Professor Hans Bork awarded Phi Beta Kappa NorCal regional teaching award
Hans Bork (Stanford) – Classics (Latin)/ Digital Humanities. Ph.D., UCLA 2018, M.A.; Washington University in St. Louis, 2011, B.A.; Classics, UMass Amherst, 2009, B.A.; English Literature, UMass Amherst, 2009.
I am one of the Latin Language and Literature faculty at the Stanford Department of Classics, though I like to think of myself as a "Historian of Language" — someone who studies not just how languages are used as they are, and why that is so, but also how languages change over time, and the social forces that cause them to change. As a result, I tend to teach and write about texts, people, and time periods that are “on the margins”: comedy and vernacular texts; the enslaved, itinerant performers, non-elite peoples. That is, non-“Classical” texts and topics. In both teaching and scholarship, my conviction is that history and literature are shaped as much by unknown participants and unnamed readers as by “big names.” I want my students to explore and think about history—literary, linguistic, temporal—as something vital in their daily lives. Something they participate in, and something they can change.