Great question! A fellow ancient historian recently asked me in what direction the study of Greek warfare is moving, and it got me thinking about how I would define the current trends in my field.

My own work recently has been on historiography (the history of writing history). Specifically, I've been researching the earliest academic work on Greek warfare, mostly from 19th-century Germany, and the way that contemporary intellectual life affected the approaches that scholars took to the subject. A lot of the stereotype that military history consists of tedious arguments over reconstructions of tactical manoeuvres derives from the power of the Prussian Great General Staff (and not academic historians) to determine what "proper" military history ought to look like. I did a podcast episode about this some time ago.

More broadly, I think there are a handful of main growth areas in the study of Greek warfare. First, there's been a popular subgenre of studies since the 1990s that focus on trauma, moral injury, and combat psychology in ancient warfare. We get tons of questions on the sub about whether ancient soldiers had PTSD; this research is the academic reflection of this fascination with the question how universal this phenomenon is.

Second, there's a trend (driven largely by reenactors) toward technical reconstructions of and experiments with ancient military equipment. These studies try to test what is really possible using this equipment, how much protection it offers, how it might have been used, and so on. It tends to offer a valuable corrective to older scholarship that took this practical stuff for granted.

In the opposite direction, there's also a lot of work that can be fairly described as embedding warfare more deeply in social and economic structures. Recent work on the Roman army engages deeply with the personal documents that soldiers and their families left behind, especially in forts along the boundaries of the Empire. In Greek warfare, too, there is a lot more attention to the daily lives of combatants and the roles of non-combatants in warfare. There used to be almost nothing on the role of women, for instance, who were pigeonholed as passive victims; nowadays there are more and more explorations of the varied roles and expectations they faced. Studies that treat mercenaries as, effectively, a form of political or labour migration are also more common now; in all these cases we are moving away from a study of warfare as purely a matter of weapons, soldiers and combat.

Fourth and perhaps most momentous is a trend towards breaking up the notion of a monolithic "Greek warfare" and toward the study regional difference. This runs parallel to recent studies of parts of Greek history like city-states, political systems, slave systems, and so on; the broad trend in the field is for people to question the notion of singular cultural forms, and to emphasise variety and local difference. Recent years have seen studies on the peculiarities of warfare in regions like Thessaly, Thrace, Asia Minor, Sicily, Crete, and Sparta. When you pay attention to the customs and traditions of local populations you find that it becomes very difficult to generalise about ways of war or attitudes to conflict. Cracks are starting to show in the notion of a generalised "Greek" warfare, and no doubt future research will continue to challenge this as one strand of the growing regionalisation of our understanding of Greek history.

This is not just me but definitely a collab, but I can tell you about the latest developments in 19th century bagatelle.

Bagatelle is the "predecessor" to pinball; it's a predecessor in the slightly odd way tech-history can be where there was a time period in the 1920s/30s where people used the two terms synonymously and flippers weren't a thing yet.

Bagatelle, most broadly defined, involves either hitting a ball with a cue (or shoving with a mace) to aim at some gates and/or holes that are worth particular scores.

The kind most relevant to pinball involves launching out of a "lane" and having gravity immediately take over. Here's a 1850-ish era board to give you an idea. The ball hits the nails and bounces (like a Price is Right Plinko board) until arriving at one of the numbered slots at the bottom. Falling in the holes in the middle makes for extra points.

The state of the board you notice isn't great -- this is something a problem for this research. We have a reference back to 1799 of "Rocks of Scilly" and a description which seems to be just the nails and the gates on the bottom (no extra holes that can get more points) but no boards of that description exist.

Anyway, there's an enormous amount of Wrong Things out there that the group has been trying to correct, like claiming bagatelle traces lineage to ancient Egypt (no evidence of this) but also myths surrounding this patent by Montague Redgrave. Like in that Smithsonian article I just linked, the general claim is that Montague Redgrave "invented" the elements that really made the game "pinball", specifically the spring to launch, but we've found evidence that the spring and all the other parts of the patent have prior art (especially in Europe), and Redgrave was simply the first to file such in the US Patent Office. He's still important for the tech history because his manufacturing had a large reach, but this (plus lots more things people in the group are discovering) makes for a much different history about the development of bagatelle and pinball.

Thank you for this great question!

Here at the Theodore Roosevelt Center, right now we're a little more concerned with methods than topics. Our goal is to digitally reunify and annotate the entirety of the papers of Theodore Roosevelt, and even many materials related to him and the times in which he lived. Essentially, we are trying to be the first and only comprehensive digital presidential library, and a "one-stop-shop" for TR.

This involves a lot of time-consuming and tedious cataloging work, especially the creation of the metadata that makes the digital copies of these items findable. It is our hope that we will be able to use artificial intelligence to speed up this work. This may work especially well for letters. If we can get software to recognize and enter much of the basic metadata - the date of the item, the creator, the recipient - and perhaps even get it to help us to link chains of correspondence, enclosures, and other related items - then we will be able to greatly speed up the rate at which we publish new items to our digital library!

