Christopher Erdman's doctoral research examined the state institutions and political culture of the Roman Republic, especially in the post-Gracchan period. He received his BA in Classics (magna from Cornell University in 2017, and was one of the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Dissertation Fellows. He conducted research for his dissertation in Munich as the Jacobi Student at the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. He now works as an Assistant Professor in the Classics department of Washington University in St. Louis.
Erdman received this year's Winifred and Louis Lancaster Dissertation Award for research in Humanities and Fine Arts for his dissertation Voting Culture and Political Theater in Late Republican Lawmaking.
In this Commencement Q&A, Erdman discusses his UCSB experience and what he'll be doing after grad school
Q&A
When I got the news about receiving the award I was surprised, mostly. I had honestly assumed the decisions had been made already and that I hadn’t been selected! Once I got over the initial disbelief I suppose I felt, between little bursts of happiness and excitement, a certain amount of gratification that my hard work had paid off.
Naturally, there wouldn’t have been a dissertation without Prof. Morstein-Marx’s support, help, and encouragement. I came into grad school with a lot of curiosity and a drive to learn and research, but it was my advisor and all of my committee members, with whom I’ve worked closely for many years, whose feedback at every stage challenged me and gave me the foundations necessary to polish the project and turn it into the final dissertation that it has become. Prof. Morstein-Marx has consistently been a great help, always responsive, encouraging, and willing to ask hard questions that have made me consider (and reconsider) the substance of my ideas.
I’ve appreciated UCSB’s environment of encouraging connections between departments and areas of study, which I think contribute to making the university a more engaging place for a grad student to do research. I’m referring in part to the opportunities for cross-departmental research and study that I was offered for instance by the History department and of course the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, all of which really enriched my time as a student and my research. But I’m also talking about the friendships that I made in other departments and disciplines with other grad students, faculty, and even undergraduates. I’ve found those connections to be a valuable part of the experience.
I hope to be able to continue my work and develop what I started in my dissertation further, eventually for a monograph. Besides research per se, I’m looking forward in my academic career to continuing to teach new generations of students and help them develop questions and projects of their own. Plus, my research often takes me to Italy and the Mediterranean, and I’m eager to continue to expand my horizons as a scholar and a person beyond where I had anticipated—intellectually and otherwise.
DID YOU KNOW?
Erdman fnished his dissertation in Italy as the Arthur Ross Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Read about his project here.