François Chevrollier’s involvement in the Libyan Epigraphy Research Network stems from his research on Cyrenaican epigraphy–that began in the late 2000s with a master’s thesis on the officials of the city-states of Cyrenaica—as well as his work as co-director of future developments of the Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica and in the prosopography of Cyrenaica.
In collaboration with Libyan archaeologists from the Department of Antiquities and with Catherine Dobias-Lalou, he has recently published new inscriptions (epitaphs, boundary stones, dedications, military inscriptions, most often found during illegal excavations or rescued by chance) from Cyrene, Apollonia, and especially from the countryside. François Chevrollier graduated from the Ecole du Louvre in art history and from Sorbonne University in ancient history, first under the supervision of André Laronde, then François Lefèvre. His PhD, defended in 2017, focuses on the history of the Roman province of Crete and Cyrene. The dissertation deals with the birth of the new province and its Roman administration, including the fasti of all its magistrates. The work, based primarily on Greek and Latin inscriptions as well as on numismatics, also encompasses other topics related to Roman Cyrenaica, including prosopographical studies on the priesthood of Apollo. In addition to history and epigraphy, his research also focuses on art history, on the history of archaeology in Libya since the 17th c. as well as on Hellenistic and Roman Crete. He also works on the updating of André Laronde’s Prosopographia Cyrenaica which is one of the current online projects on ancient Libya, in parallel with the epigraphical corpora, part of the InsLib portal. He has been a member of the French archaeological mission to Libya for nearly two decades and has worked on the excavations at Apollonia in Cyrenaica.
Other past fieldwork include excavations in France, Italy, Tunisia, and Lebanon. After a few years at the Department of Near Eastern Antiquities at the Louvre Museum in Paris and a position in the archaeological services of the French Ministry of Culture, he is currently senior curator for archaeology at Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum. His personal page can be found at https://louvre.academia.edu/Fran%C3%A7oisChevrollier.