The Graduate Group in Ancient History is delighted to announce Carlos Noreña as the Hyde Visitor for Spring 2025.
Every spring, the Graduate Group hosts a week-long visit by a distinguished ancient historian, made possible by a gift by Walter Woodburn Hyde (1870-1966, Professor of Greek and Ancient History at Penn 1910-1940). During their stay, the Hyde Visitor teaches several graduate seminars, meets with graduate students individually and in smaller groups, and delivers the formal Hyde Lecture.
Carlos Noreña (PhD, Ancient History, University of Pennsylvania, 2001) is Goldman Distinguished Chair of Social Sciences, Professor of History, and (from Fall 2025) Director of the Ancient Worlds Center at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Imperial Ideals in the Roman West (Cambridge 2011); editor of The Roman Atlantic: Dynamics of an Ocean Frontier (Oxford, forthcoming) and A Cultural History of Western Empires: Antiquity (Bloomsbury 2018); and co-editor of From Document to History: Epigraphic Insights into the Graeco-Roman World (Brill 2019) and The Emperor and Rome: Space, Representation, and Ritual (Cambridge 2010). He has published widely in Roman history, literary and material cultures in the Roman empire, the topography of Rome, historical geography, and comparative empires. He has been a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and has delivered several keynote and named lectures, including the J. H. Gray Lectures at the University of Cambridge (2022). In 2017, he received UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
Professor Noreña will deliver his Hyde Lecture
"Backwaters of the Roman Empire: The Case of Marmarica"
on Thursday, February 27, 2025
4:45-6:15pm
in Cohen Hall 402
Far away from cities, resource clusters, military installations, and transportation hubs—the interlinked “hot spots” through which the Roman Empire was sustained as a dispersed constellation of sociopolitical power—were the “backwaters” of the imperial realm: areas of sparse settlement and low productivity, devoid of conspicuous concentrations of wealth, and disconnected from the main circuits of communication and exchange. This paper investigates one such area: the microregion known in antiquity as the Marmarica in the eastern Libyan desert. Drawing on a remarkable but obscure cadastral document from the early third century CE, it explores how and to what extent this no man’s land fit into the larger imperial mosaic of which it was a part, and what the resulting picture tells us about marginality, identity, and governmentality in the Roman Empire.
4:15-4:45 pm: Coffee and cookies in Cohen Hall 2nd Floor Lounge. All are welcome.