Renske Janssen is a postdoctoral researcher in Classics and Ancient History. She has a particular interest in Roman law and administration, as well as religion in the Roman world.

More information about Renske Janssen

Fields of interest

• Roman law and administration
• Ancient legal thinking
• Roman Imperial politics
• Religion in the Ancient world
• Early Christianity and Ancient Judaism
• Greek and Latin literature and culture

Research

Renske Janssen's research is positioned at the intersection of law, classics and ancient history, and is characterised by a focus on the ways in which people in the ancient world perceived, and engaged with, systems of law, morality and power. She is currently working at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society as a postdoctoral member of the national Anchoring Innovation research programme.

Her research project, titled ‘Legal Innovation. Anchoring Change in Roman Legal History’, takes a meta-scholarly approach to Roman law and administration, and aims to study how recent research in the field has dealt with the emergence of new intellectual trends focussed on the voices of those outside the traditional (social and geographic) centre of Roman law. The study of Roman law has historically been strongly linked to contemporary perceptions of governance, and is furthermore closely associated with traditional ideas of European legacy and identity. In recent years, however, the vast socio-political changes that have occurred since the end of the Second World War have increasingly caused such notions to become complicated and re-examined. This project studies how legal historians have attempted to anchor new insights and perspectives reflective of these major political and legal changes, and furthermore provides a valuable opportunity for direct, in-depth discussion about the workings of recent broadened approaches to the ancient world among scholars in the field.  

Curriculum vitae

Dr. Janssen obtained her MA in Classics at Leiden University, and defended her PhD on the legal position of marginalised religious groups in the Roman Empire ("Religio Illicita? Roman Legal Interactions with Early Christianity in Context") at the same university in September of 2020.

From 2019 to 2022, she was active as a lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University and VU Amsterdam. She is also the initiator and editor in chief of the blog- and vlog series "Roads to Rome" ("Wegen naar Rome") which is organised alongside the annual Week of the Classics ("Week van de Klassieken") and is focussed on representations of the Ancient World in popular culture.

She was awarded a Dutch Research Council (NWO) Rubicon Postdoctoral Fellowship in early 2022. This allowed her to spend two years at the University of Edinburgh Centre for Legal History to work on her project, titled "More laws, more problems? The role of (Roman) law in society according to Cornelius Tacitus", which was focussed on legal thinking in the works of the Roman author and magistrate Tacitus. The project analysed the way in which Tacitus discussed the origins and role of the law, its beneficiaries and its application, and shed a light on legal thinking among educated non-experts in the Roman Imperial Period.

Dr Janssen is currently a postdoctoral fellow within the Anchoring Innovation research project, working withing the work package ‘Cultural Change and the Classics in 20th- and 21st-century Europe’.

Activities