Jordan Rogers, the 2027 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize in Ancient Studies, is a social and cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, with a particular interest in the sociology of small communities and urbanism in antiquity. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at North Carolina State University and previously taught as a Visiting Professor and Post- doctoral Fellow at Carleton College and Hamilton College. In addition to his work on ancient urban communities, Jordan maintains archaeological fieldwork in Pompeii as part of the Pompeii I.14 project, which examines the historical development of a neighborhood in the southeastern portion of the ancient city.
Beyond this research, Jordan has published on a range of topics, including the imagined places of Rome's lost natural spaces ("Cosmology, Place, and History in Varro's de Lingua Latina 5", Classica et Mediaevalia, 2024), conceptualizations of neighborliness on the Roman comedic stage ("Vicinus Ideology and Discourses of Urban Neighborliness in Plautus," Classical World, 2025), and Latin historiography ("Public Departures, Private Power: Rituals of profectio in Livy's AUC," Historia, 2027). He is the co-editor of and a contributor to Working Lives in Ancient Rome (2024), a collection that examines the subjective experience of labor in Roman antiquity. Currently, Jordan is co-editing a special edition, focusing on the ancient world, of the journal International Labor and Working-Class History.
What project will you be embarking upon during your time at the Academy?
While at the AAR, I'll be finishing my monograph, Neighborhoods, Neighborliness, and Urban Community in Republican Rome. In addition to being the first book-length study of Rome's neighborhoods in the Republican period, my book also reconstructs the social and cultural parameters of "neighborliness" (what the Romans called vicinitas) during this period. As I argue, practices and ideals of vicinitas were not only integral to the maintenance of urban community at Rome, they were also a flashpoint of conflict in the first century BCE, when the rapid urbanization of Rome, and the consequent desire to develop an administrative apparatus to govern these urban spaces, clashed with customary forms of communal organization at the neighborhood level.
What aspects of the city and Academy life are you most interested in exploring?
Part of my project examines the various ways in which topographical memory accretes and coheres over time, especially in connection to monuments or buildings that inform local neighborhood identity. At Rome, this often manifests as a combination of ritual practice, antiquarian etiology, and folklore centered on a particular neighborhood space. Being in Rome provides the opportunity to visit these spaces and recover memorial traces in the urban palimpsest; it is also fascinating to see how these memories remain still today in parts of the city.
What encounters, experiences, or moments in your first days at the Academy have inspired, surprised, or encouraged you thus far?
It's difficult to count the number of intellectually productive conversations I've had with artists and other scholars over a meal or in passing, but I would say my participation in the Lunar Salon (spearheaded by Mara Zepeda) has been immensely generative and inspirational. The meetings bring together the entire AAR community around the theme of the moon, with contributions ranging from the scientific and astronomical to the poetic and musical. Mostly, I'm inspired by just how generous and creative these meetings have been. It has jump-started my creativity, too. I have an abiding interest in poetry as a genre of historical writing (on the model of Ovid's Fasti and Propertius' Elegies, especially Book IV) and so have begun composing some of my own, admittedly amateur, pieces inspired by artifacts and monuments within the city.