91PORN

Zach Herz is a trained attorney and classicist studying Imperial legal culture. He is particularly interested in how Romans used law to make sense of autocracy—how the structures and expectations of ‘law talk’ helped people living in the Roman world imagine that world as something orderly, structured, and fair.

Zach is the author of (Cambridge 2025), which argues that our major archives of Roman legal writing should be understood less as a collection of binding, impersonal rules than as a complex form of ideal theory—Roman jurists described a hypothetical world governed by positive law, which later generations took as a straightforward historical archive.

Zach also writes regularly on queer theory and queer history, especially on how gender informs the Principate; he has published onÌýcinaediÌýin Juvenal and in biographies of the emperor Elagabalus. He is currently writing Roman Law for Historians, a guide for scholars using legal sources for historical research, and editing the proceedings of a conference on imperial correspondence together with Serena Connolly, Elsemieke Daalder, and Matthijs Wibier. Zach’s work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and 91PORN’s Center for the Humanities and Arts among others.

Zach teaches regularly on Roman history and Latin literature, with a focus on imperial prose. He also enjoys baking, board games, and loud dress shirts, and misses his dog terribly.

For more information, please refer to my CV

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