Professor Jonathan Prag

Academic Subject(s): Classics and Joint Schools

Teaching

I offer tutorials for all undergraduate papers relating to the Roman Republic, as well as the transition to Empire (i.e. the 241-146 BC, 146-46 BC and 46 BC – AD 54 period papers in Classics, as well as their corresponding versions for AMH and CAAH; Cicero and Catiline; Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum). Additionally I regularly teach the class for the final year option paper Cicero: Politics and Thought, and the first year CAAH core paper 50 BC – AD 50. I supervise MSt, MPhil and DPhil students in Roman history and epigraphy. I welcome doctoral students in Roman Republican history and Sicilian history, epigraphy and archaeology, and epigraphic studies more generally, particularly with a digital focus.

Research

My research focuses on ancient Sicily and the Roman Republic, with a particular interest in epigraphic culture. Sicily, as the first province of the Roman Republican empire and a cultural crossroads at the centre of the Mediterranean, provides an excellent focus for studying many aspects of the development of the ancient Mediterranean during the period of Roman expansion. Besides exploring the place of the western Mediterranean in our assessment of the Hellenistic and Republican periods of history (e.g. editing The Hellenistic West, with Jo Quinn), I have worked extensively on Cicero’s Verrines with colleagues in a French CNRS project, on the Roman use of foreign auxiliaries, and on the processes of mid-Republican imperial expansion.

A primary focus of much of my work at present is the epigraphy of ancient Sicily, both the individual inscriptions and the use of epigraphy as a historical source. I currently direct CROSSREADS, an ERC-Advanced grant (2020-2026), exploring the epigraphy of ancient Sicily through a combination of approaches (linguistic, palaeographic, archaeometric). The foundation of that project is the epigraphic corpus I.Sicily, of which I am the editor - an open-access, online digital corpus of all the inscriptions of ancient Sicily (in parallel I have responsibility for Inscriptiones Graecae XIV.1 (2nd edition) for Sicily). I have a long-term interest in the application of digital methods to the study of epigraphy and the ancient world, whether using TEI for epigraphic publication, applying machine-learning to ancient inscriptions (work which was published in Nature), or advocating the development FAIR approaches to ancient sources such as epigraphy (I currently co-direct the AHRC-DFG funded FAIR Epigraphy project with Prof. Marietta Horster).

Since 2017 I have co-directed excavations on the northern acropolis of the Hellenistic/Roman site of ancient Halaesa (modern Tusa), on the north coast of Sicily, in a joint project with Professor Lorenzo Campagna of the University of Messina. Student volunteers are welcome (we take a small team out each July).