Contact me at: aldretegs@gmail.com
For a complete list of my scholarly activities click on this link: CV Page
To learn more about the Linothorax Project click on this link: Linothorax Project Page
To learn more about my research on ancient Roman gestures and to see a video of me demonstrating some click on this link: Roman Gestures
In my ancient history classes I would often have the students make cardboard shields and drill them in ancient fighting tactics. Click on these links to see a Greek Hoplite Battle and Roman Army Training.
My particular areas of scholarly interest that I have published on include gestures of Roman orators, floods in ancient Rome, daily life in ancient Rome, ancient linen body armor (linothorax), practical aspects of animal sacrifice, logistics of the food supply system for Rome, the influence of the ancient world on the modern, the ancient world as depicted in film, and general military history particularly decisive battles and military blunders. I have written seven books: Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins 2007), Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins, 1999), Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii and Ostia (Univ. of Oklahoma, 2009), The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What Have the Greeks and Romans Done For Us? with Alicia Aldrete (Bloomsbury 2019), Ancient Rome on the Silver Screen; Myth versus Reality with Graham Sumner (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery with S. Bartell and A. Aldrete (Johns Hopkins, 2013), and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life in the Ancient World (Greenwood, 2004), as well as various chapters in books and articles.
After earning my undergraduate degree from Princeton University and my Ph.D in ancient history from the University of Michigan, I joined the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay in 1995, where I taught History and Humanities for 25 years. Among the classes I regularly offered were: Foundations of Western Culture I, Perspectives on Human Values: The Classical World, History of Ancient Greece, History of Ancient Rome, War and Civilization, Daily Life in Ancient Rome, and Interdisciplinary Themes and Great Works courses.
I have been fortunate enough to have held a number of fellowships which have enhanced my understanding of the ancient world and made possible research trips to Italy to view museum collections and archaeological sites. Most pleasant of these were two NEH fellowships which allowed me to spend several summers at the American Academy in Rome. Additionally, I was awarded two full-year NEH Humanities Fellowships in 2004-2005 and 2012-2013. One of my research endeavors was a collaborative project with students that reconstructed and tested a type of ancient body armor known as a linothorax, which is made out of laminated layers of linen. (See “Linothorax Project” link above for more details).
In the past decade, I have begun making video courses with the Great Courses/The Teaching Company. Among these are: A History of the Ancient World: A Global Perspective, a 48-lecture survey of world history from Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages; two 24-lecture courses on Roman history, The Rise of Rome and The Roman Empire, that together cover all phases of Roman civilization from the foundation of the city of Rome through the fall of the Empire; Decisive Battles of World History, a 36-lecture course examining how various battles constituted key turning points in history that shaped and determined the world we live in today; and History’s Greatest Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach, a 24-lecture course that analyzes various notable military disasters and considers what we can learn from them. My most recent course is a 12-lecture series on movies set in ancient Rome, titled A Historian Goes to the Movies: Ancient Rome. Currently, I am working on a new course provisionally titled Unsung Heroes of the Ancient World.
I firmly believe in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the ancient world which combines history, philology, archaeology, and art history and which uses both textual and physical evidence. For me, some of the most exciting moments of my research, such as examining 1,500 year old manuscripts at the Vatican Library, have involved physical evidence, and I tried to incorporate this approach into my teaching as well, by bringing artifacts such as coins into the classroom and by always emphasizing the close reading of a variety of primary sources. As a teacher and scholar, my goals are to convey a bit of the enthusiasm for and fascination with the ancient world that I feel, and to show some of the connections between that world and our own.
