Eric Driscoll
Eric Driscoll is a Hellenist, classical archaeologist, and historian of the ancient Mediterranean world. Working with both textual and material evidence, his research focuses on the cultural, political, and intellectual history of Archaic through Hellenistic Greece as well as the longer history of Greece and Greek culture in the medieval and modern eras. His writing generally involves looking for unexpected angles on important questions about the past and its relevance today, and hunting for the generative possibilities of setting different kinds of evidence in tension or posing questions from one discipline to evidence from another.
Eric is the author of several articles on the politics of fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greece and essays on the intellectual history of classical archaeology and on the concept of spolia in the work of Nora Okka, a contemporary artist. He is currently at work on two books, one about the Athenian empire of the fifth century BCE, the other a study of fortification walls across the Isthmos of Corinth and the idea of the Peloponnese as an island from antiquity to the 15th century CE.
Before coming to MIT in 2023 as Lecturer in Ancient and Medieval Studies, jointly appointed in SHASS’s History and Literature Sections, Eric taught in the Department of the Classics at Harvard University (2021-23) and served as the Assistant Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2019-21). He holds a BA in Classics from the University of Chicago and an MA and PhD in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley.