Krzysztof Nawotka is professor of ancient history at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. He received his PhD in classics from the The Ohio State University in 1991 and his habilitation from the University of Wroclaw in 1999. He is the author or editor of thirteen books. The most important of his full-length books are: The Western Pontic Cities: History and Political Organization (A.M. Hakkert 1997); Alexander the Great (CSP 2010); Boule and Demos in Miletus and its Pontic Colonies (Harrassowitz 2014); The Alexander Romance by Ps.-Callisthenes: A Historical Commentary (Brill 2017). His most recent edited volume is Epigraphic Culture in the Eastern Mediterranean in Antiquity (Routledge 2020).
K. Nawotka, a Visiting Research Scholar at ISAW for the 2022-23 academic year, in 2011-2015 was a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool, in 2014 a visiting scholar at Brown University, in 2015 he was elected to the Academia Europaea, in 2021 to Commission Transformationsprozesse und Imperium in den Alten Welten, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. His research interests include the epigraphic culture in the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity, legends of Alexander the Great, and the transformation of culture, social organization and lifestyle in the Eastern Mediterranean and the adjacent areas in the Hellenistic age. In his current project he wants to run a thorough source analysis of "Hellenistic" features within the Arsakid empire, to then assess the depth or shallowness of Hellenization of it. He intends to go beyond the traditional approach which overemphasizes the significance of Greek coin inscriptions, iconography and the title philhellen employed by Arsakids, concentrating instead on the royal Arsakid patronage of Greek temples and assessing how Hellenistic was the Arsakid empire, starting from the vantage point of classical and Hellenistic definitions of Hellenism: shared language, ethnicity, religious cults, way of life, sport and including forms of government, social organization, euergetism and the way of inscribing for display. A focal point of the forthcoming part of his project will be cities of the Arsakid empire, commonly but imprecisely called Greek. He wants to study interplay between the majority Syrian/Mesopotamian culture, Seleukid tradition, equally Macedonian and Iranian, and Parthian innovation.