Richard John Alexander Talbert (born 1947) is a contemporary British-American ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of Ancient History and Classics. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and the idea of space in the ancient Mediterranean world. Connected to this spatial research is a major project on the Tabula Peutingeriana (Peutinger table), a copy of an ancient Roman map preserved in a Medieval version. He is the head of the advisory board of the Ancient World Mapping Center based at the University of North Carolina.
Talbert received his education at The King's School Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, where he gained Double First Class Honours in Classics (1968), followed by a Ph. D. (1972). Cambridge granted him a Litt. D. in 2003. He is also a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute. Talbert has been on the faculties of the Queen's University, Belfast and McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He was Herodotus Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey (1978-79). His study The Senate of Imperial Rome (Princeton University Press, 1984) won the American Philological Association's Goodwin Award of Merit in 1985.
For 2000-01 Talbert was awarded a J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Senior Fellowship, and the inaugural Robert F. and Margaret S. Goheen Fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Among his scholarly work is the compilation of the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (Princeton, 2000), which won the 2000 Association of American Publishers Award for Best Professional/Scholarly Multivolume Reference Work in the Humanities.