Laurens Ernst (Rens) Tacoma was born in 1967. He studied History at the University of Leiden, where he graduated in 1994 in Ancient History. He defended his PhD-thesis on the urban elites of Roman Egypt in 2003. He is currently lecturer in Ancient History at Leiden University, working and teaching in the field of Roman social history. From 2010 to 2014 he worked in a project entitled Moving Romans. Migration, Labour and Urbanisation in Roman Italy, for which he stayed in the year 2013/4 as a Fellow at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome.
