Dr. Antonio Iacoviello
Antonio Iacoviello is Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Mannheim. After graduating from the University of Bari (2018), he completed a PhD in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh (2022). He subsequently held a Leverhulme Trust Postdoctoral Fellowship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris (2022–2024) and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Trento (2024–2025).
His research addresses the cultural, political, and institutional history of ancient Greece, with a particular focus on early Hellenistic Athens; Attic oratory and epigraphy; the entanglement between the materiality and textuality of memory; and the media and ideology of Greek honorific culture. He is the author of The Legacy of the Attic Orators in Early Hellenistic Athens: Rhetoric, Democracy and the Politics of Memory (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), and co-editor (with Vincent Azoulay and Christel Müller) of Hellenistic Democracy. Shapes and Models of Popular Power in the Greek Poleis, 4th–1st cent. BCE (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press). He has also published widely in peer-reviewed journals (e.g., Classical Quarterly, Historia, Chiron, ZPE, etc.) and edited volumes.
His current project at Mannheim examines crowns and wreaths (stephanoi) in ancient Greece from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. Crowns are among the most pervasive and complex symbols of Classical antiquity. By combining philological, epigraphic, and visual analyses of the textual and material evidence with contemporary theoretical approaches, the project proposes the first methodologically grounded study of crowns as active agents in Greek social practices. In doing so, it reassesses their role in articulating honour and democratic ideology, and argues for crowns as intersectional symbols capable of challenging conventional social and gender hierarchies in ancient Greek society.