[citation needed] He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (1989–90), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1997), and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science (2004-5).
[citation needed] Ober was a student of Chester Starr, and has taught classicist John Ma, ancient Greek historian Emily Mackil, and the political theorist Ryan Balot.
Melissa Lane wrote: "Ober draws on empirical evidence about the ancient world in the service of normative political theory, and in so doing sheds light not just on Athens but on the creation and operation of democratic institutions.
democratic institutions.” [7] Adriaan Lanni's review praised Rise and Fall as part of the “exciting (and controversial) recent developments” in the 'Stanford school of ancient history' and judged Ober's arguments an “unusually compelling compilation of methods, data and argument in support of a broad thesis.”[8] By contrast, in a review of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece for New Left Review, Peter Rose concluded that Ober had produced “an eccentric, at times intriguing, but deeply flawed work of history, which ultimately tells us more about the ideology of the Stanford classics department than it does about ancient Greece”.
[9] Barton Swaim called Demopolis: Democracy Before Liberalism a “tightly reasoned work of scholarship” in his Wall Street Journal review.