William Mack

Before coming to Birmingham, I spent ten years as a student and teacher at Oxford University, first as a student at Corpus Christi College and then as a Fellow in Ancient History by Special Election at Wadham College. 

My current research project is a study of the ways in which concepts of citizenship were used and defined by communities and individuals in the Classical and Hellenistic world. Citizenship was expressed in a number of different ways in the ancient world, including participation in political and religious institutions, the possession of particular citizen rights, and personal identity. By examining how these different aspects related, and why certain elements were privileged in particular contexts, this study will explore the various ways in which concepts of citizenship were used to draw lines between groups of people in the densely networked cities of the Mediterranean.

My first book, which was published in 2015, is a study of  the Greek interstate institution of proxenia (a form of public guest-friendship) and a wider-ranging examination of the structural dynamics of the Greek world in the Classical and Hellenistic periods. In 2016, I published an online database to accompany this work (http://proxenies.csad.ox.ac.uk), which enables users to explore the rich record of proxenia-relations between Greek states preserved in the documentary record.