Joseph Manning (historian)
Joseph Gilbert (J.G.) Manning (born May 1959) is a professor of History at Yale University. Manning holds the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Chair in History & in Classics. He is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School, and a Professor (by courtesy) in the School of the Environment at Yale. Manning is a specialist in the history of the Mediterranean world in the Hellenistic period with particular focus on the legal and economic history of Ptolemaic Egypt. His current work is situated at the intersection of paleoclimatology, the history of institutions, and historical change. He  is the Principal Investigator of a major National Science Foundation funded project investigating the link between explosive volcanic eruptions, Nile flood behavior, and human responses to climatic change with very broad implications for understanding climatic change across the pre-industrial world. He is currently at work on a major book examining global history since the Neolithic from the viewpoint of paleoclimatology, environmental history and climatic change. Before coming to Yale, Manning taught in the Classics Department for two years at Princeton University. Manning went on to the Classics Department at Stanford University and taught there for 12 years. He was  a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995–1996. He is a collaborative member of Yale's Program in Economic History, and was a founder of the comparative premodern history group at Yale, Archaia Education. Manning grew up in Western Springs, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago. He attended high school at Benet Academy, a Catholic prep school in Lisle, Iillinois. He received his B.A. from Ohio State University (1981) in the History of Art with a specialization in Medieval architectural history, and History, and his M.A. (1985) and Ph.D.  (1992) from the University of Chicago in Egyptology, specializing in Demotic (Egyptian) language and texts.