Nico Dogaer is a papyrologist and ancient historian specialized in the socio-economic history of Achaemenid, Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. He obtained his PhD in history from KU Leuven (2021) as a PhD fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders and he has worked as a researcher for the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names at the University of Oxford. He has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Bologna, Chicago, and Leiden. He is currently postdoctoral fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation.
Nico's dissertation challenged the longstanding notion of 'state monopolies' in Hellenistic Egypt, providing a fresh perspective on Egyptian state formation and economic development, with a more significant role for markets. This new perspective is based on the combined study of Greek and Demotic papyri, often studied separately, and inspired by recent developments in economics. Nico has also worked extensively on onomastics, cross-cultural exchange in Graeco-Roman Egypt, and the application of network analysis to ancient sources.
Building on this previous work, his current research focuses on institutional change and its effects following the Roman conquest of Egypt, in particular economic transformation and fiscal reform, traditionally seen in anachronistic terms as a privatization of a state-controlled economy. At ISAW, he explores these issues using the vegetable oil industry as a case study. He is moreover involved in the international research consortium AGROS, an interdisciplinary exploration of diet and nutrition in Graeco-Roman Egypt, and in the publication of several Greek and Demotic papyri and ostraca dating from the Achaemenid to the Roman period.