Paul received his PhD from the University of Southern California in 2018. His dissertation examined the expansion of maritime trade in the western Mediterranean during the Archaic period (ca. 650-480 BCE) as a key factor in the development of democratic political institutions in the ancient Greek world. He is a maritime archaeologist with more than a decade of fieldwork experience at various terrestrial and underwater sites in Cyprus, Greece, Italy, and Spain. Drawing on years spent in the financial services industry, his research examines economic behavior (esp. maritime trade) in the cosmopolitan, multi-cultural space of the ancient Mediterranean, with a focus on economic inequality and its connection to disparities in political power and social status, how diverse actors engaged in economic decision-making within the context of social, political, and legal institutions, and the relationship between economic equality and political participation, especially in the formation of democratic ideals and practices. More recently, his research has engaged with the emergence and development of race-based thinking in the ancient Mediterranean and the subsequent influence on our own modern concepts of race and racism.
Paul has taught Classics at Butler University in Indiana and Anthropology at Coe College in Iowa and was the KUDAR-ANAMED Joint Postdoctoral Fellow in Maritime Archaeology at Koç University in Istanbul for the 2021-2022 academic year. Since 2016, he has been a member of the team excavating the Bou Ferrer wreck, a 1st century CE Roman shipwreck that sank off the coast of Alicante transporting a large cargo of lead ingots and several hundred tonnes of fish sauce from Cadíz to central Italy, and his most recent project is a geo-spatial analysis of several regional shipbuilding traditions within the context of developing maritime transport networks in the Mediterranean from the 6th c. BCE to the 3rd c. CE.
