Joseph Scholten Joins OIP Leadership

Joseph B. Scholten joined the Office of International Programs as Associate Director on November 6, 2006. He holds a BA in History and Classical Civilization from the University of Michigan, and an MA and PhD from the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley.

He began his international work in 1980 as a field assistant documenting the Roman inscriptions of central Spain. Subsequently, Dr. Scholten studied at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens as a Fulbright Fellow, and was Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Westfaelishe Wilhelms-Universitat in Muenster, Germany. Since 2002, he has taught in the Classics Department at UM, where he has led or co-led the department’s winter term study abroad program in Central Italy the past four Januaries.

Dr. Scholten has also taught in the Department of History and in the University Honors Program, where he served as Interim Associate Director from August 2005 until October 2006.

Prior to coming to UM, Dr. Scholten was Assistant Professor of History at Portland State University, and Assistant and Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University.  He is the author of The Politics of Plunder. Aitolians and their Koinon in the Early Hellenistic Era, 279-217 B.C. (Hellenistic Society and Culture, XXIV; Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000). He has also contributed articles to collections dealing with various aspects of late Classical and early Hellenistic Greek political and institutional developments, and is currently working on a prequel to his Aitolia monograph ("Inventing Aitolia. Studies in the Origin of an ancient Greek ethnos.").  

Dr. Scholten has also served as a consultant on several media projects, appearing most recently as a featured expert in the program Alexander the Great and the Devastating Catapult for the History Channel series “Man, Moment, Machine.”

Dr. Scholten can be reached at scholten@umd.edu.