Sabine R. Huebner
I am full professor (Ordinaria) of Ancient History, head of the Institute of Ancient History and Chair of the Doctoral program of the Departement of Ancient Civilizations at the University of Basel in Switzerland. I studied History and Classics in Muenster, Rome, Berlin, Jena, and London, and received my Ph.D. (Ancient History) from Friedrich-Schiller University Jena in 2005. I completed my Habilitation (Ancient History) at Freie Universitaet Berlin in November 2010 where I taught as Privatdozentin of Ancient History from 2011 to 2014. I held teaching appointments as well at Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena and at Columbia University, New York.
After finishing my PhD in 2005, I went for 5 years to the USA where I taught and pursued my research as adjunct assistant professor and visiting scholar at several leading institutions with a DFG/DAAD fellowship (2006/7) and a ERC Marie Curie Fellowship (2007-2010): at the University of California at Berkeley (2005), at Columbia University in New York (2006 - 2009), at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University (2007-2008), and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I held a membership and the Herodotus fellowship at the School of Historical Studies in 2010.
In 2010, I further received a 2-year research fellowship at the Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, as well as a 5-year DFG Heisenberg Fellowship. I spent 2011/2012 as a Membre at the Collège de France in Paris. In 2012/2013 I was a Fellow at the British School at Rome and at the Institutum Romanum Finlandiae in Rome. Since July 2014, I am Professor of Ancient History at Basel University in Switzerland.
I was a visiting professor at the Central European University in 2015, Visiting Professor of the Humanities Council and Stewart Fellow in Religion at Princeton University in 2018, and the invited RD Milns Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland at Brisbane in 2020 (which I had to decline), Visiting Professor at La Sapienza in Rome in 2024, and a Visiting Professor at Harvard University for the academic year 2024-2025.
My research interests include the social and religious history of the ancient world, particularly of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Recently, I have also become interested in historical climatology and environmental history. I have taken on the role of PI for a substantial number of research projects, securing funding over the course of my career from organizations such as the SNSF, the ERC, the DFG, DAAD, and other funding institutions and have collectively received over 4 million EUR for my research. Notably, recent SNSF-projects like "New approaches to Basel's evidence from the Egyptian desert (2015-2018)", "Change and Continuities from a Christian to a Muslim Society (2016–2019)", "Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds (2021-2026)", and "The Roman Egypt Laboratory (2021-2025)" delve into the connections between historical periods and contemporary environmental and societal issues. Finally, I received competitive personal funding (DFG-Doctoral Funding 2002-2005; DAAD/DFG Postdoc-Fellowship (2006/7); Postdoc Fellowship at ISAW (2007/8), Institute for Advanced Study Princeton (2010), DFG Heisenberg (2011-2014); Visiting Professorship Humanities Council, Princeton University (2018).
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After finishing my PhD in 2005, I went for 5 years to the USA where I taught and pursued my research as adjunct assistant professor and visiting scholar at several leading institutions with a DFG/DAAD fellowship (2006/7) and a ERC Marie Curie Fellowship (2007-2010): at the University of California at Berkeley (2005), at Columbia University in New York (2006 - 2009), at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University (2007-2008), and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where I held a membership and the Herodotus fellowship at the School of Historical Studies in 2010.
In 2010, I further received a 2-year research fellowship at the Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, as well as a 5-year DFG Heisenberg Fellowship. I spent 2011/2012 as a Membre at the Collège de France in Paris. In 2012/2013 I was a Fellow at the British School at Rome and at the Institutum Romanum Finlandiae in Rome. Since July 2014, I am Professor of Ancient History at Basel University in Switzerland.
I was a visiting professor at the Central European University in 2015, Visiting Professor of the Humanities Council and Stewart Fellow in Religion at Princeton University in 2018, and the invited RD Milns Visiting Professor at the University of Queensland at Brisbane in 2020 (which I had to decline), Visiting Professor at La Sapienza in Rome in 2024, and a Visiting Professor at Harvard University for the academic year 2024-2025.
My research interests include the social and religious history of the ancient world, particularly of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Recently, I have also become interested in historical climatology and environmental history. I have taken on the role of PI for a substantial number of research projects, securing funding over the course of my career from organizations such as the SNSF, the ERC, the DFG, DAAD, and other funding institutions and have collectively received over 4 million EUR for my research. Notably, recent SNSF-projects like "New approaches to Basel's evidence from the Egyptian desert (2015-2018)", "Change and Continuities from a Christian to a Muslim Society (2016–2019)", "Urban Biographies of the Roman and Late Antique Worlds (2021-2026)", and "The Roman Egypt Laboratory (2021-2025)" delve into the connections between historical periods and contemporary environmental and societal issues. Finally, I received competitive personal funding (DFG-Doctoral Funding 2002-2005; DAAD/DFG Postdoc-Fellowship (2006/7); Postdoc Fellowship at ISAW (2007/8), Institute for Advanced Study Princeton (2010), DFG Heisenberg (2011-2014); Visiting Professorship Humanities Council, Princeton University (2018).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_R._Huebner
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hübner_(Althistorikerin)
https://altegeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/de/personen/sabine-huebner/
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Books by Sabine R. Huebner
In approaching the causes, forms, and effects of ancient mother absence we now stand to benefit not only from the last four decades of research into the ancient and pre-modern family (including a growing bibliography on ancient mothers, e.g., the recent collection of Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell (eds.), Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome [Univ. Texas Press, 2012]), but also from recent research into contemporary mother absence. The root cause of ancient mother absence, of course, was death, with the result that a significant proportion of ancient children grew up without their biological mothers. In the contemporary West, by contrast, mother absence is increasingly the product of the number of working and career mothers (now two-thirds to three-quarters of all mothers in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the U.S.), a social revolution that is rapidly transforming the practices, economics, ideals, and politics of mothering. Cameron Macdonald’s Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering (Berkeley 2011), for example, investigates the ways in which mother-work has been commoditized, outsourced, and negotiated between mothers and “shadow mothers” over the last two decades. Macdonald’s account of the economics, class tensions, and strategic postures shaping the relationships between contemporary mothers and a quasi-professionalized class of surrogates is a thought-provoking read for anyone acquainted with the various “shadow mothers” of antiquity. This and similar research suggests that ancient historians should attempt to see the phenomenon of ancient mother absence as a continuum, ranging from its obvious manifestation in the total absence caused by maternal death, to the partial absences of various forms of maternal separation brought about by economic necessity, divorce, slavery, social conventions, and perhaps even choice on occasion. It also provides us with a potential framework to understand the ways in which different parties or groups cognized and responded to maternal absence, from the children who grew up without their mothers to varying degrees, to those who stepped in, were employed, or commanded to mother them, a patchwork cast of stepmothers, family members, wet nurses, and domestic slaves—and perhaps we may even extend this analysis to the absent mothers themselves, to the extent that we can recover or reconstruct their experiences.
around 65 documents from the Pharaonic Late period to late antiquity. While the
texts are mainly in Greek, some are written in hieratic Egyptian, Latin, Coptic,
and Middle Persian. Most of them were acquired in the year 1900 for the
University of Basel Library by the Freiwilliger Museumsverein der Stadt Basel.
These acquisitions have made Basel the only university in the German-speaking
part of Switzerland that is in possession of a collection of papyri.
Articles and Book Chapters by Sabine R. Huebner
In approaching the causes, forms, and effects of ancient mother absence we now stand to benefit not only from the last four decades of research into the ancient and pre-modern family (including a growing bibliography on ancient mothers, e.g., the recent collection of Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell (eds.), Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome [Univ. Texas Press, 2012]), but also from recent research into contemporary mother absence. The root cause of ancient mother absence, of course, was death, with the result that a significant proportion of ancient children grew up without their biological mothers. In the contemporary West, by contrast, mother absence is increasingly the product of the number of working and career mothers (now two-thirds to three-quarters of all mothers in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the U.S.), a social revolution that is rapidly transforming the practices, economics, ideals, and politics of mothering. Cameron Macdonald’s Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering (Berkeley 2011), for example, investigates the ways in which mother-work has been commoditized, outsourced, and negotiated between mothers and “shadow mothers” over the last two decades. Macdonald’s account of the economics, class tensions, and strategic postures shaping the relationships between contemporary mothers and a quasi-professionalized class of surrogates is a thought-provoking read for anyone acquainted with the various “shadow mothers” of antiquity. This and similar research suggests that ancient historians should attempt to see the phenomenon of ancient mother absence as a continuum, ranging from its obvious manifestation in the total absence caused by maternal death, to the partial absences of various forms of maternal separation brought about by economic necessity, divorce, slavery, social conventions, and perhaps even choice on occasion. It also provides us with a potential framework to understand the ways in which different parties or groups cognized and responded to maternal absence, from the children who grew up without their mothers to varying degrees, to those who stepped in, were employed, or commanded to mother them, a patchwork cast of stepmothers, family members, wet nurses, and domestic slaves—and perhaps we may even extend this analysis to the absent mothers themselves, to the extent that we can recover or reconstruct their experiences.
around 65 documents from the Pharaonic Late period to late antiquity. While the
texts are mainly in Greek, some are written in hieratic Egyptian, Latin, Coptic,
and Middle Persian. Most of them were acquired in the year 1900 for the
University of Basel Library by the Freiwilliger Museumsverein der Stadt Basel.
These acquisitions have made Basel the only university in the German-speaking
part of Switzerland that is in possession of a collection of papyri.
Urbes clariores aliis - Urban Transitions in Roman Egypt from the Third to the Fourth Century CE
Istituto Svizzero in Rome, May 11-12, 2023
Organizers: Stefania Alfarano, François Gerardin, Sabine Huebner
https://jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stellen/assistenz-doktorand-in/3453e45c-ed1f-4316-bad0-5327e16e757c
The job includes the requirement to pursue a PhD project, 2 hours/week of teaching (in German or English), and participation in ongoing research projects, and administrative duties. A research focus on Graeco-Roman or late antique Egypt is preferable but not a requirement. Working language is English or German. Salary: approx. 50'000 Swiss francs (€ 47.000 or 52,000 USD) / year.
Deadline for application: 30. April 2020. Please apply only via the online application tool (link in the job posting: https://jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stellen/assistenz-doktorand-in/a151b8ab-6ecf-475b-9d37-75590f01de1c). Two reference letters should be sent directly via email to [email protected]. Interviews will take place around mid-May via Skype or Zoom.
The job includes the requirement to pursue a Postdoc research project (Habilitation), 2 hours/week of teaching (in German or English), and participation in ongoing research projects, and administrative duties. A research focus on Roman Egypt or the Roman Eastern Mediterranean is preferable but not a requirement. Working language is English or German. Salary: approx. 55'000 - 60'000 Swiss francs (roughly 60,000 USD) / year.
Please find the job posting and application tool here: https://jobs.unibas.ch/offene-stellen/assistenz/848fbe7e-be36-436d-a899-a2a8e8f1e929. Deadline for application: 30. April 2020. Please apply only via the online application tool (link in the job posting). Two reference letters should be sent directly via email to [email protected].
Villa Maraini, Via Ludovisi 48, Rome (Italy)
January 23/24, 2020
Organizer: Sabine R. Huebner
The importance of the Nile on Egypt’s agriculture, society, culture and political history can hardly be overrated. Since rainfall is almost non-existent in Middle and Upper Egypt, any changes in the annual Nile flood must have triggered an immediate response in Egyptian society, economy and politics. Moreover, the Nile river and its fertile flood plains did not only play a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilization, but they also constituted one of the main pillars for the economic stability of the Roman Empire and helped to sustain its imperial expansion. The grain supply of the city of Rome and the Roman army was closely tied to the annual cycle of the Egyptian river. Reconstructing annual changes in the quality of the flood of the Nile is thus important not only for studying the immediately adjacent Egyptian society, but it also has implications of a larger scale, for a series of below-average Nile floods must have had serious political and socio-economic consequences for the entire Roman Empire.
Until now ancient historians studying the society and economy of Roman Egypt have hardly paid any attention to the flood quality in any given year. Moreover, our literary, epigraphic and papyrological sources offer only sparse evidence for exceptional years: the earliest consecutive records of Nile flood levels start in the 7th century CE recorded by the Islamic Nilometer in Cairo.
With new advances in the field of paleoclimatology, which offers an entirely new array of sources to ancient historians, there is hope that we will be able to reconstruct Nile flood data for the Graeco-Roman period, and develop collaborative methods of assessing the impact of climatic variability or change on ancient societies without oversimplifying their causal connections.
In this conference we aim to discuss both human and natural proxy data in order to reconstruct summer Nile flooding during the Roman period from 30 BCE to roughly 700 CE. Possible topics include:
- literary evidence
- papyri
- ice core data
- Nile delta sediments
- Lake Moeris sediments
- dendro proxy data
- Lake Tana sediments
- proxy data for Indian or African monsoon
- climate modelling
Confirmed speakers include: Henry Lamb (Aberystwyth University), Katherine Blouin (Toronto), Dominik Fleitmann (Basel), Elena Xoplaki (Giessen), Markus Stoffel (Geneva), Jürg Luterbacher (Giessen), Irene Soto (Basel), Matthieu Ghilardi (CNRS), and Cecile Blanchett (Potsdam). The conference is sponsored by the “Basel Climate Science & Ancient History Lab” which is directing the focus on the impact of climate variability and climate change on societies in the ancient Mediterranean and in particular on the society of Graeco-Roman Egypt. Egypt in particular provides a unique historical laboratory in which to study social vulnerability and responses to climate and environmental change thanks to its extraordinarily rich evidence unparalleled for any other region of the ancient world.
Ancient historians and paleoclimatologists working on human or natural proxy data for Nile flood levels during the Graeco-Roman period and beyond should send expressions of interest, along with short abstracts (not exceeding 300 words) to Prof. Sabine R. Huebner, Institute of Ancient History, University of Basel/Switzerland ([email protected]). Please include the full title of your talk and a brief biographical note on your academic affiliation and previous research. PhD candidates are encouraged to apply as well. The deadline for submitting abstracts is August 15, 2019.
“Studying Graeco-Roman Egypt:
New Approaches in a New Generation II”
September 28, 2018
Basel/ Switzerland
Istituto Svizzero in Rome, May 11-12, 2023
Organizers: Stefania Alfarano, François Gerardin, Sabine Huebner
Valais, Switzerland
29 August – 1 September, 2022
Palaeoclimatologists believe to have identified a period of unusually warm and humid weather in Europe and the Mediterranean that expanded from roughly 200 BCE to 150 CE, which they called the ‘Roman Climate Optimum’ or the ‘Roman warm period’. Some historians have linked this overall perseverance of unusually stable and favorable climatic conditions to the expansion of the Roman Empire to its greatest height, and argue that these predominantly warm and humid conditions in large parts of the Empire enabled the delivery of sufficient supply to the growing urban population around the Mediterranean and to the Roman army. From the middle of the second century CE, climate change occurred at different rates, from apparent near stasis during the early Empire to rapid fluctuations during the late Empire. A general cooling trend coincided and, as some scholars argue, contributed to the crisis of the Empire, the Germanic migration, civil wars, and the subsequent ‘decline’ or ‘transformation’ of the Roman world. Furthermore, differences in climate conditions in the Western and Eastern Mediterranean have been hypothezised to mirror the diverging fates of the Roman West and the Byzantine Empire. More recently, other scholars based on regional datasets of climate proxies have reasoned that establishing such a connection between the climatic conditions and its consequences for the history of the Roman Empire does not do justice to the multitude of microclimates in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and North Africa on the one hand and the complexity of the material available on the other one.
