Junior Professorship in Ancient History/Papyrology, esp. cultural history of Graeco-Roman Egypt:  

https://www.uni-hamburg.de/stellenangebote/ausschreibung.html?jobID=026ef8e554fda16d5b972a0d06aa88dd18448df4 (German)

https://www.uni-hamburg.de/en/stellenangebote/ausschreibung.html?jobID=be0b1b7fff509bcabd0bec9bd722fd1ee75377bb (English)

2025 American Society of Papyrologists Book Prize

The ASP Book Prize is an annual award that recognizes an outstanding papyrological monograph or edition published by one of our members. It carries an honorarium of $1,500.

Brendan Haug

Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm.

(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024)

Available in open access: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11736090

Garden of Egypt is an innovative work of environmental history, startlingly original in conception and execution, and, in a time of acute climate crisis, of more than academic relevance. Like the unique landscape of the Fayyūm depression on which it focuses, the breadth of Haug’s examination in chronological, linguistic, evidentiary, and socio-political terms is without parallel. Ranging from its pharaonic reclamation from the Birkat Qārūn, the lengthy era of Graeco-Roman occupation enabled by further Ptolemaic intervention, its early Islamic period, whose ongoing vitality is recorded in al-Nābulusī’s thirteenth-century Villages of the Fayyūm, and even extending into the nineteenth century, the approach to the Fayyūm is a holistic and synthesizing one, treating human interactions with the landscape on the basis of all the available evidence.

Throughout Garden of Egypt, a complicated nexus of relationships is traced and analyzed. The perennial water of the Baḥr Yūsuf is the story’s protagonist, but the ways in which it is (re)shaped and (re)conceived over the centuries – by the irrigation machinery that supplied and distributed it, the countless communities and villagers who both depended upon it and who competed for access to it, and the governments whose policies and judiciary regulated it – make this a study that is as interesting for the sociology of the premodern Fayyūm it brings to life as for the insights it sheds on the region’s administrative history. 

Although the sources which inform the study are diverse, evidence drawn from antiquity’s papyrological legacy is at the heart of the book. Far from limiting its scope to general trends or evolving phenomena, the longue durée under examination is repeatedly animated by the vivid testimony of the Fayyūm’s premodern inhabitants, and the sociological phenomena pertaining to individuals’ relationships to water are grounded firmly in the documentary record. Disputes over water rights between particular villages, penthēmeros receipts documenting the ‘coordinated localism’ that distributed the responsibility for canal maintenance in a collective way, an order to dam a canal briefly (in the hope that the water’s subsequent release would irrigate properties further downstream), the collapse of Theadelphia’s population in the early fourth century – papyrological testimony for the manifold issues surrounding access to water in the Fayyūm peppers the book. Garden of Egypt is the history of a unique environment, yes, but especially of its inhabitation and its inhabitants across the centuries.

For the originality of its analyses of the relationships between individuals, communities, institutions, water, and the broader environment across more than a millennium of Egyptian history, we are delighted to honor Garden of Egyptwith the inaugural 2025 American Society of Papyrologists Book Prize.

Jury: C. Michael Sampson (Chair), Brian McGing, Francisca A. J.Hoogendijk

The ASP Book Prize is an annual award that recognizes an outstanding papyrological monograph or edition published by one of our members. It carries an honorarium of $1,500.For the 2026 award, books published in 2024, 2025, and 2026—in print and/or in electronic format—are eligible for consideration. Candidates must have been ASP Members in good standing during the years under consideration.

For detailed information regarding process, eligibility, and timeline, click here.

Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt
Organized by C. Michael Sampson (University of Manitoba)

The American Society of Papyrologists invites proposals for papers for its panel “Culture and Society in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Egypt” at the 2027 meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Boston (7–10 January). Although the scope of papyrological studies is wide, submissions for this panel must meet at least one of the following criteria:

(a) they must deploy evidence for ancient literary cultures that is preserved on papyri, ostraka, or wooden tablets (in Greek, Latin, Coptic, demotic Egyptian, Arabic, or other pertinent languages);

(b) they must investigate aspects of the histories or cultures of Egypt from the Hellenistic to the early Islamic period.

Submissions from graduate students and faculty at all levels are welcome.

Please send abstracts that follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts) by email, as a Word or PDF email attachment, to C. Michael Sampson (University of Manitoba) at mike.sampson@umanitoba.ca by February 15, 2026.

Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words (excluding bibliography) and suitable for a 20-minute presentation. Please ensure that the abstracts are anonymized, to permit a process of double-blind review. 

Decisions will be communicated to the authors of abstracts by mid-April. Please note that authors submitting abstracts must be SCS members in good standing at the time of registration for the 2027 meeting.

The fund to provide a permanent endowment supporting digital resources in papyrology, particularly the Papyrological Navigator and the resources brought together there, has now been moved from the Society for Classical Studies to the American Philosophical Society (APS). This fund, sponsored by the Association Internationale de Papyrologues and the American Society of Papyrologists, had reached about $560,000 as of the end of July, as a result of the contributions of many supporters, whom we thank warmly. At present it is still in the stage of building the principal, so all income and capital gains are reinvested. The APS, the oldest learned society in the U.S., has professional management for its endowment as well as a development office that will provide receipts for all contributions. We look forward to further support from all. The address for contributions by credit or debit card is https://www.amphilsoc.org/endowment-and-restricted-gifts#paragraph-3385, where information can also be found on making gifts by check or by transfer of securities.