Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Biography
I am a historian of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which stretched from the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia from 550 to 330 BCE. Two broad questions drive my research. First, how did the imperial ruling class maintain its empire? Second, how did ordinary people react to being part of the empire? In my research, I combine the Greek historiographical sources (Herodotus, Xenophon, etc.) with the rich documentary evidence in Middle Eastern languages such as Akkadian, Elamite, and Aramaic.
My first book, forthcoming with the University of California press in 2025, is called The House of the Satrap: The Making of the Ancient Persian Empire. In this book, I analyze the endurance of the Persian Empire through the analysis of a single institution: the house of the satrap. Satraps were the regional representatives of the Persian king, and they considered the people (family, friends, subordinates) and property under their control as a “house.” Satrapal houses sat at the interface between state and subject, and the system of satrapal houses, competing and communicating with one another, gave the empire the local flexibility to endure for two hundred years.
While at the University of Toronto, I will be developing a second book provisionally called Land, Labor, and Government under the Persian Empire: The Transformation of the Ancient Middle East. Under the Persian Empire, several social transformations occurred across the Middle East: land was accumulated into fewer, but larger estates; labor structures became more regularized into a status between what we might call “free” and “enslaved;” and the government was increasingly able to intervene into civil society. I argue that these changes are causally connected: the imperial ruling elite sought to control ever more land and labor, and it accomplished this via an increasingly large governmental apparatus. These changes were met with local resistance, and this book will tell these stories as well.
I received my PhD from the University of Chicago, and I have previously worked at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (part of New York University) and the University of St Andrews.