Peter Van Minnen

Peter van Minnen (PhD 1997) is an ancient historian broadly interested in the society, economy, and culture of the Roman Empire, including Early Christianity and Late Antiquity. He is an authority on papyri from Greco-Roman Egypt and made world news in 2000-01 with the discovery of the so-called Cleopatra papyrus. He has taught in Classics and History departments around the world, as well as in Divinity and Law schools. He has held fellowships from Leuven University, the Dutch Academy, Dumbarton Oaks, the American School in Athens, and the Loeb Foundation.
He has taught seminars on Alexandria (Greek papyri), Keos (Greek inscriptions), Latium Vetus (Latin inscriptions), and Roman North Africa, as well as more topical seminars (e.g., religion in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial worlds). He has set specials ranging from the Persian Empire and the economy of Classical Athens to Roman law and Greek and Latin patristics. His students have worked on Late Antique poetry, religion, and urban history, and on the transition from the Republic (or Hellenistic period) to the early Roman Empire from a variety of perspectives (literature, institutions, iconography, coins). Almost all PhDs hold tenure-track academic positions in the US or abroad.
He is currently engaged in two projects: the edition of a family archive from Hermopolis (with Greek athletes in the family) and a study of documents from Alexandria (complementing archaeology and literature; with a web component, https://classics.uc.edu/users/vanminnen/ancient_alexandria/). His publications now number well over 200 and include studies of the archaeological context of literature and documents, the Roman economy, and women in Greco-Roman Egypt. He loves numbers and looks forward to sharing his passion for agriculture, demography, and taxation… Since 2006 he edits the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, which involves one or two graduate assistants. 
For more information, see his academia.edu page (https://uc.academia.edu/PetervanMinnen), and for a CV see https://classics.uc.edu/cv/PVM-CV2023-WEB.pdf.

MA: University of Leiden Leiden, Netherlands, 1983 (Classics including Ancient History and Papyrology)

PhD: University of Leuven Leuven, Belgium, 1997 (Ancient History)

01-01-2002 -08-31-2005 Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

09-01-1998 -08-31-2001 Postdoctoral fellow, Project: Contextualizing Early Christianity in Egypt, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands

09-01-1997 -08-31-1998 Postdoctoral fellow, Project: Landuse in Roman Hermopolis, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

09-01-1992 -06-30-1996 Research Associate, Project: Duke Papyrus Archive (conservation and cataloguing of the papyrus collection at Duke University, including digitization), Duke University, Durham, NC

09-01-1990 -08-31-1992 Research Associate, Project: Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri (proofreading Greek texts), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

01-01-1984 -12-31-1984 Research Associate, Project: Leiden Papyri (edition of 100 texts from the collection of the Leiden Papyrological Institute), University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands

09-01-2005 -08-15-2017 Associate Professor, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

08-15-2017 - Professor, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH

2001 Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University Fall Term Fellowship

1998 -2001 Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship

1997 -1998 Research Council, Leuven University Postdoctoral Fellowship

1985 -1989 Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research Research Fellowship

2008 -2009 American School of Classical Studies at Athens Whitehead Professor Type:Fellowship

2015 -2016 Loeb Classical Library Foundation Type:Fellowship

2020 American Society of Papyrologists Summer Institute in Papyrology Type:Grant

Book Chapter

(2003). A royal ordinance of Cleopatra and related documents. In S. Walker and S.-A. Ashton (Eds.), Cleopatra Reassessed (pp. 35-44). London: British Museum Press.

(2003). Dioscorus and the law. In A.A. MacDonald, M.W. Twomey and G.J. Reinink (Eds.), Learned Antiquity: Scholarship and Society in the Near East, the Greco-Roman World, and the Early Medieval West (pp. 115-133). Leuven: Peeters.

(2003). The Greek Apocalypse of Peter. In J.N. Bremmer (Eds.), The Apocalypse of Peter (pp. 15-39). Leuven: Peeters.

(2006). The changing world of cities in Later Roman Egypt. In J.-U. Krause and C. Witschel (Eds.), Die spätantike Stadt – Niedergang oder Wandel?(pp. 153-179). Stuttgart: Steiner.

(2007). The other cities in Later Roman Egypt. In R.S. Bagnall (Eds.), Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700 (pp. 207-225). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

(2008). Money and credit in Roman Egypt. In W.V. Harris (Ed.), The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans (pp. 226-241). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(2009). Hermopolis and its papyri. In G. Bastianini and A. Casanova (Eds.), 100 anni di istituzioni fiorentine per la papirologia (pp. 1-15). Firenze: Istituto papirologico “G. Vitelli.”

(2009). The future of papyrology. In R.S. Bagnall (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Papyrology (pp. 644-660). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(2010). Contracting caterers on Keos. In J.H.F. Dijkstra, J.E.A. Kroesen and Y. Kuiper (Eds.),Myths, Martyrs, and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan N. Bremmer(pp. 209-217). Leiden and Boston: Brill.

(2010). Archaeology and papyrology: digging and filling holes? In K. Lembke, M. Minas-Nerpel and S. Pfeiffer (Eds.), Tradition and Transformation: Egypt under Roman Rule (pp. 437-474). Leiden and Boston: Brill.

(2010). Die Königinnen der Ptolemäerdynastie in papyrologischer und epigraphischer Evidenz. In A. Kolb (Ed.), Augustae. Machtbewusste Frauen am römischen Kaiserhof? (pp. 39-53). Berlin snd New York: De Gruyter.

Peer Reviewed Publications

(2006). Saving history? Egyptian hagiography in its space and time. Church History and Religious Culture (86), 57-91.

Software and Database

(2007). Original Documents from Alexandria. http://classics.uc.edu/~vanminnen

Papyri, Inscriptions, Egypt, Rome, Greece, History, Archaeology, Papyrology, Epigraphy, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, Patristics, Bible, Christianity, Religion, Editing