Dr Matthew Hassall

Research Overview

I am broadly interested in the reconstruction of late antique cultures of debate. My present research project asks how late Romans understood, and sought to change or defend, the distribution of wealth in their society. It will reassess our consensus that late antiquity witnessed no radical tradition of economic thought, identifying and analysing patterns of explicitly redistributive and anti-redistributive argumentation in late antique literature. By investigating how late Roman radicals contested wealth inequality and how late Roman counterradicals responded, this project will both recapture the diversity of late antique economic thought and expand our modern imagination of how and when the discourses that justify wealth inequality can be challenged.

I am also currently preparing my first monograph, "Political Debate in the Age of Justinian I". This monograph, based on my doctoral research, reconstructs and explains a culture of political debate in sixth-century Constantinople and the tactical choices that writers in the city made to advance their agendas within this culture. Using intertextual methods to bring a wide range of sources into dialogue, my research recaptures the intellectual diversity and tactical creativity of late antique political culture, showing how Romans used open debate to exert pressure on the imperial régime by mobilising its subjects' opinions and expectations.

I retain an interest in the comparative implications of my work. I have co-authored, with a scholar of European law, an analysis of how corporate power shaped the constitutionalisation of the EU Internal Market. I have also held roles at two autism research institutions, where I put my interest in the historical study of power towards the equalisation of power relations between scientific researchers and their autistic subjects.