Josine Blok is Professor of Ancient History and Classical Civilization at Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. She has won wide acclaim for her innovative work on archaic and classical Greece, notably on the Greek polis, and is a winner of the prestigious VICI-award for groundbreaking research issued by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. She has been a Visiting Fellow at various universities including the University of Oxford and Paris Sorbonne, and is the founder and current chair of the European Network for the Study of Ancient Greek History.