I am an ancient Historian at Yale University, with appointments in the Departments of History and Classics. I am also a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School, and have a secondary appointment in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

My primary research has been focused on the legal and economic history of the Ptolemaic period in Egypt. That means thinking hard about Greek and demotic Egyptian Papyrology. For  a short documentary film about Papyrology, filmed in 1971, follow this link. It's old school but fun. The technological change between then and now is quite astonishing. For the fabulously fun Papyrology project I was involved in along with colleagues at Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan, The Egyptian Museum in Berlin and Tokai University in Japan, follow this link.

I have published four monographs: The Hauswaldt Papyri. A Family Archive from Edfu in the Ptolemaic Period.  Demotische Studien, Vol. 12. Würzburg, 1997, Land and power in Ptolemaic Egypt. The structure of land tenure 332-30 BCE. Cambridge University Press, 2003, and The last pharaohs. Egypt under the Ptolemies, 305 – 30 BC. Princeton University Press, 2009. My new book, The Open Sea. The Economic Life of the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Iron Age to the Rise of Rome, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2018. I am in the process of completing a monograph on Hellenistic History for the University of Edinburgh Press, and am beginning a major new synthesis of Ancient History and climatic change.

I have also edited (with Ian Morris, Stanford University) a volume on economic history: The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models. Stanford University Press, 2005, and Law and society in Egypt from Alexander to the Arab Conquest (330 BC-640 AD. Co-edited with J.G. Keenan & Uri Yiftach. Cambridge University Press. With R.J. Jasnow, The Demotic and Hieratic Papyri in the Suzuki Collection of Tokai University, Japan appeared in 2016. The edited volume in honor of Pierre Briant, ​Writing History in Time of War. Michael Rostovtzeff, Elias Bickerman and the "Hellenization of Asia" appeared in 2015 with Franz Steiner Verlag.

Over the last the last four years I have begun a new research agenda that is dedicated to understanding how to integrate human and natural archives to tell a richer and more dynamic story of the past. This has taken me into the very exciting area of Paleoclimatology. My focus, with a great team of scientists and other historians, has been on ice core records and the volcanic forcing of the hydroclimate of east Africa, the source of the vital annual flood of the Nile. From this starting point we are building a new picture of the pre-industrial world by linking ice core records, other paleoclimate proxy records and historical data on environmental conditions and climatic change to establish the range of societal responses. I am especially focused on ice core Geochemistry, both because of the nature of data generated and because ice core drilling and processing intersects with my interest in climbing. A very happy coincidence of research and hobby. I am the Principal Investigator of a US National Science Foundation-funded major project assessing volcanic impacts on Nile river hydroclimate and ancient Egyptian civilization. As part of the project our team is more broadly examining all relevant paleoclimate proxy records and all relevant historical data from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods in Egypt, the Nile river basin, and western Asia. We are also planning on using climate model reconstructions  and new statistical techniques to tie in climate proxy data, qualitative Nile river flow data, historical events, and societal responses.

Our NSF Project in the news here.

You can follow the project on Twitter @NileHistory

The project website is at: nileclimateproject.netlify.com.


Before coming to Yale, I taught for 12 years at Stanford University and two years at Princeton University with a one-year stop as a Solmsen Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I have appointments in both the Classics and the History Departments at Yale, am a Professor in the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (by Courtesy), and am also a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School. I am a collaborative member of Yale’s Program in Economic History, and co-coordinator of Yale's Archaia program.

I received my B.A. from Ohio State, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. I do a lot of cycling, and am obsessed with mountaineering.