Political Theory Project

Professor Sacks received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1976. He was Professor of History and Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1986-1995. Professor Sacks came to Brown in 1995 as Professor of History and Dean of the College. His areas of teaching and research are Ancient Hellenistic History, specializing in the history of ideas, and covering aspects of philosophy and religion from roughly the time of Alexander the Great through the end of the Roman Empire; and the social, philosophical, and political thought of American Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. Professor Sacks is the author of Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (Princeton University Press, May 2003), Diodorus Siculus and the First Century (Princeton University Press, 1990), and Polybius on the Writing of History (University of California Press, 1981).