DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Medieval and Early Modern European History

Thematic Field(s):  Economic and Labor History

Principal Research Interest(s):  Socioeconomic history of the Roman Empire, comparative history, and Roman archaeology and material culture

Biography

Taco Terpstra (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2011) is a member of the Department of Classics with a courtesy joint appointment in the History Department. He specializes in Roman socioeconomic history and is the author of Rome and the Rise of the West (PUP 2026), Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean (PUP 2019), and Trading Communities in the Roman World (Brill 2013). In 2017-18, he was involved in a combined research and exhibition project at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, which resulted in the edited volume Portrait of a Child: Historical and Scientific Studies of a Roman Egyptian Mummy (Block Museum, 2019, coeditors: E. Rönkkö and M. Walton). His teaching includes courses on Roman sociopolitical and economic history, methodologies of historical research and the archaeology of Roman Campania.

Affiliated Programs 

• Faculty Fellow
• Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Publications

• Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019).
• Trading Communities in the Roman World: A Micro-Economic and Institutional Perspective (Leiden, Brill: 2013). 

Teaching Interests

• 101: The Ancient Economy.
• 330: The Roman Economy: The Preindustrial Economy as a Historical Perspective.
• 310: The Archaeology of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.
• 400: Classical Reception Studies Workshop (co-taught with Prof. S. Monoson).

Recent Awards and Honors

• 2016-17: Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship (Harvard University).
• 2015-16: Faculty Fellowship, Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities (Northwestern University).