Matthew McCarty
Matthew M. McCarty (DPhil, Oxford) is a Classical archaeologist and ancient historian whose work focuses on the edges of the Roman Empire, ancient religion, and the relationships between material objects and knowledge. He is currently completing a monograph based on his dissertation, Empire and Worship in Roman Africa (Cambridge UP), which focuses on the agency of Roman hegemony in re-shaping fundamental premises about the gods, society, ritual, and personhood in the ancient Maghreb. McCarty's next book project, The Materiality of Religion in the Roman World, argues that because religious knowledge in the ancient world was not created and circulated by texts but instead by the manipulation of objects, images, and environments, a history of religion in the Roman world ought to start from the archaeological record. Using Mithraism and site-based case-studies, this book will attempt to write such a material-based history of Roman religion. His published articles and chapters cover a range of themes from the cognitive dimensions of ritual practice to the problems with using the concept of "heritage" to shape archaeological agendas in North Africa. Prior to joining the Society of Fellows, he served as a Lecturer in Ancient History at Worcester College (Oxford), Lecturer in Classics & Ancient History at the University of Warwick, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Yale.