Seth Bernard

Seth Bernard has taught at the University of Toronto since 2014. He holds a BA in Classics from Amherst College and a PhD in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania. He has been a Regular Member of the American School for Classical Studies at Athens and a Rome Prize Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. His research focuses broadly on the social and economic history of Rome and Italy, particularly of the Republican period. He is also a specialist in Roman archaeology, and his research is committed to the use of new approaches drawn from science, archaeology, anthropology, and social sciences to expand historical understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world before and during Roman rule. His first monograph Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture and the Urban Economy, 400-200 BCE (OUP 2018) examined the developing structures of labor in the Mid-Republican city of Rome from the vantage point of the city’s building industry. A second monograph looks at historical behaviour in Pre-Roman Italy: Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy: History, Archaeology and the Use of the Past, 900-300 (OUP 2023). In addition, he has co-edited with L. Mignone and D. Padilla Peralta a volume intending to reframe the study of the Middle Republican period, Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, 400-200 BCE (CUP 2023), and with Sarah C. Murray a volume on economic theory and the ancient economy, Models, Methods, and Morality: Assessing Modern Approaches to the Greco-Roman Economy (Palgrave, 2024). He led a project on the climate science and environmental history of pre-Imperial Italy stemming from a 2021 conference funded by a SSHRC Connection Grant and now published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. His current research is carried out under the umbrella of a SSHRC Insight Grant to study the economic development and Roman imperialism in Italy from c. 500 – 200 BCE. Ongoing major publication projects include an Oxford Handbook of the Iron Age Mediterranean, also co-edited with Sarah C. Murray, and a volume of the Cambridge Key Themes in Ancient History on labor and the Roman economy. Papers in progress look at the impact of slavery on the Roman economy, the evidence for the Roman Warm Period in Italy, the role of construction in Republican colonization, and the nature of the early Roman state. Seth has published over seventy papers, chapters, and book reviews on related themes including in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Papers of the British School at Rome, Explorations in Economic History, Journal of Roman Studies, Journal of Archaeological Science, Phoenix, Mnemosyne, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, Numismatic Chronicle, and others. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Roman Studies and he is Associate Editor of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. During Fall 2024, he is a visiting professor at the Università di Roma Sapienza.

Seth has participated in archaeological fieldwork for almost two decades in Greece, Morocco, and Italy. From 2021 onward, he has co-directed with colleagues from Harvard University, the University of London, and the British School at Rome excavations at the site of Falerii Novi, north of Rome. This large scale project, featured in the University of Toronto news, seeks to explore urban life in the Roman and Post-Roman past, and the evolving relationship between urbanism and landscape over time. The project’s goals are described in an open access paper in the Papers of the British School at Rome. Further information about the Falerii Novi Project can be found on the project website.

He is happy to speak with prospective students interested in working on various topics of Early and Republican Roman socioeconomic history and the archaeology of Rome and Italy.

Publications 

• Models, Methods, and Morality: Assessing Modern Approaches to the Greco-Roman Economy (Palgrave, 2024)
• Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy: Archaeology, History and the Use of the Past, 900 - 300 BCE  (Oxford University Press : 2023)
• Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400-200 BCE  (Cambridge University Press : 2023)
• Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy  (Oxford University Press : 2018)