Yann Rivière

After serving as Director of Studies for Antiquity at the École française de Rome (2005-2011), Yann Rivière has been Director of Studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales since 2014. His chair is entitled: "Ancient Roman society: law, rites and institutions". His work focuses mainly on the social, political and legal history of ancient Rome. His thesis, published in 2002 by the Ecole française de Rome where he had previously been a fellow, was entitled Les délateurs dans l'Antiquité romaine. A more recent publication, Histoire du Droit Pénal Romain de Romulus à Justinien (Les Belles-Lettres, 2021) was awarded the "Prix Charles Aubert Droit" by the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. It is the result of 20 years of work and different publications on this theme (with a translation and commentary of Roman documentation) and proposes several research avenues to be explored in the future. This work benefited from several month-long invitations to the Deutches Archaeologisches Institut-Munich from 2018 to 2020. The completion of the proofreading work was made possible during an initial residence at the Maison Française d'Oxford where he stayed as a visiting researcher during the autumn 2020' lockdown.

In recent years, his research has focused on two more specific areas: on the one hand, in the continuity of his work on criminal law, institutions and policy, he is writing a history of the Roman dictatorship and the institutional forms of the Republic, which moderns (since the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, until contemporary political philosophy) have all too often anachronistically likened to our ‘state of exception’ (the Dictatorship itself but also the Senatus consultum ultimum or the iustitium); on the other hand, he has begun work on the Roman conquest of the "Atlantic Rim" (from present-day Morocco and the Straits of Gibraltar to Scotland and the North Sea), the Pax Romana in the western provinces, and the Barbarian invasions in those territories. This research was undertaken with a book on Germanicus. Roman Prince published in 2016 (A biography focused on a prince who tried to reconquer the province of Germany some years after Varus'disaster in 9 AD: his fleet sailed along the coasts of North Sea). It comes under the heading of historical geography at the crossroads of literary representations, administrative, and defense considerations, associated with the results of recent archaeological discoveries. It has been pursued at different scientific meetings during this year, such as Provincial Jurisdictions in Roman Antiquity (Universiteit van Amsterdam, 15-17 april 2024) - an analysis of the administrative transformation of the Late Empire in the West -, La territorialisation des espaces maritimes. Acteurs, modalités, temporalités de l'Antiquité à nos jours (Sorbonne War Studies /Centre d'Etudes Stratégiques de la Marine) - focused on the defense of Britain and the creation of the Saxon Shore on the two shores of the Channel - , 11-12 June 2024) and the forthcoming colloquium The Return of Imperial Borders. Practices, Representations, contestations (Goethe Universität Frankfurt, Institut Franco-Allemand, 4-6 november 2024): a keynote focusing on the defense of the northern imperial provinces in a comparative approach.