The Visual Workings of Roman Slave Sales

Slavery was a fundamental part of ancient Roman society, as was visual culture. We know a lot about these two topics separately, but we know much less about how slavery and visual culture interacted. In this talk, Dr. Trimble will show and discuss how the visual played a crucial role in defining and enforcing slavery for both enslaved and free people. What people saw was crucial to how they understood and experienced Roman slavery.

A reception and book signing will follow the program.

Bio: Jennifer Trimble works on art and archaeology of the Roman Empire. Her research and teaching interests include the visual culture of Roman slavery, portraits and replication, gender, comparative urbanism, and ancient mapping. Dr. Trimble was co-director of the IRC-Oxford-Stanford excavations in the Roman Forum, which studied the interactions of commercial, religious and monumental space. She also co-directed Stanford's Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project, a collaboration between computer scientists and archaeologists to help reassemble a fragmentary ancient map of the city of Rome. Her book Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2011) considers how the visual sameness of female portrait statues, with bodies that are all identical, helped construct public identity. She is currently at work on Seeing Roman Slaves about the intersections of Roman slavery and visual culture.

Sponsored by the Ancient Studies Department and the Dresher Center for the Humanities.