Now, this isn't to say we aren't working on certain topics, because we are! As we catalog more items we learn interesting things that become fodder for writing - for example, we recently published a blog piece on TR's fascination with magic and magicians! I (the outreach coordinator) am particularly interested in these kinds of novel topics and angles that are less explored, especially when talking about a man that has been so thoroughly covered in so many ways.

Holocaust studies is a broad enough field that it's hard to really generalize about where the field as a whole is going, but there are a few trends that I've encountered just from talking to people about their research, etc. One thing I've noticed a lot of interest in is photography of the Holocaust, mainly because it's an area where new sources are still being discovered even 80 years later. A subject of particular interest is perpetrator photography not only because images from that perspective are inherently interesting but also because it gives us insight into how the perpetrators viewed their actions and the victims, as well as what they were doing in their daily lives while carrying out atrocities.

Another broad trend is the focus on microhistories of the Holocaust, i.e. looking at how the Holocaust occurred in individual communities and how it affected those communities. This isn't something that I personally have much experience with, but again it's an area where there are still new sources available in local collections that can add to the general body of knowledge.

An area I'm more directly involved in is research on non-Jewish victim groups, including Roma and, in my case, Soviet prisoners of war. Obviously the vast majority of work up to this point has been focused on Jews, since they were the largest and most prominent victim group, but this has led to other victim groups being overlooked. This is particularly true in the English language historiography, where very little has been written about Soviet prisoners of war and none of the major works on the subject in German and Russian has been translated into English. This is really where my current interest is so I'm hoping we can move things forward here in the coming years.

Oh this is a good one, and since you mentioned Assyriology, it broadly seems like an opportunity for me to jump. I study the Achaemenid Persian Empire, but everyone who studies any part of ancient Iran tends to follow a bit of every era before Islam because they're all interconnected.

Personally, I'm in the early stages of writing a paper on the potentially unique preservation of of details from Darius the Great's coup in 522 BCE by the Greek playwright Aeschylus in The Persians. It's loosely building from some theories off of this book by M. Rahim Shayegan (which you can read the basics of in his earlier paper). The basic details of how best to interpret Darius' story are revised every few years, but the specific tactic of comparing the use of names in every ancient source to try and trace the transmission of the story from Darius' Behistun Inscription down to later histories and legends is relatively untested.

This actually ties into one of the major developing trends in Achaemenid Studies: increased focus on Elamite influence. Saber Amiri Parian's ongoing work on the Elamite translation of the Behistun Inscription is particularly relevant to my work, but that is just a small part of the larger picture. Partly due to the relatively sparse sources for the Neo-Elamite and early Persian periods, Elamite influence on the Persian Empire has largely gone unstudied for decades with more focus going to Mesopotamian and prehistoric Indo-Iranian legacies. Scholars like Matt Waters, Matthew Stolper, and Wouter Henkelman are just a few of the names leading the charge in this arena with research on everything from religious syncretism and political philosophy to fashion and aesthetics. There's even been some limited debate over reassessing the original ethnic identity of Cyrus and Darius the Great, with different scholars suggesting that one may have been an Elamite portraying himself as Iranian.

In retrospect, making these connections seems obvious, and credit where its due: all of this is building on piecemiel hypotheses from decades past. The Persians got their start as kings of the Elamite city of Anshan, made the old Elamite capital at Susa their own, transformed eastern Elam into the province of Parsa, portrayed themselves nearly identical to Elamites in art, and employed the Elamite language in their administrative records. However, the relative obscurity of the Elamites rendered these connections unappealing research for years.

More broadly, Achaemenid Studies is approaching the end of an epoch. In the 1980s, The Achaemenid Studies Workshops revolutionized how scholars approached the Achaemenid period, turning it into a structured interdisciplinary field. Many of the leading figures in those conferences have now passed away or retired, and their former students are starting to reach the later end of their careers as well. Slowly but surely this will open the door to a new generation of academics whose ideas go against the grain of established wisdom from the Workshops generation. Some of this is already visible in the established scholars I mentioned above, many of whom were part of the first post-workshops crop of PhDs in the late 90s. I discussed this paradigm a bit more in this thread.

Back on the subject of the Elamites, the study of Bronze Age Elam is certainly at the cutting edge of ancient Iranian history. At the beginning of this year, Francois Desset published his work on deciphering the Linear Elamite script, unlocking a small trove of previously unreadable documents. Confirmation that the Linear Elamite system was used for several centuries longer and much more widespread than previously though might be the most groundbreaking revelation from that discovery, indicating a greater level of independent Elamite identity despite well established Mesopotamian influences.

