Dr. Cam Grey is a Professor of Classical Studies and chair of the Graduate Group in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania. He serves on the Faculty Advisory Board for Penn’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies. Dr. Grey is also Faculty Director of Lauder College House on Penn’s campus, where he resides and helps cultivate the academic and intellectual life of the House.
Dr. Grey is an environmental and social historian whose work focuses on the late and post-Roman world, particularly the third through seventh centuries CE. Studying rural communities in late antiquity—how they worked, how they maintained equilibrium, and what they did when things went wrong—led him to become interested in the social dynamics of disasters in the period; for example, what factors made communities vulnerable or resilient in the face of potentially catastrophic natural hazards, military incursions, famines, or disease? How did these communities experience, respond to, and recover from such events? To explore these questions, Dr. Grey completed a Master of Environmental Studies (MES) in 2014. His capstone project brought questions of social history in conversation with environmental studies and landscape archaeology, and resulted in an article. His book, Living With Risk in the Late Roman World, was published in the University of Pennsylvania Press's "Critical Studies in Risk and Disaster" Series in 2025.
In addition to the MES degree, Dr. Grey holds a Bachelor of Arts in Ancient History and Archaeology from the University of Auckland, a Master of Philosophy in Ancient History from the University of Sydney, and a PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge.
