Walter Scheidel

Biography

Walter Scheidel is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and a Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. His research ranges from ancient social and economic history and premodern historical demography to the comparative and transdisciplinary world history of inequality, state formation, and human welfare. He has written or (co-)edited 21 books and published more than 260 papers and reviews. He has also held positions at the Universities of Vienna, Cambridge and Chicago as well as visiting appointments in Paris, Innsbruck, New York, Abu Dhabi, Copenhagen and Zurich. Scheidel launched an international research initiative for the comparative study of ancient Mediterranean and Chinese empires, co-founded the Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, created the interactive digital project "Orbis: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World," and is an editor of the monograph series "Oxford Studies in Early Empires" and a former editor of the journal "Historia." For about a decade, Scheidel taught as a Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Stanford's Human Biology program. He was awarded a New Directions Fellowship by the Mellon Foundation and a Guggenheim fellowship, and is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.