K L Czajkowski

At base, what I am interested in is how provincial agents interact with the Roman imperial order, and what those interactions tell us about both parties. Legal transactions often provide a fascinating way into this: different rules and understandings of them meet, are negotiated, and can be recognised or discarded in this process of interaction. My research often concentrates on the history of the Near Eastern provinces under the Roman Empire, though I am interested in the legal culture of the empire much more broadly: there are fruitful comparisons to be made between Eastern and Western provincial patterns of behaviour in this realm that are sometimes missed or underplayed. I also have broader interests in the history of the Jewish people (born out of my work on the Near East), Roman Egypt, Roman law and ‘Romanization’. At present, I am thinking about two distinct projects: (1) Dispute Resolution in the Roman Empire; (2) Law and Empire in Josephus' Antiquities. The first is a long-term project that seeks to delineate the symbiotic relationship between official mechanisms for resolving disputes between individuals and the "alternatives". This will also demonstrate that every layer of society engaged with "law" in some, albeit very varied, way(s): this was an all-pervasive aspect of the impact of empire that cannot be ignored. The second is a developing project that focuses primarily on the documents that Josephus, a Jewish historian writing in Greek in the Roman era, preserves in his longest work: the Antiquities. It explores what these documents tell us about the relationship between Jews, Greeks and Rome in the empire; principally, however, I am interested in what they reveal about the manner in which law was understood, determined, created, used and changed in an imperial setting, in a process that relied on both provincial and imperial actors.

2025. Identity Construction in Alexandria: Greeks, Jews and Romans. In: J. Skinner, V. Manolopoulou and C. Tsouparopoulou, eds. Identities in Antiquity. Abingdon: Routledge, pp.397-413. 2025. The Jewish Wars, the Roman Emperors and their Impact. In: R. Raja, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Hellenistic and Roman Syria and the Near East. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.311-324. 2024. The Jews of Antioch between City and Empire. In: T. Forderer and D. Schumann , eds. Antiochia I: Frühchristliche und diasporajüdische Identitätsbildung im Ausstrahlungsbereich einer antiken Großstadt. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp.95-114. 2024. The Need for Rabbinic Nomikoi: A Response to Yair Furstenberg. Journal for the Study of Judaism 55:1, pp.65-75. 2024. With D. A. Friedman. Introduction. In: K. Czajkowski and