Dr. Rens Tacoma
As of 1 July 2026, Rens Tacoma is Director of Ancient Studies at KNIR; in addition he is responsible for the education portfolio of the institute.
Laurens Ernst (Rens) Tacoma (1967) studied History at Leiden University, where he graduated cum laude in 1994 in Ancient History. Having spent a year as visiting fellow in Columbia University, New York, he became a PhD at Leiden University in 1995, which he combined later with a position as Researcher at the Leiden Papyrological Institute. He defended his PhD-thesis on the urban elites of Roman Egypt in 2003. In 2003/2004 he was temporarily a lecturer in ancient history at Groningen University. Since then he has been Lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University, researching and teaching in the field of Roman social history. From 2010 to 2014 he worked in the NWO-project Moving Romans. Urbanisation, migration and labour in the Roman Principate, a project which he helped to design and for which he stayed in the year 2013/4 as a Fellow at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome (KNIR). In 2021 he became Senior Lecturer, and spent a semester as Visiting Professor at the KNIR. Over the years he has worked in many collaborative research projects with colleagues at Leiden and elsewhere. Since 2023 he is leading the NWO Open Competition project ‘Roman Fake News? Documentary Fictions in the Roman World’. He is series editor of Ancient Mobility and Migration from Bloomsbury Academic.
Tacoma’s main field of interest is Roman social history of the imperial period, from the Principate to Late Antiquity. His research is situated at the interface of documentary texts and social history. He has worked, taught, and published on a wide variety of subjects, most notably local elites, the ancient city, ancient economic and demographic history, ancient migration and mobility, Roman political culture, late-antique Rome, Constantine, Julian the Apostate, papyrology, Greek and Latin epigraphy, in particular Greek epigrams. Tacoma has written numerous articles, co-edited two edited volumes, and has thus far published three monographs.
As Director of Ancient Studies at KNIR, he aims to further the study of two fields in particular: Roman migration and mobility, and Roman political culture.