Elio Lo Cascio - Biography#

Lo Cascio (b. 1948), Professor of Roman History at “La Sapienza” University of Rome; previously at the Universities of Lecce (1976-1986), L’Aquila (1986-90, where he also served as dean of the Faculty of Letters) and “Federico II” of Naples (1990-2006). He served for 2 terms (1996-2002) as President of the “Consulta Universitaria per la Storia Greca e Romana”, which represents all professors of Greek and Roman History in Italian Universities. He was a member of the School of Historical Studies in the IAS in Princeton in 1993 and 2001. In 2009 he was "Directeur d'études invité" in the EHESS in Paris. In 2014 he was Mercator Fellow (Gast Professor) at the DFG-Graduierten Kolleg "Archaeologie vormoderner Wirtschaftsraeume", in the Universities of Bonn and Koeln. He is currently a corresponding fellow of the Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, member of the “Consiglio Direttivo” of the Istituto Italiano per la Storia antica, and on the editorial or scientific board of several periodicals and monograph series. He is the editor of the series Pragmateiai, published by Edipuglia. In 2012 he was a member of the evaluation panel of the ERC Advanced Grants, SH6. He gave papers in Int. Conferences in Italy and other European countries (France, Spain, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Roumania, Austria), and in the USA, Canada and Iran. He delivered lectures in European and American universities (the Istituto Universitario Europeo, the EHESS, Paris, Bonn, Köln, Leiden, Nijmegen, Amsterdam, University College London, Cambridge, Sevilla, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Columbia, Duke, Harvard, Tulane, Yale, Stanford). In 2012 he gave the Lansdowne Lectures at the University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada).

His publications focus on 4 subjects: the administrative history of the Principate and of the Late Empire; the institutional history of the Roman Republic; the economic and social history of Rome from the Republic to the Late Empire; and on Roman population history and the impact of demographic change on the economy and society of the Roman Empire. He has written also on the history of Punic and Greek Sicily, on Late Republican municipal legislation, on the city of Rome and on the Roman cities and their elites with a particular emphasis on Pompeii, on the dynamics of Romanization, and on the history of modern historiography of the ancient world.