past Rostovtzeff lectures
Rostovtzeff Introduction Page
The upcoming Lectures
2010 Stephen Haber, Stanford University
“Natural Resources and the Institutions of Governance:
Evidence from the Ancient and Modern Worlds”
Haber is A.A. and Jeanne Welch Milligan Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University. Professor of Political Science, History and Economics (by courtesy). He is also the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution; senior fellow of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research; senior fellow of the Center for International Development; and research economist at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on the relationship between political organization and economic growth. 
Most of this research has focused on Latin America, particularly Mexico and Brazil. But through the Social Science History Institute (SSHI) at Stanford, Steve has been one of the strongest supporters of Ancient History in the US over the last 15 years. In particular the SSHI has been instrumental in several important international conferences about the Ancient Economy.
2009 Ian Morris, Stanford University
“What is Ancient History?”
Morris is Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor in Classics and Professor in History at Stanford University
He began his career as an archaeologist and historian of ancient Greece, studying early texts and excavating sites around the Mediterranean Sea, but in recent years he has moved toward larger-scale questions and an evolutionary approach to world history. He has written or edited eleven books, among which are Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Wiley-Blackwell, 2000). From 2000 through 
2006 Professor Morris directed Stanford University’s excavation at Monte Polizzo, a native Sicilian town of the seventh and sixth centuries BC. His most recent book, Why the West Rules …For Now (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, forthcoming 2010), asks how geography and natural resources have shaped the distribution of wealth and power around the world across the last 20,000 years and how they will shape our future. Morris’s ongoing projects include a book on slavery and globalization, a study of western civilization co-authored with historian Niall Ferguson of Harvard University, and a volume of the forthcoming Cambridge History of the World.
2008 Nicholas Purcell, Oxford University
Romans in the Middle: Between Class, Status and Geography
Purcell is a fellow of St. John’s College and CUF Lecturer in Ancient History in the Faculty of Classics, Oxford University.
He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2007. Mr. Purcell is an expert on the ancient Mediterranean and is perhaps best known for his monumental study, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History, co-authored with Peregrine Hordern (Oxford University Press, 2000). In his work he uses archaeological evidence alongside literary and documentary evidence to explore the social, economic and cultural history of the Greeks and Romans and their neighbors. His work especially stresses the longues durées, blending archaeological findings with other data, and insisting that the different themes of history, such as culture, politics, societies, economic behavior, ideas, institutions, must be studied in close association.
Purcell has a special interest in the ancient city of Rome and its Italian setting; in the cultural significance of games of chance, the rôle of women in the Roman imperial family, landscape gardening, and the emperor's resemblance to an actor on the stage; and in the production and consumption of wine and the socio-economic significance of the villa.
