DOUGLAS BOIN

Acclaimed Historian + author+ Archaeologist

LOCATED NEAR St. Louis, MO or Austin, TX

BOOK DOUG BOIN

EXPERTISE

Education, Technology, and Storytelling
Why Our Global World Needs the Classics
Classical Foundations of the American Republic
Outsiders’ Perspectives on the History of Ancient Rome
Italy: Art, Archaeology and Cultural Heritage
What Rome Can Teach Us about the Rise of AI

EVENT TYPES

KEYNOTES
LECTURES
Academic Conferences
Educational Seminars and Workshops
FIRESIDE CHATS
PANELS
BOOK TALKS & READINGS
VIRTUAL EVENTS
MODERATION
INTERVIEWS

Popular talks

Untold Civics Lessons from the Classical World

Erased Histories, How to Recover Them, and Why They Matter

The Power of Historical Storytelling in the Age of Big Data and AI

What Rome Can Teach Us about the Rise of AI

Douglas Boin’s Bio

Dr. Douglas Boin (B.A., Georgetown University; M.A. and Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is a historian, teacher, and author. His books include Coming Out Christian in the Roman World, A Social and Cultural History of Late Antiquity, and Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome, which was named by The Economist one of the best books of 2020. His next book, Clodia of Rome, will appear from W. W. Norton in August 2025.

Raised in Park Ridge, Illinois, Doug has held teaching positions at the University of Texas, Georgetown University, and is currently a Professor of History at Saint Louis University. He credits his interest in history and in writing to his grandparents, who made it possible for him as a teenager to spend one summer month on a study tour of Greece and Rome, where the dusty places he and his high-school classmates had learned about from books–Athens, Italy, the Forum, and Vatican Museums–came to life, full color. The weirdness of the ancient world and its seemingly irrelevance to life back home had made it easy, growing up gay, to build an intellectual fort inside that space. Thirty years on, Doug regularly returns to those places for his research and introduces them to a new generation of students, sharing the lessons he’s learned about the people of the ancient past with audiences at home: stories of inclusion and exclusion, examples of how lawmakers have manipulated judicial and constitutional systems to stigmatize individuals and groups, times when men in power have limited people’s access to their due rights and privileges.

Today, when he is not directing an excavation in Umbria, Italy, or teaching undergraduates and graduate students in St. Louis, Doug remains committed to his roots as a writer–ensuring that Rome and all its stories remain accessible, compelling, and above all, unexpectedly relevant to all.