Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Tyler Franconi is Assistant Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Classics. He specializes in the environmental and economic history of the Roman Empire, especially in frontier regions. Rivers have long played an important part in his research, and he has written widely about the interactions between Romans and their fluvial landscapes in the Northwestern provinces and beyond, including editing the volume Fluvial Landscapes in the Roman World (Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2017) and co-authoring English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086 (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is also an active field archaeologist; has co-directed the excavation of a Roman villa and early medieval settlement at Vacone, Italy, for 12 years; and has recently begun working as the Finds Laboratory Director at Antiochia ad Cragum, a Roman city located on high cliffs above the Mediterranean in southern Türkiye. While on fellowship at the Cogut Institute, he will focus on investigating the changing relationship between Roman economic exploitation and environmental dynamism within the Rhine River basin.