Alice Kober

Who was Alice Kober?

Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for extensive investigations that eventually led to the decipherment of Linear B.

The daughter of Hungarian immigrants, Kober was born in Yorkville, a neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper East Side. She attended Hunter College High School, and in the summer of 1924, she placed third in a New York City scholarship contest. The $100-a-year prize helped her to attend Hunter College, where she majored in Latin, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated magna cum laude. She earned a master's degree in classics at Columbia University in 1929 and a PhD in 1932.

While working on her doctorate, Kober taught at Hunter High and Hunter College and, in 1930, became an assistant professor of classics at Brooklyn College, where she remained for the rest of her career. A former student, Eva Brann, wrote that Kober was "aggressively nondescript....Her figure dumpy with sloping shoulders, her chin heavily determined, her hair styled for minimum maintenance, her eyes behind bottle-bottom glasses snapped impatiently and twinkled not unkindly." On campus she shared an office with four other faculty members and served on standard committees.