Rate My Professor Martijn Icks

Martijn Icks is a Lecturer in Ancient History in the Department of History, Faculty of Humanities, at the University of Amsterdam. He also serves as coordinator of the Ancient Studies Bachelor's programme. Icks obtained his PhD cum laude from the University of Nijmegen in 2008, with a doctoral thesis entitled Images of Elagabalus, examining the Roman emperor Elagabalus and his fictional afterlife in art and literature from antiquity to the present day. This work was published as the monograph The Crimes of Elagabalus: The Life and Legacy of Rome’s Decadent Boy Emperor (I.B. Tauris, 2011; Harvard University Press, 2012). Following his PhD, he held a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Heidelberg (2009-2011), where he initiated the project “Making and Unmaking the Emperor,” which focused on the defamation of Roman emperors through negative interpretations of imperial rituals in ancient texts. Subsequently, Icks worked as a research fellow at the University of Düsseldorf (2011-2014) and as a lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast (2014-2016) before taking up his current position in Amsterdam.

Icks’s research primarily focuses on the Roman Empire, with particular emphasis on late antiquity. His interests encompass the representation and perception of imperial power, Roman art and coinage, imperial rituals, gender and reception studies, and character assassination as a historical and cross-cultural phenomenon. His current research project explores the visibility and invisibility of Roman imperial power. Icks is a founding member of CARP, the Lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Politics, based at George Mason University. Notable publications include the co-edited volumes Character Assassination throughout the Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) with Eric Shiraev, and Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management (Routledge, 2020) with Sergei Samoilenko, Jennifer Keohane, and Eric Shiraev. Recent works feature contributions such as “Empresses taking charge? The powerful women of the Severan house in the literary sources” (2023) in The Public Lives of Ancient Women (Brill, co-edited with Lucinda Dirven and Sofie Remijsen), “Splendid isolation: Secluded emperors and the spectre of Oriental despotism” (2023) in The Roman Imperial Court (Oxford University Press), and “Three Usurpers in Rome” (2020) in Studies in Late Antiquity. Additional articles cover topics like the ontmannelijking of Marcus Antonius (2024) and the crimes and vices of Elagabalus (2024).