Specialties: Greek drama, ancient Greek language, Greek textual tradition, Greek paleography.
Professor Mastronarde grew up in Connecticut and was educated at Amherst College, Oxford University, and the University of Toronto. He came to the Berkeley Classics Department in 1973 and retired from active status in 2015, having served as Chair of the Department from 1993 to 2000 and been appointed Melpomene Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature in 2001. He was founding Director of the Center for the Tebtunis Papyri and served in that role from 2001 to 2011. He is the author of a widely used textbook for elementary ancient Greek and an associated website. He has published extensively on the ancient Athenian tragedian Euripides and various aspects of ancient drama, including interpretation, staging and dramatic technique, textual studies, and commentaries, and the general book The Art of Euripides (Cambridge University Press 2010). He is currently working on a digital edition of the scholia on Euripides (EuripidesScholia.org), which combines his interests in digital technologies, in the digital future of scholarship, and in textual tradition and editing. His latest book, the open-access publication Preliminary Studies on the Scholia to Euripides (2017), is an outgrowth of that project. He continues to teach one graduate course per year and to advise dissertations as a Professor of the Graduate School.
I am currently the Chair of the Learning in Retirement Committee of the UCB Retirement Center, and President of the Executive Council of Phi Beta Kappa Chapter Alpha of California (UC Berkeley). My current interests and activities include compiling and editing annotations in medieval manuscripts of the tragedies of Euripides as well as managing open-access monograph publication series, California Classical Studies.
