Jordan Rogers

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Bio

I received both my BA and MA in Classical Languages (Greek and Latin) at Indiana University, before studying for my PhD in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania, where I wrote a dissertation focusing on the neighborhoods of Republican Rome. Before joining NC State, I spent some time in the colder climes of the north, teaching at Carleton College (MN) and Hamilton College (NY).

Teaching and Research Interests

Broadly speaking, my research interests center around the sociology of urban communities in the ancient Mediterranean, and in particular the productive trialectic between individual agency, communal norms, and spatial contexts.

My current monograph project, Neighborhoods, Neighborliness, and Urban Community in Republican Rome, (in preparation for CUP) examines how norms of neighborliness in the city of Rome, ca. 338 – 44 BCE, governed urban communal life and resisted the nascent institutions of Rome’s imperial apparatus in the final years of the Republic. In the book, I argue that Rome’s neighborhood spaces, rather than being static spatial containers for the administration of the city, were in a constant and dynamic state of re-definition, guided by the everyday practices of a given neighborhood’s inhabitants. The book also examines the customs and norms of neighborliness within Rome’s urban communities, utilizing evidence from performative genres like Roman Comedy and Oratory to reconstruct an image of what Romans believed neighborliness to be.

Beyond the monograph, I maintain active research and publication on ancient urbanism, ancient labor histories, and the intersection of status and identity. I also have an enduring fascination with the variety of ways those living in the ancient Mediterranean reconstructed their own pasts, from monumentalization and the melodrama of religious ritual to the writing of history itself.

My colleague, Del A. Maticic (Vassar College), and I are nearing completion on an edited volume, Working Lives in Ancient Rome (The New Antiquity, Palgrave Macmillan) that provides a critical reexamination of how labor was conceptualized in the Roman world. The volume brings together experts in art history, archaeology, literary criticism, epigraphy, and visual culture to provide different insights into how individuals could (or could not) exert their own subjectivity on the often harsh structural realities of the ancient economy.

For the past three years, I have helped supervise excavations in Pompeii under the auspices of the Pompeii I.14 Project. Our work concentrates in the southeastern portion of the city, just inside the Porta Nocera, and has produced exciting results with implications for the social and economic history of Pompeii itself, and for Roman urbanism in Italy more generally. My work in Pompeii has also extended to the graffiti that filled the city’s many walls; currently, I’m working to map, via ArcGIS, Pompeii’s sexually invective graffiti and to reconstruct the spatial contexts in which certain types of insults appear.

Website: https://ncsu.academia.edu/JordanRogers

Publications

Edited Volumes

Forthcoming   Working Lives in Ancient Rome. Co-edited with D. Maticic. Palgrave Macmillan, The New Antiquity.

Articles and Book Chapters

Forthcoming. “Labor as Religio in Imperial Rome: The fabri tignarii Relief.” In D. Maticic and J. Rogers, eds., Working Lives in Ancient Rome. Palgrave Macmillan.

Forthcoming. “Structuring Subjects: Weaving the Web of Work/Life.” Co-authored with D. Maticic. In Working Lives in Ancient Rome. Palgrave Macmillan.

Forthcoming. “Plautus’ Mercator.” In Encyclopedia of Roman Comedy and Tragedy, ed. Joseph A. Smith. Wiley-Blackwell.

2024. “Excavating a matmaker’s workshop at Pompeii I 14, 1/11–14.” Co-authored with A. Emmerson, M.E. Farrior, G. Higgs, and M. Robinson. E-Journal Scavi di Pompeii no. 8.

2024. “Cosmology, Place, and History in Varro’s De lingua Latina 5.” Classica et Mediaevalia 73: 43-67.

2023. “Excavations at Pompeii I.14, Season One (2022): A Brief Report.” Co-authored with A. Emmerson, A. Badillo, and M.E. Farrior. Rivista di Studi Pompeiani no. 35, 2024.

2021. “Livy and the Augustan Heirs,” in Livio, Ad Urbem Condendam: riletture del passato in età augustea, ed. A. Roncaglia. Edizioni Saecula.

2019. “Mapping Historical Texts: The Anatolian Travelers Project.” (co-authored with P. Cobb, B. Ford, G. Blasdel, and S. Renninger) in Cartographic Perspectives. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14714/CP93.1488.

Book Reviews

Annette Haug, Öffentliche Räume in Pompeji. Zum Design urbaner Atmosphären. Berlin, 2023. Review for H-Soz-Kult.

Cristina Rosillo-Lόpez, Political Conversations in Late Republican Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Review for Bryn Mawr Classical Review.