vailsymposium

Edward Watts holds the Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair and is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego. He received undergraduate degrees in Classics and Ancient and Medieval Cultures at Brown University in 1997, and received his PhD in History from Yale University in 2002. He is the author of seven books and the editor of five more, including Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (Basic Books, 2018), a narrative history of the last three centuries of the Roman Republic, and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press, 2021), which traces the 2200-year history of claims about Roman decline and the victims they created. His most recent book, The Romans: A 2000 Year History (Basic Books, 2025), tells the story of the Roman state from the 8th century BC through 1204 AD. His work has also been featured in Time, the BBC, Vox, Smithsonian, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.