Visiting Assistant Professor
He/him/his
In his research and teaching, Timothy Clark combines material culture with literary sources to investigate the creation and maintenance of ethnic, political, and racial boundaries in the ancient world. In particular, he analyzes the construction of these boundaries between Rome and the various ethnicities, polities, and peoples that inhabited the eastern borders of the Roman empire, especially the Parthians, Armenians, and Sasanians. He has published “Processing into Dominance: Nero, the Crowning of Tiridates I, and a New Narrative of Rome’s Supremacy in the East” (JAH 2021), and an article on the Medes for the forthcoming Tacitus Encyclopedia (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022).
Professor Clark’s current book project, Between Conquest and Kingship: Parthia, Armenia, and the Construction of Roman Imperial Power, investigates visual representations of Parthia and Armenia fashioned under Nero and Trajan. The monograph offers a new theoretical approach for understanding how political actors use visual discourses to construct the alterity of foreign adversaries and to reconceptualize imperial authority abroad. His interdisciplinary focus on visual evidence—descriptions of diplomatic ceremonies, monumental art, and coinage—focuses on the images of eastern “otherness” that those beyond literate elites were receiving. He is working on additional projects that discuss the use of cults in the eastern empire to construct local ethnic identities, as well as the relationships between spatiality and ideology in Roman urban planning.
Professor Clark’s teaching interests center around Greek and Roman history and civilization, Greek and Latin at all levels, as well as the reception, use, and abuse of ancient history by modern political actors. He is deeply concerned with making Classics and ancient history more inclusive of diverse voices that have traditionally been excluded from the field.
Publications:
“Processing into Dominance: Nero, the Crowning of Tiridates I, and a New Narrative of Rome’s Supremacy in the East,” Journal of Ancient History 9 (2021) 269-296.
“Medes.” In Victora Págan, ed., The Tacitus Encyclopedia (forthcoming 2022).
Research Interests:
Roman relations with the ancient Near East; the use of urban space and architecture to communicate political ideology in the ancient world; the reception of ancient history by modern political actors.