Nathanael Andrade is an ancient historian and is delighted to be a member of the Department of History at the University of Oregon. He has published on various topics of Hellenistic Greek and Roman imperial history and the later Roman empire, especially in regards to the Near East. His recent book Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2013) examines the integration of provincial Syrians (as well as Levantine Jews) into the late Seleucid and Roman empires and their complex socio-political and cultural negotiation of imperial structuring. It especially explores how Syrians refashioned, reconstituted, and redefined Greek and Roman civic performance in ways that cohered with the demands of their material contexts and integrated an assortment of Near Eastern or otherwise local idioms, practices, and symbols. As part of this project, Andrade has taken a keen interest (among many other topics) in the settlements of Palmyra and Dura-Europos, Greek and Palmyrene epigraphy, the Greek-writing author Lucian of Samosata, the Jewish historian Josephus, the turbulent reign of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, and the social significance of speaking or writing Greek, Latin, and various Aramaic dialects in the Roman Near East.
Andrade’s other publications deal with a variety of topics pertaining to the experiences of provincial Syrians in the Roman and late Roman empire; Latin and Greek historiography; social exchange and antagonisms among pagans, Jews, and Christians; doctrinal factionalism in late antiquity; and the complicated relationship between Roman imperial structures and religious factions (especially in Constantinople and the Near East). His current book project examines the social mechanisms and chronotope by which the Christian religion (and the Syriac language) traveled from the Roman Mediterranean world to south Asia. As part of this project, he has cultivated a new focus on (among many other topics) the nature of trans-imperial and intercontinental commerce, the Acts of the Apostle Thomas, Palmyrene trade, the Syriac Martyr Acts of Sasanian Persia, the complex topic of what exactly Roman patristic sources meant by “India,” and the movement of Romans throughout the Red Sea, the Levant and Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean.