Sabine Panzram

senior fellow
EURIAS cohort 2018/2019
discipline History
Professor for Ancient History, University of Hamburg

Research project

How the Roman Empire Failed. The Connecting Power of Traditional City Culture

 

This project sets out to describe and analyse the collapse of the Roman Empire – an Empire that, at the peak of its power in AD 117, stretched from the Scottish Highlands to the Sahara and from the Atlantic to the Hindu Kush. Rome’s power rested upon cities that were independent, autonomous and hierarchical in their structure. It is commonly understood that external factors such as military threats lay at the heart of the fall of the Roman Empire. This project highlights, for the first time, that in the long term the fall of the Roman Empire was attributable to its organisational structure: alongside towns and cities that had an important legal status were others just as significant due to their traditional relevance as trading outposts or religious centres, at both regional and supraregional level. Rivalries and violent conflicts were, as a result, almost inevitable.

CPCity evaluates cities based upon their geographical location and pre-Roman history, irrespective of their legal system. It focuses its attention on southern Spain and northern Africa, and reconstructs the histories of towns and cities (case-studies) from the time of their foundation to the Moorish Invasion (approx. 3 BC to 7 AD). The evaluation and analysis of the written testimonies, following an interdisciplinary approach, will be crucial. This will include epigraphic and numismatic evidence, regional surveys and archaeological research, and will cover a 1000-year timespan.

Employing a unique methodology which visualises results as a combination of subdivided maps, step-by-step plans and network diagrams, the project sets new standards to enable access to data for analytical purposes.

 

Biography

 

Sabine Panzram is Professor of Ancient History at Hamburg University. She obtained her PhD at Münster University after completing her studies in Freiburg and Barcelona. She has been a Research Fellow of the German Research Foundation at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin.

Sabine Panzram's main research interests are the social history of power and historical anthropology, with a focus in particular on urban history on the Iberian Peninsula. Currently she is preparing a study on “Christendom without Church. The genesis of an institution in the dioecesis Hispaniarum (4th to 7th centuries)”. She is the coordinator of Toletum, an interdisciplinary network for young researchers studying the Iberian Peninsula in Antiquity (www.toletum-network.com). She is a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute.

 

Selected publications

 

Oppidum – civitas – urbs. Städteforschung auf der Iberischen Halbinsel zwischen Rom und al-Andalus, (ed.), LIT, Berlin, 2017.

 

‘Augusto y la geometría. Sobre las bases geográficas de la dominación romana’, Gerión, vol. 35, 2017, pp. 267-296.

 

'„Hilferufe“ aus Hispaniens Städten – Zur Ausbildung einer Metropolitanordnung auf der Iberischen Halbinsel (4.-6. Jahrhundert)', Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 301, 2015, pp. 626-661.

 

'Die Iberische Halbinsel um 500 n. Chr. – Herrschaft „am Ende der Welt“. Eine Geschichte in neun Städten', in M. Meier & S. Patzold (eds), Chlodwigs Welt. Organisation von Herrschaft um 500. Internationale Tagung. Weingarten 2011, Steiner, Stuttgart, 2014, pp. 449-486.

 

Stadtbild und Elite: Tarraco, Corduba und Augusta Emerita zwischen Republik und Spätantike, Steiner, Stuttgart, 2002.

 

 

institut

senior fellow
EURIAS promotion 2017/2018
Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS)
discipline History
2017
junior fellow
EURIAS promotion 2018/2019
Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS)
discipline Sociology
2018
junior fellow
EURIAS promotion 2017/2018
Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS)
discipline History
2017