Professor Claire Holleran

My research interests lie in Roman social and economic history, particularly urban economies, the experience of living in the ancient city, and migration and mobility. I am especially interested in Rome itself, and have published work on the city's retail trade, demography, and street life, as well as editing A Companion to the City of Rome with Amanda Claridge (please see publications for more details). Over the last few years I have been working on human mobility in Roman Hispania in the imperial period, exploring and mapping population movement within the region on the basis of its rich epigraphic data. The first part of this project was generously funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust and the results are now available in an open-access digital resource. I am currently writing a book analysing this inscriptional evidence to consider who moved, where, when, and why. The book is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic as Migration and Mobillity in Roman Hispania: Origins, Inscriptions, and Economics, and I have a period of research leave funded by a Loeb Classical Library Fellowship in 2024-2025 to enable the completion of this work.

I am also interested in Roman work and labour, and am working on a project exploring the ways in which the inhabitants of Rome earned their livelihoods, and the structure and organisation of the labour market in the city. This intersects with my work on human mobility and I have also published in the area of economic mobility. Other current strands of research are female work and labour. female social and economic networks, and Roman food and diet. I am one of the series editors for Palgrave Studies in Ancient Economies and am on the editorial board of The Journal of Applied History.

I would be delighted to supervise postgraduate research students interested in different aspects of Roman social and economic history, including (but not restricted to) the retail trade, demography, mobility and migration, social structure, ancient economies, urbanism, work and labour in the Roman world, and the city of Rome.

Biography:

Originally from Lancashire, I studied for my BA, MA, and PhD at the University of Manchester (1997-2005), before taking up a fixed-term lectureship at King’s College London (2005-2008). Following a Rome Award at the British School of Rome, I returned to the North West where I held a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Liverpool (2009-2012), interspersed with a Tytus summer residency at the University of Cincinnati and a research scholarship at the Fondation Hardt in Geneva, before coming to Exeter in 2012.