Dr. Rolf Strootman is Associate Professor and Head of Ancient History. He is a leading specialist on the empires of Alexander the Great and his successors

I teach World History and Ancient History at Utrecht University. In my research and public outreach, I aim to broaden the conventional focus of Ancient History on the (Greco-Roman) Mediterranean by drawing attention to cultural and political developments in East Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and India.

I graduated in history and archaeology at Leiden University, and in cultural heritage and museology at the Amsterdam School of the Arts. In 2007, I received my PhD for a study of the social, ritual, and political dimensions of dynastic courts in the Hellenistic empires. I am a former Getty Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and previously worked at the University of California in Los Angeles and the University of Leiden.

My teaching focuses on Classical Greece, Ancient Persia, the Hellenistic World and the expansion of the Roman Empire, the reception of Antiquity, and the Ottoman Empire. My research focuses on empire, court culture and religion in the Mediterranean, the Near East, Iran, and Central Asia from c. 550 BCE to 100 CE. My research interests further include east-west interactions and the image of the "Orient" in Western culture, the cultural history of warfare, and the reception of the Ancient World in modern popular culture (especially cinema and fantasy fiction). 

I am the author of Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires, c. 330-30 BCE (2014), The Birdcage of the Muses: Patronage of the Arts and Sciences at the Ptolemaic Imperial Court, 305-222 BCE (2016), as well as a number of edited volumes, including Persianism in Antiquity (2016; co-edited with M. J. Versluys) and Empires of the Sea: Maritime Power Networks in World History (2019; with F. van den Eijnde and R. van Wijk). I am currently writing a book on the relationship between war and identity in European history from the Battle of Marathon to the war in Ukraine. 

Keywords: Global Antiquity; Orientalism; imperialism and colonialism; Classical Greece; Ancient Persia; Alexander the Great and Macedonia; Hellenism; Anatolia, the Near East, Iran and Central Asia; military history; Cleopatra. 

Research Interests

World History and premodern Globalization

Cultural interactions in the Ancient World / the Silk Roads

Afro-Eurasian empires in comparative perspective

Court culture and the rituals of royalty

Alexander the Great and the Seleucid Empire

War and Imperialism in Republican Rome

The western image of the "Orient"

The history and topography of Istanbul