Biography
Drew is a PhD Candidate in Classics, Ancient History Stream. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Western Ontario in 2013 and 2015 respectively. His dissertation focuses on the development of municipal public economies in Italy between the years 201 BCE – 14 CE. Using a corpus of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, it aims to reconstruct how local Italian communities operated at a budgetary level and in so doing analyze the changing interplay between imperial and local fiscal regimes throughout the period of Roman expansion. It argues that Italian public economies were much more robust than previously thought, and that their fiscal systems played a key role in the larger processes of municipalization and urbanization in the peninsula. He was a trench supervisor during the 2018 and 2019 seasons for the Excavations on the Acropolis of Populonia Project, a joint venture between the University of Toronto and the University of Siena.
Research Interests: Roman history, ancient colonialism, epigraphy