Rafail is a fourth-year graduate student in the combined program in History and Classics. His research focuses on Roman provincial cultures, imperial administration, interconnectivity, and law. Following an interdisciplinary approach, his dissertation pertains to the ways provincial civic and religious communities utilized the norms, institutions, and spaces of Roman law to construct their locally grounded but imperially inflected identities. His other research interests include the Ptolemaic empire, the Sasanian kingdom,
Syriac law, epigraphy, and numismatics. He is a participant in Yale’s Archaia qualification and a co-coordinator for the Late Antique Reading Group. Before coming to Yale, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Classics from Princeton and his Master of Studies in Greek and Roman History from Oxford. Generously supported by the Ertegun fellowship, his Master’s dissertation “Petitions, Ideology, and Roman imperialism: A study of late Roman imperial petitions, 193-284 CE” examined the appropriation of imperial ideology by late Roman provincials in their attempt to direct the actions of state officials and shape political discourses about the emperor.
Feel free to contact him at rafail.zoulis@yale.edu.
Publications:
Stahl, Alan and Rafail Zoulis. 2018. “A double-obverse bronze of the Constantinian period from the Antioch excavations” in Concordia Disciplinarum: Essays on Ancient Coinage, History, and Archaeology in Honor of William E. Metcalf, edited by Nathan Eklins and Jane Evans. New York: ANS, 257-65.
Zoulis, Rafail. 2023. “Early Syriac Legal Culture in Roman Mesopotamia: P. Dura 28 as an exercise in structural legal pluralism” in Droits Ecclésiastique et Civil en Milieu Syriaque, edited by Muriel Debié and Vittorio Berti. Paris: Geuthner, 41-62.