Christer Bruun

Christer Bruun teaches Roman history and Latin language and literature in the Department of Classics at the University of Toronto, where he began his North American academic career in 1994. He was Chair of the department 2013-19 and Associate Chair and Graduate Coordinator 2005-09 and 2020-21.

Professor Bruun’s fields of interest include Roman history (political, social, cultural); Roman epigraphy; Roman, medieval and renaissance water supply & Frontinus; the Antonine plague and ancient pandemics; the topography of Rome; and Latin historians. He has authored or edited six books and some 130 articles in international scholarly languages; in addition, he has published in Finnish and Swedish. In 2015 The Oxford Handbook of Roman Epigraphy appeared (paperback 2018), edited by Prof. Bruun and Jonathan Edmondson. Among ongoing projects, he is currently finishing an historical monograph on Roman Ostia. He has been awarded a Standard Research Grant twice and an Insight Grant once by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2010 he was elected external Fellow of the Societas Scientiarum Fennica. He is an elected member of the Comité of the AIEGL (the Association Internationale d’Epigraphie Grecque et Latine) during the period 2017-2022, and he was a member of the Council of the Classical Association of Canada 2012-15.

Professor Bruun is a member of the Academic Board of the international network Impact of Empire, and he sits on the Advisory Board of the international epigraphic project CARMEN (2021-24), funded by the European Union and studying Latin verse inscriptions. He is also a collaborator in the international research project FISTULAE (2023-27), focusing on Roman lead production and financed by the French ANR (Agence national de la recherche). He was recently re-elected a Trustee of the Foundation Institutum Romanum Finlandiae.

Born into the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, Professor Bruun studied in his home country at the Universities of Åbo Akademi, Turku and Helsinki, holding a Junior Research Fellowship from the Academy of Finland while a PhD student. He studied at Oxford in 1988-89 (two terms at Brasenose College) and 1992 (postdoc Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College), and he was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Universität zu Köln in 1993-94. He has lived for over seven years in Rome, in his youth, as a student at the Instititum Romanum Finlandiae (IRF), and as Director of the IRF in 1997-2000, and his research continues to bring him to the Eternal City. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Odense (now the Univ. of Southern Denmark) in the first half of 1997. In the fall term of 2009 he was a Fellow in the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Durham, in April 2010 a Research Fellow at the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Munich, and during the fall term of 2012 a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has delivered papers and lectures in 18 countries. In 1998-2011 he was a columnist for Hufvudstadsbladet, the largest Swedish daily in Finland.