What Can the Romans Do For Us?
Born in York, England, Emma Dench grew up near Stratford-Upon-Avon, and studied at Wadham College, Oxford and at St. Hugh's College, Oxford earning a DPhil in ancient history in 1993. Before taking up a joint appointment in the departments of the classics and of history at Harvard in January 2007, she taught classics and ancient history at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a Craven Fellow at the University of Oxford, a Rome Scholar and a Hugh Last Fellow at the British School of Rome, a Cotton Fellow, a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a visiting professor of the classics and of history at Harvard, and a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellow.
Dench is the author of From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995) and Romulus' Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian (Oxford University Press, 2005). She is currently completing Imperialism and Culture in the Roman World for the Cambridge University Press series Key Themes in Ancient History. Other current projects include a study of the retrospective writing of the Roman Republican past in classical antiquity.
At Harvard, Dench has been the recipient of a Harvard College Professorship for 2010–15 (recognizing "outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching, mentoring and advising"), a Marquand Award for Excellent Advising and Counseling, and an Everett Mendelsohn Award for Excellence in Mentoring Graduate Students. In 2015–16, she also co- taught (with Frances Frei) an elective MBA course "All Roads Lead to Rome: Leadership Lessons from Antiquity," at the Harvard Business School.
Photo credit: Kathleen Dooher
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Food for Thought: Podcast with Emma Dench