ISAW’s Director Emeritus Roger Bagnall Announced as the new President of the American Philosophical Society

We are pleased to share the following announcement from the American Philosophical Society concerning ISAW’s Leon Levy Director Emeritus Roger Bagnall:  

On April 29, 2023, Dr. Roger Bagnall took office as President of the American Philosophical Society. Dr. Bagnall is professor emeritus of ancient history and Leon Levy Director Emeritus of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. Among the leading historians of Greek and Roman antiquity, Dr. Bagnall enjoys an immense reputation for his work on Roman and Late Antique Egypt, its economy, and its documents on papyri and potsherds. His technical expertise in papyrology is matched by a historical mind of great range. He has also been a pioneer in the application of computer technology to the humanities.

Elected to the APS in 2001, Bagnall has long been an involved Member of the Society, serving as councilor for class four (humanities), chair of the committee on museum, a member of the committee on meetings and the committee of library and museum, curator of fine arts, and most recently, curator of art and material culture.

“I am honored by the trust that my fellow-Members of the American Philosophical have placed in me. Both the Society's support of research and its intellectual fellowship have been deeply meaningful to me. As the Society looks to advance its mission of "promoting useful knowledge" even more broadly in the coming years, I hope to play a useful part in that effort,” Bagnall said.

To read more regarding the announcement, please consult the full article posted by the APS.

Dr. Roger Bagnall is the Emeritus Professor of Ancient History and Leon Levy Director Emeritus at ISAW. 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).