Dr. Koenraad Verboven (°1968) is professor of Ancient History at the University of Ghent since 2007, , ordinarius (Gewoon Hoogleraar) since 2022. He specializes in ancient social and economic history, particularly of the Roman world, and has a special interest in monetary history and numismatics, friendship and patronage based networks, professional associations(collegia), , and the application of economic theories in historical research.
Verboven obtained his PhD in History from Ghent University in 1998, where he also held a post-doctoral research fellowship from the Flanders Research Foundation. He was a visiting research fellow of Linacre, Brasenose and Merton colleges in Oxford. He is director of the international research network ‘Structural Determinants of Economic Performance in the Roman World’ and co-director with Paul Erdkamp of the ‘Roman Society Research Centre’ (Ghent/Brussels). In 2009 he was founding member of the ‘Ghent Institute for Classical Studies’, which he presided from 2009 to 2011. He is a member of numerous scientific committees and of the editorial boards of scholarly journals as Ancient Society and the Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire.
Since 2007 Verboven has supervised more than 10 funded research projects and (co-)organized almost 20 international conferences and workshops. He is the author of The Economy of Friends. Economic aspects of Amicitia and Patronage in the Late Republic (Brussels, Latomus, 2002), for which he was awarded the “Prix Joseph Gantrelle” of the Belgian Royal Academy. He (co-)edited nine scholarly monographs: Pistoi dia tèn technèn. Bankers, Loans and Archives in the Ancient World (Leuven, Peeters, 2008); Structure and Performance in the Roman Economy. Models, Methods and Case Studies (Brussels, Latomus 2015); Ownership and Exploitation of Land and Natural Resources in the Roman World (Oxford University Press, 2015); Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World (Leiden and Boston, Brill 2016); The Impact of Justice on the Roman Empire (Leiden and Boston, Brill 2019); Capital, Investment, and Innovation in the Roman World (Oxford University Press, 2020); Complexity Economics: Building a New Approach to Ancient Economic History (Cham, Palgrave 2020); Climate Change and Ancient Societies in Europe and the Near East : Diversity in Collapse and Resilience (Cham, Palgrave 2021); and Law and Economic Performance in the Roman World (Leiden and Boston, Brill 2022)and published more than 90 papers in scholarly journals and books.
As president of the Faculty Library Committe from 2010 until 2017 he was involved in the creation of a new Faculty Library for the Humanities. He was Programme Director for History (2017-2022) and Vice-chair of the History Department (2020-2022)
