Brent D. Shaw is professor of Classical Studies and chair of the Graduate Group in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been published in many major historical, sociological, and anthropological journals, including Past & Present, American Historical Review, History Today, Journal of Roman Studies, Man, and American Journal of Sociology and is editor of the collected papers of Sir Moses Finley. He is the recipient of the Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and has been Commonwealth Scholar at Cambridge University, honorary visiting Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Goldman Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His study of violence in Roman society, especially in civil conflict in the later Roman Empire, helped inspire the Bedford/St. Martin’s volume Spartacus and the Slave Wars (2001).