Benjamin Straumann (PI) is ERC Professor of History at the University of Zurich and Research Professor of Classics at New York University. He is also Alberico Gentili Senior Fellow at NYU Law School. Benjamin is the author of Roman Law in the State of Nature: The Classical Foundations of Hugo Grotius’ Natural Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Crisis and Constitutionalism: Roman Political Thought from the Late Republic to the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For reviews, see here, here or here. For papers and other publications, go to Benjamin’s Academia page. 


Ana Kotarcic holds undergraduate degrees in Ancient Greek and Latin as well as English and French linguistics and literature from the University of Berne, a Master of Studies in Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford, a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence from KU Leuven as well as a PhD in Classics from the University of St Andrews. After her PhD, Ana was an FWO [Pegasus]2 Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the department for comparative, historical and applied linguistics at KU Leuven and subsequently worked as an NLP and Deep Learning postdoctoral researcher on multi- and interdisciplinary projects at the KU Leuven Neuroscience Laboratory, on the Swiss Voices Project at the ETH Media Technology Centre and on the Stop Hate Speech Project (funded by InnoSuisse and BAKOM) at the Immigration Policy Lab at ETH Zurich and the Digital Democracy Lab at the University of Zurich. Ana’s research focuses on the workings of natural language und includes theoretical, applied, cognitive, neuro- and computational linguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax and semantics, which she approaches with the help of philological, linguistic, NLP and machine learning techniques. Her work has been published by international outlets like Cambridge University Press, Nature Scientific Reports and EMNLP. On the JustCity project, Ana will be examining Cicero’s conception of justice in light of the Carneadean debate, eudaimonistic virtue ethics as presented by Greek predecessors, Cicero’s theory of natural law and his views on private property.

Jeffrey Dymond works on political and legal thought from the medieval through to the early modern period, and especially on the Renaissance re-introduction and appropriation of ancient Greek and Roman ideas. He received an MA from University College London in 2013 and completed a PhD in 2021 at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a dissertation on the reception of Cicero's concept of the civitas among Italian Renaissance political writers from c.1250 to c.1550. An article on the reception of Book 6 of Polybius’s Histories in Renaissance Florence, and in Machiavelli’s Discorsi in particular, appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas in 2021. On the JustCity project, he will work on the role of Ciceronian thinking about justice and human association in shaping early modern natural and international law, as visible primarily in the work of the jurist Alberico Gentili (1552-1608).

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Signy Gutnick Allen holds a BA in Modern History and English Literature from the University of Oxford (2010) and an MA in the History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of London (2012). She earned her PhD in the History of Political Thought with a dissertation on Thomas Hobbes’s Theory of Crime and Punishment, completed under the supervision of Quentin Skinner at Queen Mary University of London in 2016. She was subsequently an Associate Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics at the University of York (2016-17) and an LSE Fellow in Political Theory in the Department of Government at London School of Economics and Political Science (2017-2021). Her research focuses on early modern debates around citizenship and political rights, with a particular emphasis on the history of English and European social contract theory and its limitations. She’s also interested in methodological debates about the relationship between political theory and the history of political thought. She is contributing a book chapter on ‘Thomas Hobbes’ to Reconsidering Political Thinkers, eds. Manjeet Ramgotra and Simon Choat, to be published by Oxford University Press, and another book chapter on ‘The Right to Punish’ to the Cambridge History of Rights: Early Modern Volume, eds. Andrew Fitzmaurice and Rachel Hammersley, to be published by Cambridge University Press. Within the JustCity project, Signy seeks to determine the contribution of Cicero’s political thought to the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, with a particular focus on the works of John Locke (1632-1704) Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797).

Nikolas Hächler studied history, philosophy and political science at the University of Zurich, where he obtained his Master's degree in 2012 and his doctorate in 2017. A revised version of his doctoral thesis on the composition, functions and importance of the senatorial order during the 3rd century CE has been published as Kontinuität und Wandel des Senatorenstandes im Zeitalter der Soldatenkaiser in 2019 by Brill. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich from 2017 to 2019 and then held a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) postdoc fellowship, during which he has been visiting scholar at the universities of Vienna, Paris and Munich, respectively. Nikolas’ research interests include social, economic and cultural history; history of political thought during the later Roman Empire, Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages; pagan philosophy and its Christian reception; epigraphy; prosopographical and historical network research; and historical anthropology. Appointed to join JustCity in 2022, Nikolas will be examining the way Lactantius and Augustine used the Carneadean debate to criticize Ciceronian ideas of justice, with a view both backwards to the classical origin and forward to the later uses of the debate. For more of Nikolas’ research, go to his Academia page.  

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Andreas Gyr is the Project Coordinator of JustCity. Andreas graduated from the University of Basel with an MA in classical philology and philosophy and was a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) research fellow in ancient philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin. He is also a certified clinical investigator in accordance with ISO-GCP. Before joining JustCity, he worked as scientific project manager for clinical trials at the University Hospital of Basel.

Affiliated Researchers

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René de Nicolay was educated in France (ENS Paris, from 2011 to 2017; B.A. in Classics from the Sorbonne - Paris IV, in 2012; M.A. in Ancient History from the EPHE, in 2015; agrégation de lettres classiques, 2017) and the United States (Ph.D. at Princeton from 2017 to 2021). René has been primarily working on classical political theory. Parts of his dissertation on “The Origins of Licence: Excessive Freedom in Ancient Political Philosophy” have appeared as journal articles in Polis (“Shameless Freedom in Plato’s Laws”) and in Classical Philology (“Licentia: Cicero on the Suicide of Political Communities”); another chapter, on “Freedom and Fetishism in Book 8 of Plato’s Republic”, has been presented at the 2021 meeting of the Society of Classical Studies. René has also developed a strong interest in the reception of classical political theory, especially in late antique, medieval and Renaissance texts, in the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic traditions. René is an affiliated researcher with the JustCity project, examining Cicero’s notion of justice as elaborated in his key philosophical works as well as in some of the speeches in order to test the project’s fundamental hypothesis that Cicero developed a law-based conception of justice at odds with prevailing virtue-based Greek ones.

Enrico Piergiacomi received his PhD from the University of Trento in 2016. At present, he is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Arts of the Technion | Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa, Israel) and Research Fellow at the Center for Religious Studies of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento. In 2019-2020, he was the recipient of the international grant The Reception of Lucretius and Roman Epicureanism from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century. In 2021-2022, Enrico was Francesco De Dombrowsky Fellow at Villa I Tatti | The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2021-2022), where he worked on a project entitled The Pleasures of Piety. The History of a Neglected Religious Tradition. He also held a research fellowship at Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations at the University of Erfurt, where he investigated the Stoic conception of the city and natural law. Enrico specializes in ancient and modern theological thought and its moral and political implications. He has published two books: Storia delle antiche teologie atomiste (Sapienza Editrice, Roma 2017) and Amicus Lucretius. Gassendi, il “De rerum natura” e l’edonismo cristiano (De Gruyter, Berlin-New York 2022). He collaborates with the JustCity project by studying the Academic-Stoic theories of justice that influenced Cicero’s own conception of virtue, natural law, and self-interest. In particular, his research focuses on the Stoic ideas of divine justice and the cosmic city, which the Roman Stoics such as Panaetius and Posidonius interpreted as “embedded” in the civic constitution of Rome and used as theoretical tools for imagining the perfect/rational community of wise human beings and the gods.