Congratulations to Dr Danielle Hyeonah Lambert on her book contract with Cambridge University Press: 'Decolonizing Roman Imperialism: The Study of Rome, Romanisation, and the Postcolonial Lens'.
Danielle is one of our Research Associates and is working on news ways of understanding the Roman Empire in Britain. We asked Danielle to provide a brief description of her upcoming book...
"Forty years after Edward Said’s Orientalism first appeared, postcolonialism has become an intellectual movement to define the era. It not only earned prominence as an academic discipline in its own right but also exerted influence further afield. Roman scholarship was no exception, and postcolonialism inspired a new orientation for the discourse concerning Romanization in particular. Postcolonial challenges to the concept and methodology of established history and its aim to decolonize history and epistemology motivated Roman historians and archaeologists to question the paradigm of Romanization: to review its historiography, to take a fresh look at the age-old issue, and to re-conceptualize and rewrite it. Yet, the connection between postcolonialism and Romanization appears to be difficult to bridge. The temporal and spatial gap of their focus makes the link between them seem debateable. Broadly speaking, there is a common ground of a focus on imperialism and its consequences. Nonetheless, the concern about the anachronistic comparison does not seem to abate and keeps many ancient historians wary of modern theories. The question still remains whether postcolonialism is a useful analytical tool to re-examine Romanization and how it affected the Romanization discourse. Here I investigate how postcolonialism travelled to Anglo-American and French scholarship of Roman history and reoriented the discourse on Romanization in each scholarship respectively. It is a far cry from a historiographical review of recent studies on Roman imperialism and Romanization. Rather, it is a comparative study between the point of departure and the point(s) of arrival of travelling ideas that aims to understand their path and impact."
We are immensely proud of Danielle’s achievement and look forward to its publication!
