Roman Society Postdoctoral Scholarship 2022-2023
We are very pleased to announce that Karl Dahm is the second holder of the Roman Society ('Germanicus') Postgraduate Scholarship. Karl writes:
I have recently submitted my thesis “(Re)Writing the History of a Christian Roman Empire. A Study on Authority and Conflict in Socrates of Constantinople’s and Sozomen of Gaza’s Ecclesiastical Histories” at the Classics Department of KCL (submitted September 30th; supervised by Dr. James Corke Webster). In my thesis, I have explored the construction, negotiation, and contestation of idealised types of (il)legitimate authority by the two church historians Socrates and Sozomen who present us with the main narratives of the ecclesiastical conflicts dominating the 4th and 5th centuries. Unlocking the two gatekeepers of this threshold period will open up new avenues for a better understanding of the shifting patterns of authority formation within an empire that was renegotiating its identity between firm Greco-Roman roots and a new Christian faith. Apart from finalising several forthcoming articles, I will use most of my funded time as ‘Germanicus Scholar’ of The Roman Society to prepare my thesis for publication. Additionally, I will also begin working on a new project which again will focus on contested authority in contexts of religious conflict, investigate the impact of the intra-Christian divisions on the institution of the Roman family. I will further continue to teach Roman and Byzantine history as GTA at King’s Classics Department.
Roman Society Postgraduate Scholarship 2020-2022
We are delighted that the holder of the first Roman Society Postgraduate Scholarship, Emilio Zucchetti (Newcastle University), is now taking up a Lectureship at Royal Holloway. Emilio worked on the publication of his thesis (Discordia, Hegemony, and Popular Subjectivities: towards a Model for the Analysis of Social Conflict in Ancient Rome), planned for 2024. The monograph will explore the formation of individual and collective subjects, trying to recover non-elite agency in the complex process of transition between Republic and Principate. The work takes an etic perspective, drawing from Marxist, Post-Marxist, Post-structuralist, and Intersectional Feminist theory. He also began a new project on the life and scholarship of Frank William Walbank, Rathbone Professor of Ancient History at the University of Liverpool from 1951 to 1977 and longstanding member of the Roman Society. The research was prompted by the cataloguing of the papers bequeathed by Walbank to the University of Liverpool. An article by Walbank titled “Is our Roman History Teaching Reactionary?’ (Greece&Rome, 12, 1943, under the pen name “The Examiner”) brought Emilio to study the teaching of Ancient History in Britain in the Interwar period: the focus so far has been on how textbooks of the time framed the narrative of Roman history. During this period, Emilio has also been teaching Roman history and Classics as Associate Lecturer at Newcastle University and as Tutor for the University of Leeds.
The Roman Society is grateful to a long-standing member for supporting this Scholarship.