Jan Martin Trosien is a historian from Lübeck, Germany. From 2015 to 2020 he studied history and economics in Hamburg, where he graduated with an M.A. with a specialization in ancient history. In 2020 he joined the Graduate School of the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts” (UWA) at the “Center for Manuscript Studies” (CSMC) of the University of Hamburg (UHH). There, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kaja Harter-Uibopuu and Prof. Dr. Christof Berns, he wrote his dissertation entitled “Die Vermittlung athenischer Rechtsvorschriften über die Inschrift als Kommunikationsmedium – Fallstudien zur kommunikativen Funktionalität athenischer nomoi des Vierten Jahrhunderts v. Chr.“, submitted in 2024. At the CSMC he was also employed as a research associate within the project “‘Communicating’ a ‘Code of Conduct’? Inscriptions containing Legal Regulations in Ancient Athens” headed by Prof. Harter-Uibopuu from 2020 to 2023. Since 2024 he is a postdoctoral fellow in the European Research Council (ERC) project “The Making of Local Legal Cultures under Rome: A View from the Margins” under the principal investigator by Prof. Dr. Yair Furstenberg in Jerusalem, Israel.

Jan Martin Trosien’s research interests include a range of topics in the field of classics such as ancient military and economic history, but his primary area of expertise is ancient Greek law, where he specializes in the law of classical Athens, the role of legal inscriptions and the reconstruction of the everyday function of the underlying legal culture. This material source-based approach is extended to the Roman period, where he explores the interactions between Greek and Roman law.