Woolf, Greg

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WOOLF, Greg

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: Oxford University, degrees in classics and ancient and modern history, 1985; Cambridge University, doctorate.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of St. Andrews, School of Classics, Swallowgate, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9AL, Scotland. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Laboratoire d'Archéologie, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, researcher; University of Leicester, Leicester, England, part-time teacher; Christ's College, Cambridge, Cambridge, England, research fellow; Magdalen College and Brasenose College, Oxford, Oxford, England, teaching fellow, beginning 1990; University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland, chair of ancient history, beginning 1998, professor of ancient history and head of school of classics.

MEMBER:

Roman Society (member of advisory committee), Classical Association of Scotland, Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (fellow), American Philological Association.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Honorary research fellow, British School at Rome, 2004.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Alan K. Bowman) Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor) Cambridge Illustrated History of the Roman World, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

(Editor, with Catharine Edwards) Rome the Cosmopolis, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Economies beyond Agriculture in the Classical World, edited by David J. Mattingly and John Salmon, Routledge (New York, NY), 2000. Contributor to academic journals, including Journal of Roman Archaeology, World Archaeology, and Journal of Roman Studies. Member of advisory board, American Journal of Archaeology; member of editorial board, Roman Society and Classical Association.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Books on Roman imperialism cultural history, the 2005 Rhind lectures on Religious Creativity in the Roman Provinces, and the Roman world's science and empire in the context of the Logos Research Centre.

SIDELIGHTS:

British educator Greg Woolf has written widely on the cultural history of the Roman empire. In Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul Woolf looks at "the process by which the cultures of Rome's conquered subjects in Gaul, after an initial period of disruption and destruction, were transformed into a distinct Gallo-Roman civilization," according to Times Literary Supplement contributor Richard Miles. By examining a variety of factors, including villa culture, economic conditions, religion, and literacy, "Woolf shows how Roman imperialism, and the attitudes that accompanied it, provided the opportunity for some groups in Gallic society 'to make strategic use of Roman culture to acquire privileged places for themselves in the new order of things,'" Miles observed. Becoming Roman was deemed a "substantial and well-written study" by N. James in Antiquity. A more recent work, Rome the Cosmopolis, coedited by Woolf, provides "wide-ranging insights into the life of the capital," wrote a critic in Contemporary Review.

Woolf also coedited Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, a collection of essays concerning "the function of literacy in the exercise of state control," remarked Eric W. Robinson in Notes and Queries. As Rosamond McKitterick observed in History Today, "Too limited a view of the roles of writing and the degree to which writing effected historical change and was used in the construction of power has sometimes narrowed the discussion down to questions of who was or was not literate." The essays in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, though, "widen the debate to consider complex patterns of cultural borrowings and adaptation across Western and Eastern Europe as well as instances when tangential contacts, as between Greek and Syriac literatures, could be relatively inconsequential," McKittrick noted.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Antiquity, March, 2002, N. James, review of Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul, p. 241.

Choice, March, 1999, review of Becoming Roman, p. 1318; November, 2003, R. I. Frank, review of Rome the Cosmopolis, p. 599.

Contemporary Review, June, 2003, review of Rome the Cosmopolis, p. 383.

Greece & Rome, October, 1999, P. Walcot, review of Becoming Roman, p. 251.

History Today, July, 1996, Rosamond McKitterick, review of Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, p. 55.

Notes and Queries, March, 1996, Eric W. Robinson, review of Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, p. 64.

Times Literary Supplement, September 16, 1994, W. V. Harris, review of Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, p. 22; June 18, 1999, Richard Miles, review of Becoming Roman, p. 35; October 3, 2003, Glen Bowersock, review of Rome the Cosmopolis, p. 5.