My research focuses on empire, enslavement, and legal culture in the Roman world. I study how different people - especially those beyond the male elite - made, fought for, and lost claims to the world in the framework of the imperial res publica. In so doing, I draw on the unique and varied archive of the Roman past - from highly literate poetry to survey archaeology - to speak to broader historical problems of political economy.
I am currently finishing a book on Romano-Italian settler colonialism and the forms of statecraft it called into being in Rome’s emerging provinces and have begun another one on the highly varied, but pervasive and heretofore unexplored role of women as enslavers in the Graeco-Roman world. Most recently, I have written about the relationship between law, time and revolution in ancient Rome, about the politics of wealth and inequality in the republican empire, and about conceptions of empire and materialism in Appian.
I serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Roman Studies, and I am a member of the research network IANUA (Environments for dialogue: the spatial contexts of diplomacy in the Roman provincial sphere during the republic), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and the European Union. Beyond that, my research has been supported by the German research Foundation (DFG), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Thyssen Foundation, and the Excellence Initiative at the University of Tuebingen.
