Amy Russell is associate professor of history and classics at Brown University. She is a Roman political and cultural historian, with a particular interest in architecture, urbanism, and space. She is currently working on a monograph on the building activity of the imperial Senate, part of a larger project on the contributions of multiple social groups to imperial imagery and ideology. She has also published on concepts of public and private, the relationship between English and German-language research on the Roman Republic, and the spatial turn, and has an ongoing project on scale. Her next major work will be a monograph on the institutional and cultural role of the populus Romanus, for which her preparations have included new collaborations with political scientists, historians, and lawyers on the construction of peoplehood across time and space.
Russell will serve as a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Classics in Spring 2027. She will teach the undergraduate course “The City of Rome,” which will investigate the ways in which architecture and urban planning shaped political ideas and actions in ancient Rome.
