Dr Marcus Chin

I am an ancient historian whose work focuses on the social and cultural history of the Hellenistic and Roman eastern Mediterranean, and in particular of its civic communities. I am interested in the way localised polities intersected and interacted with the large, trans-local organisations of political and social power in the ancient world, and for this reason am closely concerned with epigraphic texts, and documentary evidence more broadly, while nurturing a burgeoning interest in numismatics. Having completed undergraduate and graduate degrees at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia (2014, 2016), I undertook a doctorate at Oxford from 2016 to 2021. While originally intending to compose a history of local memory-formation in the Roman east, I eventually completed a thesis examining the evolution of civic euergetism and honorific culture in western Asia Minor under the influence of early Roman domination and rule (2nd century BCE to 1st century CE). I have elsewhere published on euergetism as a language of political power, especially in relation to Attalid Pergamon. I joined Andrew Meadow’s project CHANGE in September, and will be marrying these research concerns with CHANGE’s broader ambition of composing regional economic histories in pre-Roman Anatolia, by looking at the rhetoric of money and fiduciarity in the polis, especially in the 4th to 1st centuries BCE: how money intersected with the development of civic institutions, notions of polis-hood, and the extent to which financial institutions laid foundations for the Roman period. A subsidiary focus, however, will be to look beyond the polis, to consider the role of mid-range non-polis actors (beyond kings and imperial rulers), especially powerful landowners and dynasts, in shaping the long-term economic history of Anatolia, from the Lydians to the Romans. I have also served as a non-stipendiary lecturer in Roman history at Lady Margaret Hall (2020-2021).