Rens Tacoma is a university lecturer at the Institute for History.

More information about Rens Tacoma

Spreekuur / Hours

Na afspraak / by appointment

Biography

Laurens Ernst (Rens) Tacoma (1967) studied History at Leiden University, where he graduated cum laude in 1994 in Ancient History. Having spent a year as visiting fellow in Columbia University, New York, he became a PhD at Leiden University in 1995, a position he combined later onwards with a position as Researcher at the Leiden Papyrological Institute. He defended his PhD-thesis on the urban elites of Roman Egypt in 2003. In 2003/2004 he was temporarily a lecturer in ancient history at Groningen University. Since then he has been Lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University, researching and teaching in the field of Roman social history.  From 2010 to 2014 he worked in the  NWO-project Moving Romans. Urbanisation, migration and labour in the Roman Principate, a project which he helped to design and for which he stayed in the year 2013/4 as a Fellow at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (KNIR). In 2021 he became Senior Lecturer, and spent a semester as Visiting Professor at the KNIR. Over the years he has worked in many collaborative research projects with colleagues at Leiden and elsewhere. Since 2023 he is leading the NWO Open Competition project ‘Roman Fake News? Documentary Fictions in the Roman World’. He is series editor of Ancient Mobility and Migration from Bloomsbury Academic.

Fields of interest

Roman social history of the Roman world. The ancient city. Ancient economic and demographic history. Ancient migration and mobility. Roman political culture from the Principate to Late Antiquity. Documentary texts. Greek and Latin epigraphy, in particular Greek epigrams. Documentary fictions and fake news.

Research

Tacoma’s research is situated at the interface of the analysis of documentary texts and Roman social history. He has worked and published on a wide variety of subjects, most notably local elites, migration and mobility, and political culture. Tacoma has written numerous articles, co-edited two edited volumes, and has thus far published three monographs.

Publications