A little about me:
My name is Andy Gallia, and I'm an associate professor of History at the University of Minnesota. I was born in San Diego, but grew up in Austin, TX. After stints in Princeton (AB, Classics), Reading (MA, with a stopover in Rome) and Philadelphia (PhD, Ancient History), I came to Minneapolis, where I currently reside with my wife and two children. My area of expertise is Roman history and culture. Along those lines, I teach a wide range of courses dealing with ancient history and classical languages in the departments of History and Classical and Near Eastern Studies here at the 'U'.
My research interests:
By training and inclination a Roman historian, I also maintain a keen interest in Greek history and culture and in the history of ancient civilizations generally. Now and then I get to teach the first part of the world history survey sequence, which spans the globe from the emergence of homo sapiens to Columbus' voyages, with an emphasis on environmental history. As a researcher, I like to think of my approach to history as comprehensive, drawing on as wide a range of evidence as I can manage. My work combines analysis of written sources (literary and epigraphic texts) with that of material remains (as represented in the disciplines of art history, archaeology, and numismatics). Still, I try not to lose sight of the individual tesserae of this mosaic, preferring to build larger arguments through careful, in-depth discussions of individual problems and pieces of evidence.
My first book, Remembering the Roman Republic: Culture, Politics and History under the Principate (CUP 2011), explores what its blurb describes as a "central paradox" of the Roman Principate: the presence of multiple, repeated claims of continuity with the past in the face of a political system that marked a clear break with the old traditions. Though we regard the Principate (I don't like the term "Empire") as a distinct era of Roman history, defining the relationship between this period and that of the "free" Republic was not so easy for those who lived through it. In six case studies spanning the years between the fall of Nero and the height of Trajan's power, I examine some of the ways that emperors and their subjects confronted and tried to make sense of (i.e., remembered) their Republican heritage.
In addition to a number of articles I'd still like to get off my desk, I'm currently working on a new book on the tradition of tyrannicide in Greek and Roman culture. Tentatively entitled "Sic Semper Tyrannis: The Tradition of Political Violence in Ancient Greece and Rome," this work is an outgrowth of a larger project on the role of historiography in the interaction between Greek and Roman culture. I am interested in exploring not just the relationship between historical accounts and the popular tradition about tyrannicides (a well-plowed field, at least in some of the furrows) but also the tension between professed political ideals (like protecting freedom and fostering equality) and the messy reality of political murder. How did conspiracy and assassination become noble acts?
The rest of my work looks like something of a mixed bag, but there may be underlying continuities. I've done a fair amount of reasearch into the ancient topography of the city of Rome. I contributed to (and was the primary cartographer for) Mapping Augustan Rome, a thoroughly documented map of the city in the Augustan period, and am now finishing up an essay on Rome's development under the Flavians. Articles in The Classical Quarterly (on the reinscription of Draco's law on homicide), the Journal of Roman Studies (on the putative sources behind Dionysius of Halicarnassus' Roman Antiquities) have a (now apparent) relationship to the tyrannicide project, while one in Transactions of the American Philological Association (on the meaning of Tacitus' Dialogus) is an outgrowth of my work for Remembering the Roman Republic. Several articles (mostly prosopographical) are forthcoming in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient History. Works in progress include a piece on the relationship between memory and literacy in Cato and Valerius Maximus, one on anti-Greek attitudes in Juvenal's Third Satire, and a paper on the perplexing status of the Vestal Virgins in Roman society.