Drew Davis

From the small southern Ontario town of St. Marys, Drew received his BA and MA in Classics from the University of Western Ontario. He then came to the big city of Toronto for his PhD, which he completed in the summer of 2024. Drew has been teaching the history, culture, and languages of ancient Rome and Greece within a broader Mediterranean context since 2017 at the University of Toronto. He has also taught at Mount Allison University, where he held the 2022–23 Crake Doctoral Fellowship, and at the University of Guelph. He currently serves as the Language Coordinator for Greek and Latin courses and is overseeing the Department’s outreach initiatives for the 2025–26 academic year. 

His research probes how ancient Italian communities negotiated Roman imperialism, shifting the narrative of Roman history toward one more attuned to local experiences of empire. His dissertation, “Inscribing Municipalization,” analyzed the development of public epigraphic commemorative practices in Italy in the Late Republic and their role in promoting municipal authority in both Roman and non-Roman communities in an era where such local power was still being defined and negotiated. His current project explores the broader impact of Roman settler colonialism in Italy in the first century BCE, particularly how the colonization of select Italian towns under the dictators Sulla, Caesar, and the Triumvirs affected the development and formation of Italian municipalities in their adoption and reproduction of colonial institutions.