Notes on Contributors
Henriette van der Blom is Reader in Ancient History at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She has published extensively on Cicero, late republican oratory, politics, memory culture, and the reception of republican oratory, including her two monographs on Cicero’s Role Models: The Political Strategy of a Newcomer (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Oratory and Political Career in the late Roman Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2016). She is involved in a new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators and is co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric vol i on the ancient world. She sits on the editorial board for Journal of Roman Studies and Historia, and is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on epistolary leadership.
Christopher Burden-Strevens is Lecturer in Roman History at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Catherine Steel (University of Glasgow) as part of the ERC-funded Fragments of the Republican Roman Orators project. Since then he has published extensively on Cassius Dio’s treatment of Roman history, including numerous articles, two edited volumes, and most recently his monograph Cassius Dio’s Speeches and the Collapse of the Roman Republic (Brill, 2020). He is interested in the political culture of the late Republic (especially political communication from rhetoric to numismatics) and its representation in historiography. His current research project focuses on the reception of the Roman Republic in intellectual culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutionary Europe.
Vera V. Dementyeva is Professor of Ancient History at P.G. Demidov Yaroslavl State University, Russia. She is the author of a series of monographs on the extraordinary magistrates of the Roman Republic (the interrex, the dictator and the magister equitum, the decemviri legibus scribundis, and the military tribunes with consular power). She has co-edited several volumes, including Volk und Demokratie im Altertum (Edition Ruprecht, 2010), and published numerous articles on aspects of the republican constitution and political culture (imperium and potestas, Roman meritocracy, bellum iustum—to name some of the themes), as well as on the history of classical scholarship. Her most recent work focuses on the Roman quaestors.
Roman M. Frolov is Lecturer in Ancient History at P.G. Demidov Yaroslavl State University, Russia. Focusing on the political culture and constitution of republican Rome, he is particularly interested in public gatherings (coetus and contiones) and magistrates. He is currently working on a research project entitled Between privati and magistratus: Holders of “Intermediate” Statuses in Roman Republican Politics. He has published a series of papers on this subject, including articles on magistrates-elect (Historia 67, 2018), the suspension of magistrates from their functions (Vestnik drevnei istorii 76, 2016 & 81, 2021; Mnemosyne 70, 2017; Athenaeum 107, 2019), and the activities of promagistrates in the sphere domi (Phoenix 73, 2019; Classical Quarterly 70, 2020).
Oliver Grote is “Akademischer Rat auf Zeit” in Ancient History at the University of Regensburg, Germany. He is the author of Die griechischen Phylen. Funktion—Entstehung—Leistungen (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016). His research interests include the political order and political practice in the Roman Republic, the polis in Archaic Greece, ancient Sparta, the emergence of the political in antiquity, and systems theory in ancient history, in particular in studies of republican Rome. His current project is on potentiality as a characteristic of the political sphere of the Roman Republic (Potentialität als Merkmal des politischen Raums der römischen Republik).
Wolfgang Havener is “Akademischer Rat auf Zeit” at the Seminar for Ancient History & Epigraphy, University of Heidelberg, Germany. His research focuses on the political and cultural history of late republican and imperial Rome. He is the author of Imperator Augustus. Die diskursive Konstituierung der militärischen persona des ersten römischen princeps (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016) which investigates the way in which Augustus and the members of the senatorial elite shaped the princeps’ role as military leader. In addition he has co-edited (with I. Gildenhard, U. Gotter and L. Hodgson) the volume Augustus and the Destruction of History. The Politics of the Past in Early Imperial Rome (Cambridge Philological Society, 2019) and is currently preparing another edited volume on “The Culture of Civil War” in late republican Rome.
Karl-J. Hölkeskamp is Professor of Ancient History in the Department of History, University of Cologne (Germany), now Emeritus. He is interested in the political, constitutional, social, and cultural history of archaic Greece and republican Rome. Major publications include Reconstructing the Roman Republic. An Ancient Political Culture and Modern Research (Princeton University Press, 2010, updated Italian and Spanish translations 2016, 2019), as well as two collections of essays, Libera Res Publica. Die politische Kultur des antiken Rom—Positionen und Perspektiven (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017) and Roman Republican Reflections. Studies in Politics, Power, and Pageantry (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2020).
Alexander V. Makhlaiuk is Professor of Ancient History and Chair of the Department of Ancient and Medieval History at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod, Russia. His chief interests are Roman imperial army and military history, the ideology and political culture of the Roman Empire, and Greek and Roman historiography (particularly Cassius Dio). His major publications include Soldiers of the Roman Empire. Military Traditions and Martial Mentality (St. Petersburg State University, 2006) and Daily Life of the Roman Army under the Principate (Eurasia, 2021, with A.E. Negin). He is also the author of the Russian translation and commentary of Cassius Dio’s Roman History, Books 51–80 (two volumes, St. Petersburg State University, 2011 & 2014) and is currently preparing a translation and commentary of Books 1–50. He has written articles on political and military history, lately “Emperors’ Nicknames and Roman Political Humour” (Klio 102, 2020).
