Professor of History and Humanistic Studies
Gregory S. Aldrete
Professor of History and Humanistic Studies
Interests: Ancient Greek and Roman History; Daily Life in the
Roman World; The City of Rome; Floods in Rome; Roman Rhetoric and Oratory
After earning my undergraduate degree from Princeton University and my Ph.D
in ancient history from the University of Michigan, I joined the History Department
at UWGB in 1995. I teach classes in History and Humanistic Studies including:
Foundations of Western Culture I, Perspectives on Human Values: The Classical
World, History of Ancient Greece, History of Ancient Rome, Topics in Ancient
History, and Interdisciplinary Themes and Great Works courses.
My particular areas of research interest are the social and economic history of the Roman Empire, rhetoric and oratory, and urban problems in the ancient world. My major publications include a number of books, among them, Floods of the Tiber in Ancient Rome, (Johns Hopkins 2007), Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins, 1999), Daily Life in the Roman City: Rome, Pompeii and Ostia (Greenwood, 2004), and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Daily Life in the Ancient World (Greenwood, 2004), as well as various chapters in books and articles. Currently I am writing a college textbook for use in Western Civilization survey classes which is under contract with McGraw Hill. I have been fortunate enough to have held a number of fellowships which have enhanced my understanding of the ancient world and made possible research trips to Italy to view museum collections and archaeological sites. Most pleasant of these were two NEH fellowships which allowed me to spend several summers at the American Academy in Rome. Additionally, I was awarded a full-year NEH Humanities Fellowship for 2004-2005 which enabled me to spend the year finishing my book on floods. Recently, I attended an NEH seminar at UCLA that investigated using high-tech three-dimensional virtual reality models of ancient Rome as aids to teaching and research.
I firmly believe in an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the ancient world which combines history, philology, archaeology, and art history and which uses both textual and physical evidence. For me, some of the most exciting moments of my research, such as examining 1,500 year old manuscripts at the Vatican Library, have involved physical evidence, and I have tried to incorporate this approach into my teaching as well, by bringing artifacts such as coins into the classroom and by always emphasizing the close reading of a variety of primary sources. As a teacher, my goals are to convey to my students a bit of the enthusiasm for and fascination with the ancient world that I feel, and to show some of the connections between that world and our own.
Office: 369 Theatre
Hall
e-mail: aldreteg@uwgb.edu
phone: (920) 465-2467
Mailing address:
University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
2420 Nicolet Dr., Theatre Hall 331
Green Bay, WI 54311