Steven Rutledge

Associate Professor Steven H. Rutledge (shr@umd.edu) earned his PhD at Brown University and joined the faculty at the University of Maryland in 1996. He retired in 2012 and taught at Linfield College in Oregon for ten years, where he was also the co-owner of the Dancing Faun Farm, until his retirement from both as of 2022.

He specializes in the literature, history, and culture of the late Roman republic and early empire. He is author of numerous studies on Roman culture, history, and literature. His books include Imperial Inquisitions: Prosecutors and Informants from Tiberius to Domitian (Routledge 2001); Ancient Rome as a Museum: Power, Identity, and the Culture of Collecting (Oxford 2012); A Tacitus Reader (Bolchazy-Carducci 2012); and The Death of Christ. The Bible and Popular Culture Versus Archaeology and the Historical Evidence (Pen and Sword, 2022).

Courses he taught for our department included seminars on Tacitus, Cicero, and Roman historiography, as well as courses on Roman literature and religion. At Linfield he taught courses on Greek and Roman history, and cinema and Classical antiquity. He has appeared on the History Channel’s Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire, and was also a consultant for the series. Professional organizations of which he is a member include the SCS, CAAS, and CAMWS; he is an alumnus of the American School for Classical Studies in Athens (1994-95), and was an NEH fellow at the American Academy in Rome (summer 2002). 

Although retired he is still an active scholar, with projects in the works on Tacitus, Cicero, and the destruction (and survival) of Classical culture. He currently resides abroad.