Clifford Ando has received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from Germany’s Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Winners of the €45,000 award are invited to spend up to one year collaborating with a German colleague on a long-term research project.
Ando, Professor in Classics and the College, is an expert on law, religion and government in the Roman Empire. He plans to collaborate with Jörg Rüpke, a professor of comparative religion at the University of Erfurt’s Max Weber Kolleg.
During his stay at the University of Erfurt, Ando plans to finish Roman Social Imaginaries, a book exploring cognition and metaphor in Roman social thought. In collaboration with Christopher Faraone, the Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and the College, and Chicago's Center for the Study of Ancient Religions, Ando and Rüpke are also organizing a conference on the notion of public and private in ancient Mediterranean law and religion.
Ando, the co-director of the Center for the Study of Ancient Religions, received his PhD from the University of Michigan and joined the UChicago faculty in 2006. His previous publications include Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (2000), The Matter of the Gods (2008), and Law, Language and Empire in the Roman Tradition (2011).
—Prof. Chuan He
