The New York Classical Club Fall Meeting 2021 welcomes Prof. John Gruber-Miller.

Pre-register here.

Professor John Gruber-Miller of Cornell College will lead this workshop, which will take us through material objects from which we can learn more about how Romans practiced slavery. This workshop aims to challenge the idea of the ‘happy slave.’

Professor Gruber-Miller writes: A number of publications have criticized the motif of the “happy slave” in antiquity.  This workshop is meant to provide a corrective to that representation and take a deeper look at the evidence of how the enslaved experienced “social death” (Patterson).  As Kamen (2010) and Trimble (2016) have pointed out, Roman slaveholders used a variety of ways to mark slaves as property and to stigmatize them as social outcasts—slave collars, brandings, tattoos, and scars.  This workshop will lead participants through a sampling of the textual and visual evidence for inscribing slavery upon the bodies of those enslaved and suggest an approach to explore the radically different perspectives of the slaveholder and the marked slave. Warning: this workshop will view and discuss difficult topics of branding, whipping, and scarring human beings without their consent.

Please register for this Zoom event at the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZAucuCrrz0tHdLPzb1DvYiy0PgbGv5nF5KR