Robert Frakes

Robert Martin Frakes (born 1962)^[1] is an American classics scholar. He is the dean of the School of Arts & Humanities at California State University, Bakersfield, where he is also a professor of history.^[2] His research concerns "political, legal, and religious history in the later Roman Empire".^[3]

Education and career

Frakes grew up in Santa Barbara, California, where he became interested in classics through the mentorship of Vernon P. Ziolkowski. He is a 1984 graduate of Stanford University. After earning a master's degree and teaching certifications in Latin and Social Science through the Stanford Teacher Education Program, he completed a Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1991.^[2] His dissertation was Audience and meaning in the "Res gestae" of Ammianus Marcellinus,^[4] supervised by Harold A. Drake.^[5]

From 1991 until 2017, Frakes was a faculty member in history at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. During this time, he was also a Humboldt Research Fellow, visiting the Leopold Wenger Institute for Ancient Legal History and Papyrus Research at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.^[6] At Clarion, he became chair of the Department of Social Sciences.^[3][7]

In 2017, he moved to California State University, Bakersfield as dean of the School of Arts & Humanities and professor of history.^[3][7]

Personal life

Frakes is married to Susan Frakes, a bookbinder.^[8][9] He is the son of historian George E. Frakes and teacher and librarian Catherine Rose Kay Davies Frakes. Like Frakes, both of his parents were educated at Stanford University.^[10]

Books

Frakes is the author or editor of several books on ancient history, as well as a college writing textbook.^[11] They include:

• Contra Potentium Iniurias: The Defensor Civitatis and Late Roman Justice (Münchener Beiträge zur Papyrusforschung und Antiken Rechtsgeschichte 90, C. H. Beck, 2001)^[12]
• Writing for College History: A Short Handbook (Cengage, 2004)^[13]
• Religious Identity in Late Antiquity (edited with Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, Edgar Kent, 2006)^[14]
• The Rhetoric of Power in Late Antiquity: Religion and Politics in Byzantium, Europe and the Early Islamic World (edited with Elizabeth DePalma Digeser and Justin Stephens, Tauris Academic Studies, 2010)^[15]
• Compiling the Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)^[16]

References