Walter Scheidel

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Walter Scheidel (2012)

Walter Scheidel (born July 9, 1966 in Vienna ) is an Austrian ancient historian .

Life

From 1984 to 1993 he studied ancient history and numismatics at the University of Vienna , where he received his doctorate in 1993 . In 1998 he completed his habilitation at the University of Graz . From 1990 to 1994 he worked as an administrative and research assistant at the University of Vienna. As an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Fund for the Advancement of Scientific Research , he spent 1995 as a visiting scientist at the University of Michigan . From 1996 to 1999 he was a Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College , Cambridge. During this time he was also visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of Innsbruck . Since 2003 he has been a professor at Stanford University in America .

His research is mainly concerned with the social and economic history of Greco-Roman antiquity. On this basis, Scheidel conducts cross-cultural studies, both synchronously in the context of ancient societies, and in a diachronic comparison up to the societies of modern times.

Scheidel's academic work includes more than 200 articles on social and economic history, numerous co-editorships and five monographs. His work The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century , published in 2017, is also available in German translation under the title After the War . In it, the author examines when and how in human history a reduction in social inequality took place, and states that this happened across all epochs exclusively as a result of wars, revolutions and epidemic catastrophes, but never as a result of a corresponding policy.

Fonts (selection)

  • Land rent and wage labor in the agriculture of Roman Italy. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-631-47904-2 .
  • Death on the Nile. Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt . Brill, Leiden 2001, ISBN 90-04-12323-7 .
  • After the war everyone is the same. Theiss Verlag, Darmstadt 2018, ISBN 978-3-8062-3819-8 .
  • Escape from Rome. The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2019, ISBN 978-0-691-17218-7 .

Web links

Commons : Walter Scheidel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Marc Buggeln: Review of: Scheidel, Walter: After the war everyone is equal. In: H-Soz-Kult. January 24, 2019, accessed May 14, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Urs Hafner: Only violence brings equality. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. December 20, 2018, accessed May 14, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Scheidel, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian ancient historian
DATE OF BIRTH July 9, 1966
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna