Duncan MacRae is an Associate Professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. A Roman historian, he specializes in the history of religion in the Roman world, including the history of the Jews under Roman rule. He has written on 1 Maccabees, Josephus and early (tannaitic) Rabbinic literature, as well as on Roman perspectives on Jewish history. The ways that each side – Jewish and Roman – negotiated and experienced imperial power and violence is the key theme of this work. He has also written on early Christian antisemitic reception of Josephus. He anticipates future work on Josephus and, further off, a rethinking of the entangled histories of Jews and Greeks in antiquity.
At UC Berkeley, aside from the Center for Jewish Studies, he is also a faculty member in the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and a faculty affiliate of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion.
