History

Dr. Kevin Osterloh (PhD Princeton) specializes in ancient Judaica and the society and politics of the Greco-Roman world. His book project, Virtuous Sons of Abraham: Judean Identity in a Hellenistic World under Rome focuses on the reinvention of Jewish collective identity and ethnicity in the second-century BCE amidst a complex conversation between Jews, Greeks and Romans. He has authored articles on related topics, including: “Judea, Rome and the Hellenistic Oikoumenê; Emulation and the Reinvention of Communal Identity,” in the volume Heresy and Identity (2008); and “2 Maccabees,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, (forthcoming 2024), and is the co-editor of a published volume of articles, Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World (2008).  He was a recipient of the 2009-10 Loeb Classical Library Foundation grant (at Harvard University Press) for work related to his field of research. Osterloh taught courses on ancient history at Miami University (Ohio) before joining the OSU faculty. At OSU, he teaches classes on the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, ancient Near East, ancient Judaism, and world religions.