Walter Scheidel

Walter Scheidel
Scheidel at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions in 2012
Born	(1966-07-09) 9 July 1966 Vienna, Austria
Nationality	American
Fields	Historian
Institutions	Stanford University
Alma mater	University of Vienna

Walter Scheidel (born 9 July 1966) is an American historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to world history.^[1]

Life

From 1984 to 1993, Scheidel studied Ancient History and Numismatics at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate in 1993. In 1998, he completed his habilitation at the University of Graz. From 1990 until 1994, he worked as an administrative and research assistant at the University of Vienna. As an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Austrian Research Council, he spent 1995 as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From 1996 to 1999, he was Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge. During this period, he also served as visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the University of Innsbruck.

Scheidel moved to the United States in 1999, where he initially held visiting positions at Stanford University and the University of Chicago. In 2003, he took up his current position in the Department of Classics of Stanford University, where he was promoted to professor in 2004 and received an endowed chair, the Dickason Professorship in the Humanities, in 2008. He is also a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Stanford's Human Biology program.

Scheidel has published four academic monographs and over 200 papers and reviews, and has edited or co-edited thirteen other books. He is co-editor of a monograph series for Oxford University Press and was co-founder of the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics,^[2] the world's first online repository for working papers in that field.^[3] In May 2012, Scheidel and Elijah Meeks launched the interactive website ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World.^[4] He has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Works

• Grundpacht und Lohnarbeit in der Landwirtschaft des römischen Italien, Frankfurt: Lang, 1994, ISBN 3-631-47904-2
• Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire: Explorations in Ancient Demography, Ann Arbor: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 1996, ISBN 1-887829-21-0
• Debating Roman Demography, Leiden: Brill, 2001 (editor), ISBN 90-04-11525-0
• Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt, Leiden: Brill, 2001, ISBN 90-04-12323-7
• Ostrakismos-Testimonien I: Die Zeugnisse antiker Autoren, der Inschriften und Ostraka über das athenische Scherbengericht aus vorhellenistischer Zeit (487–322 v. Chr.), Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 2002 (co-editor), ISBN 3-515-07947-5
• The Ancient Economy, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, and New York: Routledge, 2002 (co-editor), ISBN 0-7486-1322-6
• The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 (co-editor), ISBN 978-0-521-78053-7
• The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 (co-editor), ISBN 978-0-19-537158-1
• Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 (editor), ISBN 978-0-19-533690-0
• The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010 (co-editor), ISBN 978-0-19-921152-4
• The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012 (editor), ISBN 978-0-521-89822-5
• The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013 (co-editor), ISBN 978-0-19-518831-8
• State Power in Ancient China and Rome, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 (editor), ISBN 978-0-19-020224-8
• Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (co-editor), ISBN 978-1-107-08920-4
• On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016 (co-editor), ISBN 978-1-119-16248-3
• The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0-691-16502-8

See also

• Roman demography
• Roman economy

References

External links

• Personal website at Department of Classics, Stanford University
• Stanford Profiles at Stanford University
• Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics – PDF papers on ancient demography and economy