Timothy Howe
Timothy Howe
Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University, 2000
Associate Professor
Ancient Mediterranean History
Ancient Studies
howe@stolaf.edu

Tim Howe was born in California and spent his formative years in the
Sierra Nevada foothills, chasing cattle and sheep on his parents' farm.
After completing a B.A. in History and Anthropology at Cal State, Chico,
he went "out east" to Penn State for his M.A. and Ph.D.  At Penn State,
as a student in a Golden Age Latin class, he met his wife, Mary.

Historian, archaeologist, Greek and Latin epigrapher, his fascination with
the Ancients began at the tender age of 1 and a half, when he proudly
flushed a copy of Thucydides down the toilet. Reflecting his wide interests,
he teaches a range of classes about the ancient Mediterranean and
Near East, from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greece, Carthage, Rome and
Late Antique Europe. He also serves as editor for the multi-disciplinary
ancient studies journal The Ancient World. Prof. Howe is especially interested
in Alexander the Great, ancient Mediterranean warfare, agriculture, law,
religion, trade, and Greek and Latin historiography and has written
numerous articles and book chapters on these topics.

His first book, Pastoral Politics: Animals, Agriculture and Society in Ancient
Greece (Regina, 2008), #9 in the Association for Ancient Historians
Monograph series, argues that Greek choices about agriculture affected
ancient peoples at all levels of society, in all professions and in all types of
community, from rural to urban, in a multitude of ways. The book is a
discussion about land use, especially politicized land non-use, and attempts to
answer three questions: (1) why did wealthy (and even some non-wealthy)
people in a dry, mountainous region like Greece prioritize the production of
animals to such a degree that they removed their best land from cereal or
other food cultivation; (2) how did these people justify taking essential land
away from food production in order to raise non-food animals such as
horses; and (3) how did these choices about land affect those individuals
directly and not directly involved in animal production?

Also for the Association for Ancient Historians Monograph series,
Prof. Howe is editing a multidisciplinary study of trading practice from the
Bronze Age to Late Antiquity, Traders in the Ancient Mediterranean, which
will be available in spring of 2012.

Tim Howe next to Alexander the Great
Professor Howe in Greece, August 2, 2011 (next to Alexander the Great)

Continuing his life-long interest in Alexander the Great, Prof. Howe
co-edited Macedonian Legacies: Studies in Ancient Macedonian History
and Culture in Honor of Eugene N. Borza (Regina, 2009), a collection of
essays from 13 experts in the field honoring his teacher, noted
Alexander the Great scholar, Eugene N. Borza. At present, Prof. Howe
is working on two books about the Great Macedonian: All Things
Alexander the Great (Greenwood, 2013) and Inventing Alexander:
A Study in the Sources and Historiography of Alexander the Great.
He is also hosting a conference in Athens, Greece on Alexander and
Ancient Macedonian History.

In pursuit of Alexander, Prof. Howe has traveled widely:
In September, 2010 he spoke on Alexander Historiography at the
5th International Symposium on Alexander the Great and the
Successors in La Coruña, Spain. In March of 2011 he gave a paper on
Alexander and King Ptolemy of Egypt at the Dublin Classics Seminar
held at University College Dublin. In June of 2011 he was a funded
guest of the University of South Africa for the 12th Unisa Classics
Colloquium "Alexander in Africa" and the Unisa/Addo Seminar on
Alexander the Great. While in South Africa, Prof. Howe gave two papers,
one that debunked the common assertion that Alexander the Great
founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt, another that compared
ancient and modern insurgencies in Africa in an effort to contextualize
why the continent might offer a fertile ground for such movements.

Prof. Howe will continue his Alexander and Insurgency/Terrorism
research as the first recipient of the Scott R. Jacobs grant for
Alexander the Great research from the Tanner Humanities Center at
the University of Utah. With the support of the grant he recently
traveled to Purdue University on Sunday, 11 September, 2011 where
he had been invited to speak on the ancient Mediterranean history of
terrorism and insurgency at "Re-Visioning Terrorism: an
Interdisciplinary and International Conference", part of the official
ten-year remembrance of the 9/11 attacks in New York City.

As someone who writes and teaches about ancient warfare, Prof. Howe
has been concerned for some time by the trendy and politicized use of
terms such as "insurgent" and "terrorist" in both popular and scholarly
writing. Uncritically calling the Roman slave leader Spartacus or King
Xerxes of Persia a terrorist certainly grabs attention but it also sidelines
the rich historical context of both these famous men the strategy of
terrorism. In fact, it's a cheap shot.  The critical investigation of
insurgency and terrorism in the ancient world can provide a deep
context for ancient behaviors that often get overlooked as coherent
concerted movements. Likewise, a deep historical perspective can
greatly increase understanding of current military actions.  So when
Brill asked him to edit Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient
Mediterranean, a collection of essays by 14 international experts on the
ancient world from Pharonic Egypt  (3000 BCE) to Late Roman Europe
(600 CE), and write the theoretical introduction, he instantly agreed.
Since no methodological approach to either insurgency or terrorism
yet exists for the Ancient Mediterranean World, the book will offer new
research that both stimulates informed discussion and shapes the
future of scholarship, without any anachronistic connotations of modern
military policy or trendy 9/11 parallels.

Prof. Howe has visited many different parts of the Mediterranean, both as
a researcher and a teacher, and is always ready to share weird travel
stories with anyone bold enough to enter his office. In the Interims of
2006, 2008, and 2011 he took 30 students to Greece. He hopes to
continue teaching students in Greece and in the future plans to develop
an Interim trip to Italy and an archaeological field school in Turkey.



He, his wife, and his cats are avid birdwatchers and gardeners, and he
(and the cats) love to fish. Cooking, especially Mediterranean cooking, is
his passion. Someday he hopes to have a farm of his own, full of organic
gardens, sheep, a cow or two, and perhaps the odd goat.

Prof. Howe is the faculty advisor for the St. Olaf Society for Ancient History.