Miroslav Marcovich

Who was Miroslav Marcovich?

Miroslav Marcovich was a Serbian-American philologist and university professor. Marcovich was born in Belgrade, Serbia. He studied at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy graduating in 1942. In 1943 he served as the assistant to Georg Ostrogorsky, expert in Byzantine studies. He served in the army under Josip Broz Tito during World War II between 1944 and 1946. In 1953 he traveled to India where he began working at Visva-Bharati University. In 1955 he moved to Mérida and worked as a professor of Ancient Greek and philosophy from 1955 to 1962 at the University of the Andes, Venezuela. In 1962, he taught at the University of Bonn invited by Hans Herter. Between 1963 and 1968 he taught at the University of Cambridge. He then moved in 1969 to the University of Illinois, Urbana, where he was the Head of the Department of Classics, and taught there until his retirement in 1989. He also founded "Illinois Classical Studies" and served as its editor for 12 years. During those years he was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, Trinity College, Dublin, and was an Einstein Visiting Fellow in Tel Aviv. During his lifetime Marcovich wrote and edited 45 books, including critical editions of the fragments of Heraclitus, of the Vitae philosophorum of Diogenes Laertius [2 v., Bibliotheca Teubneriana, 1999 ] and the Bhagavad-Gita and 248 articles and essays in Spanish, German, Italian, French and Serbo-Croatian. He died June 14, 2001 at the Carle Foundation Hospital, Urbana, Illinois.