This international conference will be the first that is specifically devoted to the notion of a Roman Climate Optimum and its impact on the fate of the Roman Empire. The conference will examine the implications of a Roman Climate Optimum for writing Roman environmental, political, social and economic history, and will bring climate scientists, ancient historians and environmental archaeologists around one table. We aim at papers that focus on regional studies and pursue a synthesis of the evidence from written, archaeological, and natural climate archives. Special emphasis will be placed on the challenges of a collaboration between ancient historians, archaeologists and palaeoclimatologists, the methodological difficulties in distinguishing between correlation and causality, and methods of assessing the impact of climatic variability or change on ancient societies without oversimplifying causal connections.
The event is part of the Basel research project ‘The Roman Egypt Laboratory: Climate Change, Societal Transformations, and the Transition to Late Antiquity’ (PI Sabine R. Huebner) and is sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Swiss Association of Classical Studies (SVAW/ASEA), and the Swiss Academic Society for Environmental Research and Ecology (SAGUF).
An interdisciplinary conference held at the Swiss Institute in Rome
Villa Maraini, Via Ludovisi 48, Rome (Italy)
January 23/24, 2020
Organizer: Sabine R. Huebner
The importance of the Nile on Egypt’s agriculture, society, culture and political history can hardly be overrated. Since rainfall is almost non-existent in Middle and Upper Egypt, any changes in the annual Nile flood must have triggered an immediate response in Egyptian society, economy and politics. Moreover, the Nile river and its fertile flood plains did not only play a crucial role in the development of Egyptian civilization, but they also constituted one of the main pillars for the economic stability of the Roman Empire and helped to sustain its imperial expansion. The grain supply of the city of Rome and the Roman army was closely tied to the annual cycle of the Egyptian river. Reconstructing annual changes in the quality of the flood of the Nile is thus important not only for studying the immediately adjacent Egyptian society, but it also has implications of a larger scale, for a series of below-average Nile floods must have had serious political and socio-economic consequences for the entire Roman Empire.
Until now ancient historians studying the society and economy of Roman Egypt have hardly paid any attention to the flood quality in any given year. Moreover, our literary, epigraphic and papyrological sources offer only sparse evidence for exceptional years: the earliest consecutive records of Nile flood levels start in the 7th century CE recorded by the Islamic Nilometer in Cairo.
With new advances in the field of paleoclimatology, which offers an entirely new array of sources to ancient historians, there is hope that we will be able to reconstruct Nile flood data for the Graeco-Roman period, and develop collaborative methods of assessing the impact of climatic variability or change on ancient societies without oversimplifying their causal connections. At this conference we aim to discuss both human and natural proxy data in order to reconstruct summer Nile flooding during the Roman period from 30 BCE to roughly 700 CE.
with the Environmental and Climate Sciences.
Intl. Conference on "Climate Science & Ancient History.
Decoding «Natural» and «Human» Archives", November 27–28, 2018, Kollegienhaus, Regenzzimmer 111, Petersplatz 1, 4001 Basel, Switzerland
The conference bridges the traditional gap between the Humanities and the Natural Sciences: Researchers from Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States will illustrate with
interdisciplinary contributions, to what extent the different sciences are capable of assisting and complementing each other in the exploration of
past times, regions and cultures.
We warmly invite you to participate in our conference. To register, please send an email to [email protected]. For all informations regarding program and location, please see our website
https://altegeschichte.philhist.unibas.ch/de/forschung/forschungsprojekte/climate-science/
and the program below.