Rate My Professor Robert Greenberg

Professor Robert Greenberg is the Pro Vice-Chancellor of the College of Human and Social Futures and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Newcastle, leading schools of Education, Law and Justice, Humanities, Creative Industries, Social Sciences, and Business. He earned his PhD in Slavic languages from Yale University in 1991. Greenberg specializes in South Slavic languages and linguistics, conducting research on the connections between language, nationalism, and conflict in the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. A distinguished polyglot, he speaks twelve languages, including English, Russian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, French, German, Slovenian, and Czech.

Greenberg's career spans prestigious institutions. He served ten years as Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, followed by positions as Dean and Professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York. From 2013 to 2024, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland, he integrated 16 departments into four schools, doubled Māori and Pacific academics in Te Wānanga o Waipapa, introduced undergraduate degrees in communications and global studies, masters programs in Indigenous studies and conflict and terrorism studies, and the Art Scholars programme. He increased external research funding from $500,000 to $10 million annually, secured $20 million in philanthropic funding for humanities positions and scholarships, advanced gender equity, renewed the Bachelor of Arts program to improve enrollments and finances, and supported major research centres while overseeing facility renovations. His influential publications include the book Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its Disintegration (Oxford University Press, 2004), "Sociolinguistics in the Balkans" (2023), "Revisiting Language, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Former Yugoslavia" (2020), and "The communicative value of scripts: The changing status of Cyrillic in the former Yugoslavia" (2019).