CIMS Lecture: Italy’s Urban Boom in the Late Roman Republic (Drew Davis)

Italy's Urban Bloom in the Late Roman Republic
Thursday, December 1 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm EST
Drew Davis, Crake Doctoral Fellow in Classics, Mount Allison University

A significant urbanization phenomenon swept through the Italian peninsula in the second and first centuries BCE. Communities across Italy invested considerable amounts of labour and financial capital into monumentalizing their urban spaces, a process which coincided with one of the most transformative periods in the region’s history. This lecture will explore how this commitment to public construction in turn (re)created and constructed communities and forged local identities.

Drew Davis is Crake Doctoral Fellow in Classics at Mount Allison University for 2022-2023.  He is completing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto.  It focuses on the larger socio-economic history of the public building phenomenon which swept through Italy in the last two centuries of the Roman Republic. It assesses how communities afforded such projects, and how this construction fit into the wider political shifts of the period.

Zoom link: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/86581981946

This public lecture is hosted by the Canadian Institute of Mediterranean Studies and is co-sponsored by the University of Toronto Department of Italian Studies and the University of Toronto Department of Classics.