Hannah Mitchell is Lecturer in Ancient History at St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the political culture of the late republican, triumviral, and Augustan periods, and her interests include the norms and values of elite society, the political and historiographical construction of reputations, civil war, and political participation. She has published on the careers and self-presentation of particular Roman politicians, such as Pompeius Magnus and Munatius Plancus. She has research forthcoming on the issue of neutrality in civil war, and she is working on a larger project on political non-participation and legitimacy.
Kit Morrell is the Susan Blake Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland, Australia. Her research centres on the political and legal history of the late Roman Republic. She is currently undertaking an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award project examining the idea and practice of reform in the Roman Republic. Her previous publications include a monograph, Pompey, Cato, and the Governance of the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2017) and The Alternative Augustan Age (Oxford University Press, 2019), co-edited with Josiah Osgood and Kathryn Welch.
Katarina Nebelin is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Her research interests include the political culture, political theory, and history of ideas of ancient societies, especially democratic Athens and republican Rome. Her dissertation Aristokratie und Philosophie. Die Autonomisierung der Philosophie von den Vorsokratikern bis Platon (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016) dealt with the emergence of ancient Greek philosophy and its connections to elite culture and ideology. Particularly interested in the relationship between the lower and upper strata of societies in theory as well as in practice, she has co-edited Eliten nach dem Machtverlust? Fallstudien zur Transformation von Eliten in Krisenzeiten (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin, 2012). She is currently writing a book in which she analyzes and contextualizes Roman marches on Rome during the late Republic, especially in regard to the motivation of soldiers to participate in these activities.
Josiah Osgood is Chair and Professor of Classics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC, United States), where he has also served as Convener of the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics. He has published many articles and books on Roman history and Latin literature, including Caesar’s Legacy: Civil War and the Emergence of the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2006), Turia: A Roman’s Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Rome and the Making of a World State, 150 bce–20 ce (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He has also co-edited The Alternative Augustan Age (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Cassius Dio and the Late Roman Republic (Brill, 2019). He is currently working on a book about Rome’s destruction of Carthage.
Tassilo Schmitt is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bremen, Germany. His major publications include Hannibals Siegeszug. Historische und historiographische Untersuchungen zu den ersten beiden Jahren des Zweiten Punischen Krieges (Tuduv-Verl.-Ges., 1991) and Paroikie und Oikumene. Sozial- und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum I. Clemensbrief (de Gruyter, 2002). He has also co-edited a number of edited volumes, including Volk und Demokratie im Altertum (Edition Ruprecht, 2010). He has published numerous articles on Roman historiography, Christianity in the Roman world, the polis as a state, political terminology in the Mycenaean Greece, ancient Caucasus, and other topics, with particular focus on the connections between political order and cultural representation of the world.
Catherine Steel is Professor of Classics at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Her research focuses on the political history of the Roman Republic, especially its last century, with a particular interest in public speech, power, and institutional history. She is the author of The End of the Roman Republic, 146–44 b.c.: Conquest and Crisis (Edinburgh University Press, 2013) and edited a special edition of Classical Receptions Journal on the reception of the idea of the Roman republican Senate. She has published widely on Cicero, including, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and is currently working on an edition of fragmentary Roman oratory from the republican period.
Claudia Tiersch is Professor of Ancient History at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include political communication in the late Roman Republic and the Athenian democracy, the history of the ancient city, and church and state in late antiquity. She is the author of Johannes Chrysostomus in Konstantinopel (398–404): Weltsicht und Wirken eines Bischofs in der Hauptstadt des Oströmischen Reiches (Mohr Siebeck, 2002). She has co-edited several volumes, including, most recently, Semantische Kämpfe zwischen Republik und Prinzipat? Kontinuität und Transformation der politischen Sprache in Rom (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021). She has also published numerous papers on the crisis of the Roman Republic, optimates and populares, contiones, the political elite in Rome and in Athens, and political legitimation.
Lewis Webb is a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), and a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. His research expertise is in gender, law, religion, and space in republican Rome. Much of his recent work has focused on Roman women, particularly their public roles and visibility. His research interests extend in various additional directions, including comparative approaches to sexuality and shame in Rome, northern alterities in Roman literature, early Roman legislation, theoretical approaches to Roman archaeology, the Anthropocene, and the material culture of Etruria and Thessaly.
Alexander Yakobson is Associate Professor of Ancient History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His main fields of research are democracy, popular politics, public opinion and elections in the ancient world, the political culture of the Roman Republic, the political culture of the early principate, and the status of the imperial family. In addition to various papers, he is the author of Elections and Electioneering in Rome: A Study in the Political System of the Late Republic (Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999). His research interests outside of ancient history include democracy, national identity, nation-state and the rights of national minorities, and religion and state in Israel and in Western democracies.