However, the most exciting aspect isn't even Linear Elamite itself, but its connections to other, still undeciphered scripts. It appears to share symbols with Proto-Elamite glyphs and the Indus Valley Script (which may share additional symbols with Proto-Elamite itself). If those shared symbols can be used to identify recognizable words in still undeciphered texts, scholars may be able to crack the code and translate them. Deciphering either Proto-Elamite or the Indus Script could have profound implications. On the very slim chance that Proto-Elamite documents contain any references to identifiable individuals, places or events, there's a small possibility that it could shift the origins of writing away from Sumer and into Elam. Deciphering the Indus Script would be the academic coup of the century, finally unlocking written information about a culture that remains very poorly understood. I discussed some more about that for this post.

I study pre-islamic central asia with a focus on nomadic empires but honestly there is still so much to be done in that the field itself feels 'cutting edge' haha. Many of the most important nomadic empires or peoples still don't even have a reliable overview monograph written on them let alone any type of healthy scholarly discourse because there aren't enough people studying them. With regards to nomadic empires specifically there is a lot of current deconstruction about what exactly nomadic imperialism/state formation looked like in different cases and critiques of the 'raid and trade' theories which are predominant in a lot of literature and very flawed.

Partially this is due to the difficulty of gaining the necessary skills — to even begin to read the necessary sources in their original the way historians are generally expected to do at a professional level, one needs to have reading abilities in 7-8 languages from very different language families (some of which are only known by a handful of academics to begin with) and be able to work with archaeology/phonology as well as literary sources. Obviously this is very difficult, but as a result previous study of these empires (with exceptions, ofc, just not enough of them yet) are dominated by scholars of the surrounding regions to whom central asia is a periphery. In addition many of the countries in the region are simply inaccessible at the moment even for academics who used to be able to move relatively comfortably through the region so many are doing their best to try to preserve histories of minorities and minority languages that are rapidly being erased which is perhaps not 'cutting edge' but of greater urgency at the moment in places like xinjiang/china and india among many others. Understanding the complexities of oral histories and traditions that are being systematically erased is very important for some of these regions.

In ancient history there is a huge reckoning within the field of classics as they try to face the problems of defining 'ancient history' as the history of greece and rome, with perhaps the inclusion of a few mediterranean locales. Programs are trying to expand but structurally there just do not exist programs that will effectively support ancient history as a discipline to the point that I would argue it does not meaningfully exist on a representatively global scale. NYU's institute for the study for the ancient world is probably closest in the us, but I've heard faculty from that school define the ancient world as the mediterranean still and realistically students seeking to study ancient topics go to either area studies departments or, sometimes, history departments that might have one/two people in their area. There is also a lot of intense debate on latin learning pedagogy, but that is less related to history so I'll leave it out.

I'm not sure if a broader answer is interesting to you, but I think that the contemporary 'buzzwords' in terms of research that get attention within the field are trending towards focusing on lived realities and using individuals to access broader historical events/phenomena (microhistories, as someone below mentioned). This isn't very new anymore, but there is an increasing push towards talking about interconnectivities and intersectionalities within that. So, for example, if you look at Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century edited by David Lambert and Alan Lester you see a focus on individuals who traveled throughout the empire as a way of studying it from a (theoretically) more bottom-up, non-centric, periphery-focused, global view. Doreen Massey's book For Space is a good way to look at the way students are being taught to deconstruct the relationship between space and time to understand movement and existence within the concept of a 'place.' Daniela Dueck's Geography in Classical Antiquity is also good.

Interdisciplinarity is a huge theme, as well as focusing on materiality (I mean this in terms of impact of physical items and the way people would have interacted with them). Histories of single items are more common, such as articles by Verity Platt on sponges in the ancient world or Rebecca Earle's work on the potato (her student Serin Quinn is working on the tomato), or Jan de Vries' on bread. Studies about travelers, merchants and ancient/medieval international relations are also increasing.

There's definitely a body of people using digital methods in history, such as virtual representations, GIS, text mining, etc. and digitization of sources, but there are generally not enough people fluent in these yet to create a critical discourse around them and there's a simultaneous distrust for quantitative methods of any kind amongst many historians. Interestingly, a few decades ago there was a trend towards quantitative history (Jan de Vries again has some good articles on the subject) and now that historians are moving away from this (due to the focus on microhistories — there's a fundamental focus on the exception rather than the rule in history, whereas stats are focused on the rule rather than the exception to put it crudely) there is a huge trend within economics as a field towards quantitive studies of economic history. The two fields are like ships passing in the night.

Last year I worked on researching the English-language history of Tamakorogashi / Japanese Rolling Balling. This was a very early purely mechanical arcade game that began in Meiji-era Japan, and then came to North America around 1900 with early waves of Japanese immigrants. It is the earliest known origin of the modern "redemption arcades" we see today, where you accumulate points to exchange for prizes.

The research was done on behalf of Kazuo Sugiyama (杉山 一夫), who included the work in a his book ものと人間の文化史 188: 玉ころがし published by Hosei University Press.