Miguel John Versluys

Biography

2001 PhD Leiden University, Aegyptiaca Romana. Nilotic scenes and the Roman views of Egypt (cum laude). 2002-2004 Amsterdam Archaeological Centre, Postdoctoral research fellow & project manager of the International Nemrud DaÄŸ Project 2005- Assistant Professor, Leiden University, Faculty of Archaeology 2011 Guest professor at the Université Toulouse – Le Mirail/Jean Jaurès (Toulouse) 2011-2015 NWO VIDI grant for the project Cultural innovation in a globalising society. Egypt in the Roman world & Associate Professor. 2014 Co-founder of the Leiden Material Agency Forum. 2016 Senior research fellow with the Excellence Cluster TOPOI (Berlin).

Research Interest

I obtained my PhD degree from Leiden University in 2001 for a study of images of Egypt in Roman visual material culture and, in broader terms, the meaning of Aegyptiaca Romana. To further explore how “Egypt” and “Rome” constituted dialectical history, I organised, together with Laurent Bricault (Toulouse), a series of conferences on the Egyptian/Hellenistic/Roman goddess Isis between 2005 and 2011. This has resulted in four edited book volumes (Bricault/Versluys 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2014) that explore the entanglement of the local and the global with regard to Isis and the Egyptian gods from a wide variety of perspectives. Simultaneously, extensive fieldwork in Commagene (south-east Anatolia) broadened my range beyond the Nile and Tiber – and subsequently led me to rethink what cultural interaction in Antiquity was about by taking the perspective of the Euphrates. This resulted first in an exploration of Globalisation theory to better understand the connectivity that characterised the Roman world (Pitts/Versluys 2015) and, subsequently, in The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization, which encompasses a worldwide scope throughout time. Together with others I also investigated the consequences of living in a world characterised by increasing interconnections as well as our conceptual apparatus for understanding such a context. For instance, we critically evaluated and applied the concept of “The invention of tradition” to Roman Europe and the Mediterranean (Boschung /Busch/ Versluys 2015). Making a similar conceptual shift from culture to concept, a recent volume argues for the crucial importance of the notion of Persianism, as parallel to Hellenism, in order to understand the cultural dynamics of Hellenistic and Roman Eurasia beyond “East’ (versus) “West” containers (Strootman/Versluys 2017).