dr. A.E. Vermeulen

My research focuses on Roman imperialism and colonialism, colonial landscapes and impact of Roman rule through landscape management and land division. My focus is on the Imperial period and the Western provinces of the Roman Empire. I am currently working on a project exploring the correlation between imperial attempts at restoration of control after major political crises, and the use of land division and landscape organisation as a tool of control. For this project, I combine textual and linguistic analysis of the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum with a material perspective on the ground in a selection of case studies.

Besides this, I collaboratively work on a project focusing specifically on the Corpus Agrimensorum Romanorum and investigating the continued relevance of those texts throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The use of language in the texts of this corpus is easily linked to modern colonial discourses, and our aim is to analyse these Roman-period texts from decolonial perspectives. The main focus of our work is the role of the Roman imperial enterprise as (implicit or explicit) exemplary model for later colonialist and imperialist projects such as the Dutch presence in the East Indies.