Introducing New Lecturer Ursula Rothe
I am delighted to have this opportunity to introduce myself to the wider OU Classical Studies community. I started as Baron Thyssen Lecturer in October last year. Before coming to the OU I worked as a temporary lecturer and research fellow in Classics at the University of Edinburgh, and then as the manager of an EU project on Roman dress at the Reiss Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim, Germany. Although starting out as an ancient historian in my studies in Germany, I have recently veered more into Roman archaeology, and would consider myself simply a scholar of Roman history and culture. I think that exploring different types of evidence allows us to ask exciting new questions of these past societies. What has always fascinated me about the Romans is the empire itself: its vastness, its longevity and the
Read more about Ursula’s research on the department website http://www.open.ac.uk/ Arts/classical-studies/ rothe.shtml
huge number of different cultures that were united within it. For this reason, my research mainly revolves around what it meant to be Roman in the provinces. For years, a large debate has been underway in Roman studies on how the different people in this multicultural empire fared under Roman rule, and I am interested in both the scholarly history of this debate from the 19th century to the present and in the evidence for cultural processes on the ground. To this end, I have written on cultural theory, such as the idea of ‘cultural resistance’, and on material culture in Rome’s northern provinces. My main research area is dress. Then as now, the clothes people wore expressed their status, their background, their aspirations and their roles. In short, dress is a window on people’s identity, and in a Roman context it can give us profound insights into the way people saw themselves in the context of the empire. In the northern provinces, which is my main research area (Gaul, the Germanies, Britain, Raetia, Noricum and Pannonia),
Poster for the Die Macht der Toga exhibition, which Ursula helped develop.
climatic conditions are such that textiles