President
Professor Roy Gibson was elected President in June 2022. A native of Belfast, Roy is Professor in Classics at Durham University. He received his BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge and taught for twenty-five years at the University of Manchester. He has worked on Augustan poetry, especially Ovid and Propertius, and on the letters of Pliny the Younger and Sidonius Apollinaris. He is currently working on the surviving corpus of Greco-Roman letter collections 400 BCE – 400 C.E. and is co-director with Andrew Morrison of the AHRC-funded “Ancient Letter Collections” project. He was editor of Classical Review 2005-10 and Chair of the Council of the Classical Association 2013-20.
Vice-Presidents
Professor Tim Cornell was elected President in June 2018, and became a Vice-President in June 2022. He is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Manchester and a former Director of the Institute of Classical Studies. His research interests include ancient historiography and the history and archaeology of Rome and Italy from the Bronze Age to the end of the Republic. He is the author of The Beginnings of Rome and General Editor of The Fragments of the Roman Historians.
Professor Catharine Edwards, FBA was elected President in June 2015, and became a Vice-President in June 2018. She teaches at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research interests lie in Roman cultural history and Latin prose literature, particularly Seneca, as well as responses to classical antiquity in later periods (her books include Death in ancient Rome 2007; she also translated Suetonius Lives of the Caesars for Oxford World’s Classics). She served on the Classics sub-panel for the Research Excellence Framework (2014) and is on the steering group of the Capital Classics project, supporting Latin and other classical subjects in London schools. Her media work includes many contributions to BBC Radio 4’s ‘In our time’ and a three-part TV series ‘Mothers, murderers and mistresses: empresses of ancient Rome’ for BBC Four.
Professor Dominic Rathbone, who has been a member of the Roman Society since 1985, was elected President in June 2012, and became a Vice-President in June 2015. He is Professor of Ancient History at King’s College London, and his main fields of research interest are Republican Rome and Italy, the economy and fiscality of the Roman world, and Egypt under Roman rule. He is keen that the Roman Society, while maintaining its world-class Library and the JRS and Britannia, continues to develop its contacts with and appeal to a wider audience.
Honorary Treasurer
Philip Kay MA, MPhil, DPhil combines a career in finance with academic research into the economy of the Roman Republic and the structure and practice of ancient banking. He is the Managing Partner of a specialist Japanese fund management firm, having previously held senior positions at Schroders, Smith New Court and Credit Suisse. He is also a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, where he is a member of the College’s Investment Committee and chairs its Strategy Group. Publications include Rome’s Economic Revolution, published by OUP in 2014.
Honorary Secretary
Professor Roland Mayer taught in a number of London colleges—Bedford, Birkbeck, and King's—before his retirement in 2015. His research and publications are generally focussed on the writers and literary culture of the early principate at Rome: Horace, Seneca, Lucan, and Tacitus. He also has a lively interest in reception studies, particularly regarding the ruins of Rome.
JRS Editor
Myles Lavan is Reader in Ancient History at the University of St. Andrews. He works on citizenship, slavery and imperialism in the Roman empire and on the development of quantitative methods in ancient history. He is the author of Slaves to Rome: Paradigms of Empire in Roman Culture (2013) and co-editor of Cosmopolitanism and Empire: Universal Rulers, Local Elites and Cultural Integration in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (2016).
JRS Reviews Editor
Neville Morley is Professor of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Exeter. He works on Roman economic and social history, historiography (especially social-scientific approaches), and the reception of classical antiquity (especially of Thucydides). Recent publications include Classics: Why It Matters (2018), Thucydides and the Idea of History (2014), and Capital in Classical Antiquity (2022), co-edited with Max Koedijk.
Britannia Editor
Professor Will Bowden is Associate Professor in Roman Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on urbanism and identity in the Roman and late antique periods. He has been involved in major fieldwork projects in Balkans and the UK, most recently at Venta Icenorum in Norfolk. Major publications include Epirus Vetus: the Archaeology of a Late Antique Province (2003) and Butrint 3: Excavations at the Triconch Palace (2011, with R. Hodges). He is also involved in heritage interpretation projects utilising Virtual Reality and serves as trustee for two community archaeology charities.
Britannia Reviews Editor
Dr Nick Hodgson FSA retired in 2019 after 30 years as archaeologist for Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, where he co-directed long-running excavation campaigns at the Roman sites of South Shields and Wallsend on Tyneside. His research interests embrace all aspects of Roman frontier communities and their relation to indigenous Iron Age populations. His most recent books are Hadrian’s Wall: archaeology and history at the limit of Rome’s empire (2017) and The Roman Baths at Wallsend (2020). He is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology, Durham University and President of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne.
Honorary Librarian
Gesine Manuwald is Professor of Latin at University College London (UCL). Her main areas of research are Roman drama, Roman oratory (esp. Cicero’s speeches), Roman epic and the reception of antiquity in Neo-Latin literature.