostwald (born January 15, 1922) is an influential German-American classical scholar, who taught until 1992 at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College. His main field of study was Ancient Greece' political structure.
[edit] Life
Born as the oldest son of a Jewish lawyer, Ostwald was raised in Dortmund, where he attended the Archigymnasium, and originally intended to become a rabbi. During the Reichskristallnacht on November 9, 1938, Ostwald was arrested by the Gestapo, together with his father and his younger brother. Forced to leave his parents behind in Germany, Ostwald and his brother soon later were able to emigrate to England via the Netherlands. In England, however, Ostwald was alleged to be a German spy, and thus send to a Canadian detention camp, where he first met Thomas G. Rosenmeyer.
Following his release, Ostwald enrolled at the University of Toronto, majoring classical studies. After graduation in 1946 he continue his post-grad studies at the University of Chicago. In 1949 he became a doctoral student under fellow German immigrant Kurt von Fritz at Columbia University in New York City. Ostwald received his Ph.D. in 1952 with a work entitled “The unwritten laws and the ancestral constitution of ancient Athens”.
During his academic career, Ostwald taught at numerous universities, among them Wesleyan University, Princeton University, Cal–Berkeley, the Balliol College, Oxford, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1991 Ostwald was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, followed by an induction to the American Philosophical Society two years later. In 2001 he was given an honorary doctor by the University of Dortmund.
