A specialist in Roman archaeology and social history, Jeremy Hartnett deploys material culture to write the history of urban life, particularly as experienced by everyday Romans. 

Hartnett’s first book, The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome (Cambridge, 2017), recaptured the flurry of city activity by drawing on the evidence of historical and poetic texts, inscriptions, artwork, monuments, and buildings as well as by mixing in comparative evidence and modern urban theory. The American Historical Association awarded it the James Henry Breasted Prize for “the best book in English in any field of history prior to CE 1000.” His second monograph The Remarkable Life, Death, and Afterlife of an Ordinary Roman (Cambridge, 2025), examined a Roman funerary monument accidentally discovered under St. Peter's in 1626, which now resides in the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. The project reconstructs an ancient life in as many dimensions as possible and also traces the sculpture's remarkable odyssey between Rome and Indianapolis. He is working on two books concurrently: Rome's Underbelly: The People and Places that Made the SPQR Work, which uses close-range studies to distill grand features of urban existence in the caput mundi to human scale. The second is a co-authored project entitled Rome’s Hidden Heroes: A History in 25 Lives.

Hartnett recently completed a 5-year term as the chief executive of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (aka “The Centro”), the pre-eminent study abroad program for the pre-eminent study-abroad program for undergraduates passionate about the ancient Mediterranean world. He studied at the Centro as an undergrad and twice spent a year on its faculty, most recently as Mellon Professor-in-Charge in 2017-2018. He has also served on the jury for the AAR's Rome Prize in Ancient Studies.