Professor Irene Soto Marín is an ancient historian of Roman and Late Roman world with a focus on Egypt whose research illuminates the life of the 99%—the workers, villagers, urban workers and producers who formed the economic fabric of the ancient world. Using numismatic, papyrological, and archaeological evidence, she reconstructs the systems and practices that defined everyday economic experience across the Roman Mediterranean. She is co-editor of Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction in Comparative Perspective (NYU Press, 2021) and has published extensively on topics in papyrology, archaeology, and numismatics. Her current monograph, The Nile Flows with Gold: Money and the Global Economy of Roman Egypt (forthcoming in 2027 with Princeton University Press), examines Egypt’s economic integration within the Roman Mediterranean through a numismatic lens. She has also published articles on economic growth, the Egyptian countryside, and its environmental context, in addition to other articles dealing with agricultural production.
Associate Professor of Classics