Confronting Leviathan: The Roman Empire from Hobbes to Rostovtzeff Yale Humanities - Video

The 5th annual Michael I Rostovtzeff lecture, followed by an all-day symposium, and incorporating a visit to the new Dura Europus Galleries at the YUAG.

John Matthews, John M. Schiff Professor of Classics and History, came to Yale in 1996, having spent his earlier career at the University of Oxford, where he was University Professor of Late Roman History, and Fellow and Tutor at Queen's College. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990 and is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the London Society of Antiquaries. The main areas of his research have concerned the social and cultural roots of political life in the later Roman empire, and the making and diffusion of Roman law. His 2006 book, The Journey of Theophanes: Travel, Business and Daily Life in the Roman East, a translation and interpretation of a fourth-century papyrus archive, received the James Henry Breasted Prize of the American Historical Association, as the best book published in that year on any period of history before 1,000 CE. His most recent book is Roman Perspectives: Studies in the social, political and cultural history of the First to Fifth Centuries (2010), a collection of seventeen papers, of which six are previously published and others have been extensively revised. He is currently working on a study of the first century of the city of Constantinople, and on a general history of the Roman empire in two volumes, in which the second volume will present a complementary anthology of Greek and Latin texts in translation.