Dorothy Thompson

Dr. Thompson received her B.A. from Girton College, Cambridge, and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. She is currently the Isaac Newton Trust Lecturer in Classics at Cambridge; an Official Fellow and Lecturer in Classics and History at Girton College, where she is also Director of Studies in Classics; and a Lecturer in Classics at Clare College, Cambridge.

Dr. Thompson is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has won numerous awards and fellowships, including most recently a prestigious Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. She is the current President of the International Association of Papyrologists. Her scholarship is characterized by its innovation, its rigor, and its breadth; it is no exaggeration whatsoever to say that her work has had a profound impact upon the study of Greco-Roman Egypt. Two publications particularly characterize her work.

The first, 1971's Kerkeosiris: An Egyptian Village in the Ptolemaic Period, is a historiographic landmark -- one all the more remarkable when one considers that it is a revision of her doctoral thesis. As its subtitle suggests, Kerkeosiris is local history, written close to the soil. This emphasis on the land and its exploitation, alongside the exploration of questions of population and ethnicity, was a departure -- some would say a welcome one -- from traditional papyrological concerns -- from the political and institutional histories, and from the unfortunate papyrological tendency to lose the forest for the trees. Based upon the Tebtunis papyri, Kerkeosiris also marks the beginning of Dr. Thompson's long-standing interest in the Berkeley collection.

The second work that comes immediately to mind is Dr. Thompson's Memphis under the Ptolemies, an exemplary marriage of Greek and Egyptian source material appearing at a time -- 1988 -- when such unions were hardly commonplace. It is a volume that, in short, contains some of the finest historical writing that we have ever encountered, and not surprisingly, in the year following its publication, it was awarded the American Historical Association's James H. Breasted Prize for the best book in any field prior to the year 1000.

Dr. Thompson is currently putting the final touches on a two-volume opus entitled Counting the People, a project upon which she has been working for the past few years with Professor Willy Clarysse of Leuven. Counting the People will contribute significantly to the study of the demography of the ancient world.

--April 2002