Duncan MacRae
Associate Professor of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies; Co-Director, Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion
Research Areas
Roman history, late Republic to late Antiquity; ancient religions, including Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity
Biography
I work on Roman history from the period of the late Republic to Late Antiquity, particularly the entangled histories of religion and cultural life in the empire. I find myself particularly preoccupied by the history of religious change, the sociology of knowledge, and, increasingly, the history of temporality. These interests have led me to also write on the history of Judaism in antiquity and the history of ideas in early modernity.
I am currently engaged in two book projects. For some time now, I have been at work on a book tentatively titled Roman Futures: An Essay in Cultural History. Against standard accounts that assume that Roman culture (and all pre-modern cultures) worked only with an attenuated sense of the future, the book sketches how Romans devoted great energy to the calculation and imagination of the time-to-come. Religion is a big part of this story, but so are economics and "science". I have also recently started work on a short book for Cambridge UP, Religion in the Roman World, which will introduce advanced students and scholars in adjacent fields to the religious history of Roman worlds.
My first book, Legible Religion, was published by Harvard University Press in 2016. It is a historical investigation of the learned literature on Roman religion that appeared in the Late Republic (2nd-1st c. BCE) and the consequences of this literature for shaping ancient and late antique ideas about Roman religion. I continue to write on the religious and intellectual history of the Roman world. I am committed to the idea that Roman history should involve deep engagement with both the textual and material evidence; Latin epigraphy, which is both, is a particular interest.
I was educated at Trinity College Dublin (BA Classics) and Harvard (PhD Ancient History). At Berkeley, I am participating faculty in the Graduate Group for Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology (AHMA) and a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies and the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
Publications
Book:
Legible Religion: Books, Gods and Rituals in Roman Culture. 2016, Harvard University Press.
Recent Articles and Book Chapters:
“Reading the Roman-Jewish Treaty in 1 Maccabees 8: Narrative, Documents, and Hellenistic Historical Culture,” Hermathena 200/201 (2016 [2022]): 73-93.
“Ludibrium Paulinae: Historiography, Anti-Pagan Polemic, and Aristocratic Marriage in De excidio Hierosolymitano 2.4,” Journal of Late Antiquity 14.2 (2021): 229-256.
“Roman Hegemony and the Hasmoneans: The Construction of Empire,” The Middle Maccabees: Archaeology, History, and the Rise of the Hasmonean Kingdom, edited by Andrea M. Berlin and Paul J. Kosmin, Atlanta: SBL Press, 2021: 331-345.
“The Date of the Proem of Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica: New Epigraphic Evidence from Naples” Classical Philology 116.1 (2021): 119-125.
“Simon the God: Imagining the Other in Second-Century Christianity,” Geneses: A Comparative Study of the Historiographies of the Rise of Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam, edited by John Tolan, Abingdon: Routledge, 2019: 64-86.
“Mercury and Materialism: Images of Mercury and the Tabernae of Pompeii” Tracking Hermes, Persuing Mercury, edited by John F. Miller and Jenny Strauss Clay, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019: 193-208.
“The Two Gentlemen of Trachonitis: A Story of Violence in Galilee and Rome (Josephus, Vita 112-113, 149-154),” Strength to Strength: Essays in Honor of Shaye J. D. Cohen, edited by Michael Satlow, Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2018: 219-234.
“Diligentissumus investigator antiquitatis? ‘Antiquarianism’ and historical evidence between Republican Rome and the early modern Republic of Letters” In Omnium annalium monumenta: Historical Writing and Historical Evidence in Republican Rome, edited by Christopher Smith and Kaj Sandberg, Leiden: Brill, 2018: 137-156
Books
