Roger Bagnall

Before joining the NYU faculty in 2007, Bagnall was Jay Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History at Columbia University, where he had taught for 33 years. During that time he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of Classics. Educated at Yale University and the University of Toronto, he specializes in the social and economic history of Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique Egypt. He has held many leadership positions in the fields of classics and papyrology; he is co-founder of a multi-university consortium creating the Advanced Papyrological Information System. Among his best-known works are Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994; with Bruce Frier), Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History (1995), Early Christian Books in Egypt (2009), and Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (2010). His edition (with Giovanni Ruffini) of the first volume of Ostraka from Trimithis inaugurated ISAW's series of digital books. He has also edited many volumes of papyri and other ancient texts.  He directs NYU's excavation project at Amheida (jointly sponsored with Columbia) in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt. His latest book, An Oasis City, presents the results of the Amheida excavations.He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Académie Royale de Belgique, as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy and a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute. In October, 2016 he received an honorary doctorate from the Université de Paris-Sorbonne.

Bagnall is one of the general editors of the 13-volume Encyclopedia of Ancient History, which appeared from Wiley-Blackwell in November 2012 and is regularly enlarged and updated.  Other recent publications include the graffiti from the basilica in the agora of ancient Smyrna and publication of texts from the excavations at Amheida and Berenike. He retired as Leon Levy Director of ISAW in 2016.

Curriculum vitae