This book presents a lightly adapted version of my Habilitationsschrift, which was accepted by the Faculty of Languages and Literatures at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU Munich) in April 2018. I would like to thank all members of my Habilitation committee for their careful reading of the Habilitationsschrift and for providing valuable comments: Martin Hose, Dennis Pausch, and Martin Zimmermann, who also supported me as mentors during the whole process of Habilitation; Bardo M. Gauly and Alain M. Gowing, who served as external reviewers; and the anonymous reader of Mnemosyne Supplements.
This book has benefitted from important feedback on individual chapters by my colleagues and friends Casper C. de Jonge, Brandon F. Jones, Stefan Merkle, Bianca Schröder, Janja Soldo, Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp, and Claudia Wiener. I have also had the chance to draw on several research groups and networks to develop my ideas: I would like to thank the members of the German DFG research group on “Mediale Diskurse römischer Herrscherrepräsentation” and in particular Sophia Bönisch-Meyer, Lisa Cordes, and Therese Fuhrer, for inspiring workshops; all doctoral and postdoctoral members of the research group “Organisation of Memory and Forgetting” at the Munich Graduate School for Ancient Studies Distant Worlds for interdisciplinary perspectives on the topic of memory; and the international research network “historiai” for illuminating the relationship of history and philology. I am grateful to Orla Mulholland who has copyedited the English manuscript, and to Giulia Moriconi at Brill for their professional support in producing this book. It is a topos, but a true one, that all remaining errors are my own.
A number of fellowships have given me the time to focus on this book and the opportunity to present and discuss my ideas at institutions other than my home university LMU Munich. I am deeply indebted to the funding bodies that provided a Junior Researcher Fund, a Mentoring Programme Grant, a Research in the Humanities Fellowship (all LMU Munich), a Teaching Staff Mobility Programme Grant to Aarhus in Denmark (ERASMUS), a Fellowship for Young Researchers at Vandœvres-Genève in Switzerland (Fondation Hardt), and a Scholarship to present research abroad (DAAD). I am grateful to all the hosts of my visiting research fellowships, who welcomed me warmly and helped me to start, continue, and finish this project: the University of California at Berkeley; Princeton University; and the University of Washington, Seattle. The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam was the ideal place to finalize this book.
This book is dedicated to my parents for their continued interest in the places and times to which I travel and for their loving support over the last decades.
Amsterdam/Munich, February 2019