The Rostovtzeff Lectures
Each spring ISAW sponsors a series of four lectures, named after the great ancient historian Michael I. Rostovtzeff. A Russian ancient historian, Rostovtzeff came to the U.S. after the Russian Revolution and taught for many years at Yale University as Sterling Professor of Ancient History. Rostovtzeff’s prodigious energies and sprawling interests led him to write on an almost unimaginable range of subjects. ISAW’s Rostovtzeff series presents scholarship that embodies its aspirations to foster work that crosses disciplinary, geographical, and chronological lines.
The Rostovtzeff Lectures are supported in part by a generous endowment fund given by Roger and Whitney Bagnall.
The Rostovtzeff Lectures are published by Princeton University Press.
The following lectures have previously been delivered in this series:
Authorship, Tradition, and Performance in Early China
The inaugural Rostovtzeff Lectures were given in 2010, by Martin Kern (Princeton University).
- Texts as Rewritten Traditions
- Writing and Performance
- The Staged Author and the Rise of Literature
The Origin of Monsters: Image, Cognition, and State Formation in the Ancient World
The 2011 Rostovtzeff Lectures were given by David Wengrow (University College London).
- The Sumerian Innovation
- The Cultural Ecology of Monsters
- Fantastic Creatures between Nature and Nurture
- The Demonic State
These lectures were published in 2013 in a volume entitled The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Shifting Narratives in Egyptian Christian Visual Culture
The 2012 Rostovtzeff Lectures were given by Elizabeth S. Bolman (Temple University).
The Sovereign Assemblage: Sense, Sensibility, and Sentiment in the Bronze Age Caucasus
The 2013 Rostovtzeff Lectures were given by Adam T. Smith (Cornell University).
- The Sovereignty of Assemblages
- The Civilization Machine in the Early Bronze Age
- The War Machine in the Middle Bronze Age
- The Political Machine in the Late Bronze Age
These lectures were published in 2015 in a volume entitled: The Political Machine: Assembling Sovereignty in the Bronze Age Caucasus.
Displacements: Migration, Mobility, and Material Culture in the West Mediterranean
The 2014 Rostovtzeff Lectures were given by Peter van Dommelen (Brown University).
Sumer in the Mesopotamian World: Reading Traditions & Traditions of Reading
The 2015 Rostovtzeff Lectures were given by Gonzalo Rubio (Pennsylvania State University).
Silk Roads and Steppe Roads of Medieval China: History Unearthed from Tombs
The 2016 Rostovtzeff Lectures were delivered by Jonathan K. Skaff (Shippensburg University).
Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antique Egypt: The Struggle of Coptic for an Official Status
The 2017 Rostovtzeff Lectures were delivered by Jean-Luc Fournet (Collège de France).
- An Egyptian Exception?
- Why Greek was Preferred to Coptic?
- The Rise of Legal Coptic and the Byzantine State
- The Role of the Church in the Growth of Legal Coptic
The Sky over Ancient Iraq: Babylonian Astronomy in Context
The 2018 Rostovtzeff Lectures were delivered by Mathieu Ossendrijver (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin).
Feeding Civilizations: A Comparative Long-Term Consideration of Agricultural and Culinary Traditions across the Old World
The 2019 Rostovtzeff Lectures were delivered by Dorian Q. Fuller (University College London).
- March 27: Domestication, Demography, and Settlement: Alternative Mathematics for Early Agriculture
- April 3: From Sustainability to Investment Agriculture: Logics of Productive Consumption and Disparity
- April 8: Sticking with the Spirits: Eastern Cuisines, Grain Wines, and Civilization
- April 17: Baking up Western Civilization and Some African Alternatives
As If: Fiction, Make-Believe, and the Legal World of Early Medieval Francia, 5th-9th Centuries AD
The 2021 Rostovtzeff Lectures were delivered by Alice Rio (King's College London)
Epistemic Corruption and Epistemic Progress in Ancient Science
The 2023 Rostovtzeff Lectures were delivered by Daryn Lehoux (Queen's University)
- April 25: Sources of Corruption
- April 27: The Contagion of Corruption
- May 2: Naturalizing the Social
- May 4: The Question of Progress
The End in Sight? Archaeological Science, Globalisation and Unsustainability
The 2024 Rostovtzeff Lectures were delivered by Shadreck Chirikure (University of Oxford)
- April 8: Great Zimbabwe: Archaeological Science, Globalisation and Humans with a Different History
- April 10: Archaeological Science and Internal African Globalisation
- April 15: Archaeological Science, Globalisation and the Atlantic-Indian Ocean System – Oranjemund Shipwreck
- April 17: Homo faber and Homo dolor: Archaeological Science, Globalisation and (Un)sustainability