M.A. Scholarship on Roman Studies (Roman Army or Roman Middle East) at the University of Manitoba

The Department of Classics at the University of Manitoba is pleased to be able to offer a two-year funded M.A. scholarship (2022-2024) for a student to study an aspect of the ancient Roman world, with a preference for a research topic that pertains to the Roman army or the Roman Middle East.  Funding for the award is courtesy of the SSHRC Insight Grant held by Dr. Conor Whately at the University of Winnipeg on soldier-civilian interaction in the Roman and Late Antique Middle East.

Applicants should apply in writing (a letter of application and a statement of research interests) to Dr. Conor Whately (c.whately@uwinnipeg.ca) no later than 15 January 2022.  Information on the M.A. programme in Classics at the University of Manitoba may be found here:

https://umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/departments/classics/4515.html

Soldiers and Civilians in Rome’s Southeast (100-600 CE)

SSHRC IG, 2021-2026

Dr. Conor Whately

c.whately@uwinnipeg.ca

Project Summary

This project is a micro-level social history of the Roman military communities of Roman Arabia broadly speaking, which comprises much of modern Jordan and parts of modern Israel/Palestine.  It will be centred on the interactions between soldiers and civilians in the region, as well as those between nomadic and semi-nomadic groups that lived on the periphery.  This important region is in close proximity to other, better studied, regions, like Syria to the north and Egypt to the south and west, and the more densely inhabited coastal parts of Israel/Palestine to the west; but it was also integral to the Christianization of the Roman Empire, and near the end of antiquity it played an important role in the context of the rise of Islam and the movement of Arab armies from the Arabian peninsula north.  Soldiers had many and varied relationships with communities:  personal ones (like marriage), socio-economic (consuming local goods), religious (working on the pilgrimage routes), and industrial construction of fortifications work).  I will examine the totality of these soldiers’ interactions.

There has been some excellent work on the relationship between soldiers and civilians in general (MacMullen 1963), frontiers and security in the Roman Near East (Isaac 1990), detailed studies of soldiers in neighbouring regions like Syria (Pollard 2000), the relationship between Rome and the nomadic peoples (Fisher 2011), and the Roman Near East more generally (Millar 1993, Ball 2000, Sartre 2005).  There has also been detailed work on aspects of Roman Arabia and the neighbouring regions, like the excavation reports from el-Lejjūn (Parker et al. 2006) and Ward’s work on Christians and nomads in the Sinai (Ward 2015).  Scholars have not looked specifically at the military communities and the attendant interactions between soldiers in civilians in the region in detail for any one period of Roman rule let alone during this 500 or so year epoch in its entirety.  There is real gap in knowledge despite the existence of some significant and detailed bodies of evidence, which includes, but is not limited to, the papyri from en-Gedi (Babatha), Nessana, and Petra, and the abundant Safaitic graffiti from the Hauran (MacDonald 2014).  This project demonstrates the vitality of Roman Arabia, the valuable role of soldiers in the transformation of a region from independent kingdom to province with a distinct identity, and it underscores the wealth of evidence for life and personal interactions amongst lower rungs of Roman provincial society.  This research will contribute to debates on frontier security, community formation, and the transformation of Roman rule in frontier regions like Arabia.  It will increase our understanding of some of the individuals who comprised frontier society in Roman Arabia as well as our understanding of broader society itself.

MA Student Research Assistant Duties

The two-year MA student (2022-2024) will be responsible for putting together detailed prosopographies of the people of the southeast frontier, with a particular emphasis on the three principal collections of papyri, those from the Babatha Archive, those from Nessana, and those from Petra.  While a detailed record of the individuals that can be compiled from the other evidence would be no less useful, chronologically a lot of this material is more difficult to pin down, and much of it is more diffuse geographically.  A good example is the Hauran graffiti, most of which can only be dated to within a few centuries.  And this is despite the abundance of epigraphic evidence from the larger region in late antiquity in particular.  The student will be required to compile this information over the course of their degree with the hopes that some or much of this material could form the basis of their MA thesis, to be completed in the second year. 

The MA RA will also be responsible for helping me to organize and run, a workshop on soldiers and civilians in the ancient Mediterranean world to be held at the University of Winnipeg, with a view to hosting the workshop in the fall of the start of their second year here (2023) (pandemic permitting).  The preparation would begin as soon as they started (fall 2022), which would entail soliciting participants, booking spaces, applying for funding, and so on.  Upon successful completion of the workshop, I will prepare a proposal to submit to a press (potentially Brill or Routledge), and, ultimately, a volume based on the proceedings of said workshop. 

Course work and research

The University of Manitoba has two streams of study for the M.A.: thesis and Major Research Paper.  The former requires 12-15 credit hours of coursework in the first year (this includes courses in Greek, Latin, and Classics Studies); the student devotes the second year to research and writing a thesis.  The second entails 24 credit hours over two years and the writing of a substantial research paper in the summer between. There is the opportunity for one of the courses to entail a topic on the Roman army.  The thesis research can be on any aspect on Roman and Late Antique warfare, or the Roman and Late Antique Middle East.

Funding amounts and duration

The amount of the scholarship is $17,500 per year (two years maximum) plus a research allowance of $500 per year.

Applications and arrangements

Entry requirements for the M.A. degree is a B.A. in Classics with a minimum GPA of 3.0 across the last 60 credit hours.  Students should have a minimum of 18 credit hours total of Greek and Latin (two years of one language, one of the other) with a minimum GOA of 3.5.

Interested students should submit a letter of application and a statement of research (1-2 pages) interest to Dr. Conor Whately.  The successful candidate will then apply for admission to the University of Manitoba.  Dr. James Chlup, the Graduate Chair at the University of Manitoba, can guide the applicant through this.