Dr. Lisa Pilar Eberle

I am a historian of the Graeco-Roman world, whose research combines literary, documentary, and archaeological evidence to investigate the intersections of economic life, social relations, and political and legal cultures. More specifically, I focus on Romano-Italian migration and the impact it left on Rome’s emerging provinces and their administration from the middle republic to the early principate; on Greek demographic thought and action, in particular as it relates to the notion of oligandria (the lack of men and /or people), from the archaic period to late antiquity; and on the intersection of slavery and gender: I am the co-PI in a project funded by the German Research Foundation, which undertakes the first investigation of women as enslavers in the Roman world.

Beyond these topics I have published on various aspects of Roman legal and imperial history, including the origins of patronage in the middle republic and its relationship to the Roman law of debt, the relationship of law and time in republican political culture, and the meanings of taxes and their histories in the high empire.

Currently I am working on edited volumes on discursive constructions of unrest (together with Myles Lavan, funded by the Thyssen Foundation), and on praxeological approaches to the actions of Roman governors (together with James Corke-Webster, funded by the King’s Global Fund). I am also an investigator with IANUA, a project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture which explores the spatiality of diplomacy in the emerging Roman empire during the republic.

In relation to university teaching and pedagogy, I have written about online teaching during the COVID pandemic and developed Open Educational Resources (OER) for flipped-classroom approaches to the German-style propaedeutic Tutorium in Graeco-Roman history.

(in preparation) States of Displacement. The Politics of Settler Colonialism and Provincial Statecraft in the Roman Republic

(2024, together with Myles Lavan) Unrest in the Roman Empire. A Discursive History, Frankfurt/Chicago: Campus.

(2024) Narrating Entitlement in Ancient Rome. Nomos, Empire, and Political Economy between 150 BCE and 150 CE, in: Recht als Erzählung / Law and Narrative, ed. by Robert Kirstein and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner. Basel: Schwabe.

(2024) Introduction, in Unrest in the Roman Empire. A Discursive History, ed. by Lisa Pilar Eberle and Myles Lavan. Frankfurt/Chicago: Campus.

(2024) Aporetic Unrest. Appian, Hadrian and the politics of imperial history in the second century CE, in Unrest in the Roman Empire. A Discursive History, ed. by Lisa Pilar Eberle and Myles Lavan. Frankfurt/Chicago: Campus.

(2024) The Creation of Wealth and Inequality in the Graeco-Roman World. Tactics from Law and Racial Capitalism, in Morality and Models in the Study of Ancient Mediterranean Economies, ed. by Seth Bernard and Sarah Murray. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

(2023) The Edicts of the Praetors: Law, Time, and Revolution in Ancient Rome, in Law and History Review, First View, 1-25.

(2023, together with Johanna Göcke), Turias Tod. Macht, Erinnerung, und Geschlecht nach den römischen Bürgerkriegen, in: Krisen anders denken, ed. by Ewald Frie and Mischa Meier, 324-36. Berlin: Propyläen.

(2023) Kontingenz, Konkurrenz, und Kommerzialisierung. Senatorische Elite und wirtschaftliches Leben in der ausgehenden mittleren Republik, in: Stabilität—Kontingenz—Innovation, ed. by Christopher Degelmann and Jan-Markus Kötter. Berlin: Metzler.

(2023) Foreign Silk on Roman Bodies: Gender, Wealth and Empire in the Metropole, in: Gendering Roman Imperialism, ed. by Hannah Cornwell and Greg Woolf, 203-22. Leiden: Brill.

(2022) Debt, death and destruction in Roman law and politics during the middle and late Republic, in: Debt. The first 3000 years, ed. by John Weisweiler, 67-83. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(2022) Peregrini / Nationes Exterae. Foreigners and the political culture of the Roman Republic, in: The Blackwell Companion to Roman Political Culture, ed. by Valentina Arena and Jonathan Prag, 332-46. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

(2021) Fiscal semantics in the long second century: Citizenship, taxation, and the constitutio Antoniniana, in: Roman citizenship in the long second century, ed. by Clifford Ando and Myles Lavan, 69-102. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(2019) Resistance in the Roman empire, in: The Cultural History of Empires in the Western World, ed. by Antoinette Burton and Carlos Noreña, 177-99. London: Bloomsbury.

(2017) Making Roman Subjects. Citizenship in the Time of Augustus, in: Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPA) 147.2: 321-70.

(2017, together with Énora LeQuéré) Landed Traders, Trading Agriculturalists? Land in the Economy of the Italian Diaspora in the Greek East, in: Journal of Roman Studies 107: 27-59.

(2016) Law, Empire, and the Making of Roman Estates in the Provinces during the Late Republic, in: Critical Analysis of Law 3.1: 50-69

(2022) Meister, Jan B. und Gunnar Seelentag, Hrsg. Konkurrenz und Institutionalisierung in der griechischen Archaik, Stuttgart 2020. In: Historische Zeitschrift 314(3): 725-7.

(2020) Bernard, Seth: Building Mid-Republican Rome. Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy, Oxford 2018. In: Historische Zeitschrift 311(2): 429-31.

(2018) Hölkeskamp, Karl-Joachim: Libera Res Publica. Die politische Kultur des antiken Rom – Positionen und Perspektiven, Stuttgart 2017. In: Journal of Roman Studies 108: 1-2.

(2022) Tutorium Alte Geschichte. Digitale Resourcen für die Präsenzlehre in der althistorischen Propädeutik
collection of twelve short educational videos (with scripts, PPTs, worksheets, and sample), published on ZOERR (https://www.oerbw.de/), the repository for Open Educational Ressources in Baden-Württemberg

(2020) Adsenz statt Präsenz. Erfahrungsbericht einer Historikerin aus dem digitalen Semester, in: Forum Digitales Lehren auf H Soz Kult (https://www.hsozkult.de/debate/id/fddebate-132415)

(2019) Dem Schicksal entkommen: Antike Texte, Moderne Feminismen
collection of student essays composed in a seminar on the feminist reception of ancient literature
https://medium.com/dem-schicksal-entkommen-antike-texte-moderne