Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture, 15th April 15:15 BST

On Monday 15th April 2024, our Principal Investigator, Erin Thomas Dailey, will be giving the Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture, at the Bonn Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies.

The lecture will take place 15:15-16:45 BST / 16:15-17:45 CEST.

It will be a hybrid event: online via Zoom & on-site at the University of Bonn in Niebuhrstraße 5.

To register, please email Jan Hörber (events@dependency.uni-bonn.de).

Making Slaves in the Bedroom. Making Society in the Household. Sexual Vulnerability and Sexual Desire as Historical Agents in Late Antiquity

The households of the late antique world, for all of their variety, shared a common role in serving as the foundation stone of wider social organisation and, indeed, of the Roman state itself. Not only were households a microcosm of society, but they were also the workshops in which social hierarchies were produced and exported throughout the Empire. In these spaces, residents negotiated the relationship between free and slave, parent and child, man and woman, citizen and foreigner. It is crucial to recognised how the vulnerability of slaves to sexual exploitation and the politics of sexual desire shaped the daily interactions that reinforced (or undermined) the social status of all involved, and thus the social makeup of the greater Mediterranean world. This paper explores these dynamics and how they impacted late Roman attitudes during an era that has been called an ‘Age of Anxiety’, when profound changes and unparalleled developments gave rise to a new medieval landscape.

More information here.