David Goldstein

David Goldstein received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. His research lies at the intersection of language evolution, classical philology, linguistic theory, and computational modeling. He specializes in the structure and historical development of Indo-European languages, with particular focus on Greek and Latin.

His 2016 monograph, Classical Greek Syntax: Wackernagel’s Law in Herodotus, is the first theoretically grounded treatment of second-position clitics and clausal syntax in Ancient Greek. More recently, Goldstein has brought Bayesian methods to bear on core questions in historical linguistics, including linguistic diversification, divergence-time estimation, and morphosyntactic change. His 2024 article, “Divergence-Time Estimation in Indo-European: The Case of Latin,” reconsiders the diversification of Romance using novel probabilistic tools. His other recent publications address morphosyntactic variation from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, including “A Multifactorial Account of Differential Agent Marking in Herodotus” and “Correlated Grammaticalization: The Rise of Articles in Indo-European.”

At SCAS, he will be working on a new account of the diversification of the Ancient Greek dialects, which unifies several strands of his earlier research.

Goldstein’s work has appeared in leading journals across linguistics, classics, and Indo-European studies. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Society for Classical Studies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has taught at the CUNY Latin/Greek Institute, the University of Vienna, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, and has held visiting positions at Clare Hall, the Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies, and the University of Crete.

David Goldstein is in residence in the spring of 2026.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.