Walter Scheidel


Walter Scheidel is an Austrian historian who teaches ancient history at Stanford University, California. Scheidel's main research interests are ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and transdisciplinary approaches to world history.

Life

From 1984 to 1993, Scheidel studied Ancient History and numismatics at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his doctorate in 1993. In 1998, he completed his habilitation at the University of Graz. From 1990 until 1994, he worked as an administrative and research assistant at the University of Vienna. As an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Austrian Research Council, he spent 1995 as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. From 1996 to 1999, he was Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge. During this period, he also served as visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the University of Innsbruck.
Scheidel moved to the United States in 1999, where he initially held visiting positions at Stanford University and the University of Chicago. In 2003, he took up his current position in the Department of Classics of Stanford University, where he was promoted to professor in 2004 and received an endowed chair, the Dickason Professorship in the Humanities, in 2008. He is also a Kennedy-Grossman Fellow in Stanford's Human Biology program.
Scheidel has published five academic monographs and over 200 papers and reviews, and has edited or co-edited fourteen other books. He is co-editor of a monograph series for Oxford University Press and was co-founder of the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, the world's first online repository for working papers in that field. In May 2012, Scheidel and Elijah Meeks launched the interactive website ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World. He has been awarded a New Directions Fellowship of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Reception

Escape From Rome was panned by fellow historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto who accuses Scheidel of wholesale oversimplification, "cutting through the chaos of real life and dismissing its messiness."
William Easterly wrote in a review of The Great Leveler, which argues that violence is the main contributor to declines in inequality, that "the great virtue of the book is to present a lot of evidence on both sides for the readers to judge the thesis for themselves."

Works