14 Facts About Dirk Obbink

Dirk D Obbink was born on 13 January 1957 in Lincoln, Nebraska and is an American papyrologist and classicist.

Dirk Obbink was Lecturer in Papyrology and Greek Literature in the Faculty of Classics at Oxford University until 6 February 2021, and was the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project until August 2016.

Dirk Obbink's ancestors were originally from the Netherlands, later immigrating to the United States.

Dirk Obbink attended high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and took a BA in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1979, before earning an MA in Classical Studies and Papyrology there in 1984.

From 1998 to circa 2015, Dirk Obbink was the Director of the Imaging Papyri Project at Oxford.

Related searches

Dirk Obbink has made significant contributions in the fields of ancient literature, society and philosophy.

Dirk Obbink is familiar with the poetry of Sappho or Simonides discovered in the Egyptian Oxyrhynchus papyri, as he is with the technical-philosophical writings of the Epicurean Philodemus, the text of which he helped recover from the carbonized papyrus rolls discovered in The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum.

In 2001, Dirk Obbink was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his work on the papyri from Oxyrhynchus and Herculaneum.

In March 2010, Dirk Obbink appeared in Channel 4's series Alexandria: The Greatest City, presented by Bettany Hughes.

Dirk Obbink featured briefly in the 2015 BBC documentary Love and Life on Lesbos with Margaret Mountford, in which he showed Mountford a papyrus brought to him by an anonymous private collector in 2012 and that is believed to be a manuscript copy, executed in about AD 200, of a poem written by Sappho in c 600 BC.

Also offered for sale were fragments of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, all of which Dirk Obbink had then proposed as likely to be of a second century date, while the Mark fragment was presented as more likely first century.

Since June 2019, Dirk Obbink has had his access to the EES collection removed, and as of October 2019 he is under investigation by Oxford University for removing texts belonging to the EES from university premises.

In October 2019, Dirk Obbink was suspended from his role at Christ Church, Oxford.

Hobby Lobby, the company behind the Museum, alleges that Dirk Obbink sold fragments of papyrus and ancient objects stolen from an Oxford University collection in seven private sales between 2010 and 2013, worth a total of $7,095,100.