Episode 28: Edward Watts, on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Watts received his PhD in History from Yale University in 2002. His research interests center on the intellectual and religious history of the Roman Empire and the early Byzantine Empire. His first book, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria (University of California Press, 2006), explains how the increasingly Christian upper class of the late antique world used a combination of economic and political pressures to neutralize pagan elements of the traditional educational system. His second book, Riot in Alexandria: Historical Debate in Pagan and Christian Communities, uses Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Syriac sources to reconstruct an Alexandrian riot that erupted in 486 AD. His third book, The Final Pagan Generation, offers a generational history of the men born in the 310s that traces the experience of living through the fourth century’s dramatic religious and political changes. His fourth book, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2017) recounts the life of an important female philosopher whose work redefined philosophy and whose death resonated as a symbol of dramatic religious and social change in the early fifth century. He is also the author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny. In addition to these five books, he has co-edited five other volumes. He has also authored more than 40 articles on topics ranging from the Old Academy in the fourth century BC to the relationship between orality and textuality in the early Byzantine period. He is currently preparing a monograph tracing the Romanization and de-Romanization of the Mediterranean world between 96 and 850 AD (The Rise and Fall of the Roman Nation,  and is co-authoring a volume introducing the historical and classroom uses of Roman imperial coins. Watts taught for ten years at Indiana University. Professor Watts teaches courses on Byzantine History, Roman History, Late Antique Christianity and paganism, Roman numismatics, and the history of the Medieval Mediterranean.