John Noël Dillon
I am a classical philologist and Roman historian; I received my PhD in Classics here at Yale in 2008. Although I’ve worked most extensively on the administration of the Later Roman Empire and Roman law, my special interests also include textual criticism, Roman Republican religion, Roman numismatics, Greek literature of the Imperial period, and medieval and early modern Latin literature and culture. I also have extensive pragmatic experience in translation.
After I graduated, I taught classics and ancient history at the University of Heidelberg (in German!), the University of Exeter, and Peking University. I then took a hiatus of several years with my family in Berkeley, California. During this time, I worked mainly as a scholarly translator, translating hundreds articles, reference articles, and several scholarly monographs into English—primarily manuscripts in German, but also French and Italian and (typically cited as sources) Ancient Greek and Latin.
In 2017, I joined the faculty of the Yale Divinity School as Lecturer in Latin, where I taught and continue to teach Medieval Latin. In addition to joining the Classics faculty as senior lector in 2023, I am now also officially core faculty of Medieval Studies. I teach primarily advanced language courses in Ancient Greek and Classical Latin for the Classics Department and introductory to intermediate courses in Medieval Latin for the Divinity School and Medieval Studies program.
My publications include The Justice of Constantine: Law, Communication, and Control (2012), “Book I” of The Code of Justinian: A New Annotated Translation, with Parallel Latin and Greek (2016), and “The Emperor’s New Prose: The Style of Diocletian’s Legislation,” in Diocleziano: la frontiera giuridica dell’imperio (2018).
My most recent major translation projects are Markus Friedrich’s The Jesuits: A History (Princeton University Press, 2022), Hans-Ulrich Wiemer’s Theodoric the Great: King of Goths, Ruler of Romans (Yale University Press, 2023), and Lisa Regazzoni, The Episteme of the Gallic Past: French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century (Routledge, forthcoming).
Currently, I am producing a new English translation of the Theodosian Code for Cambridge University Press.