Joe Morgan is a historian of the Hellenistic Mediterranean with a particular focus on the social, economic, and environmental history of the Ptolemaic Kingdom. His work explores the development and evolution of institutions that informed individual decision-making during this turbulent period. His investigations address questions concerning the impacts of migration, monarchy, law and enforcement mechanisms, the relationship between local and regional markets, and socio-economic responses to environmental shocks.
Dr. Morgan is presently engaged in composing a monograph on local articulations of social change in Ptolemaic Egypt over the course of the Third Century BCE. By integrating evidence derived from papyrological, literary, and archaeological sources, he reconstructs episodes in the lives of individuals who chose to bind themselves by sacred oaths to the House of Ptolemy and serve as the king’s functionaries in the Egyptian hinterland. The material evidence of these individuals’ daily lives sheds new light on the evolving social structure of local agricultural communities and the role played by the king’s administrators in driving elements of this process.
Dr. Morgan contributes to the growing body of textual evidence available to historians through the publication of text-editions of papyri. He has published papyri dating from the Ptolemaic Period to the Byzantine Period housed in the collections of UC Berkeley and Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently preparing articles on early Ptolemaic cartonnage held by Yale University and the University of Toronto. He is particularly interested in addressing the problem of undocumented provenance through “museum archaeology”, the tracing of a papyrological assemblage’s transmission and dispersal through the global antiquities market to collections in Europe and the United States.
Dr. Morgan holds a Ph.D. in Ancient History from Yale University, an M.A. in Classics from Washington University in St. Louis, and a B.A. in Classics from Washington and Lee University. Prior to taking up his post at the University of Oklahoma, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Classics at Florida State University.
