Dr Sarah Levin-Richardson

Visiting Research Fellow
Dr Sarah Levin-Richardson

Dr Sarah Levin-Richardson

Visiting Research Fellow, April 2022 - May 2022

Home Institution: University of Washington

Sarah Levin-Richardson is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Washington (Seattle, U.S.A.). Her research probes the intersection of ancient Roman material culture (art, architecture, archaeological finds, inscribed texts) and social history. She has explored sexuality in Roman Italy and the provinces (highlighting the sexual activity of penetrated men and women, for example), the social functions of Pompeian graffiti (including the literacy and subjectivity of those who inscribed texts and images), and the ways modern cultures look to ancient Rome for paradigms of sexual behavior. Her first book, The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society (Cambridge 2019), illuminated a world in which prostitutes could flout the norms of society and proclaim themselves as sexual subjects and agents (even while their sexual and emotional labor was sold), where prostitutes and clients exchanged gifts, greetings, jokes, taunts, and praise, and where enslaved clients were allowed to act like ‘real men.’

Her current work uses a range of ancient evidence to explore the lives of enslaved people in Roman Italy. In asking how we might access and write about the emotional lives of these individuals, her research builds on creative approaches developed in other fields (e.g., Black feminist theory; counterhistory) that encourage us to think through dimensions of experience that are otherwise beyond scholarly grasp.

Project Title: Born into Slavery: Recovering the Lives of Homeborn Slaves in Roman Culture

This monograph aims to recover and narrate the social, emotional, and physical experiences of individuals born into enslavement in ancient Roman Italy. Attention is focused on embodied experiences (e.g., mobility in the household; punishment and sexual abuse); relationships with other individuals (e.g., the other enslaved and free children of the household; male and female enslavers); and the emotional landscape of the household. Taking explicit inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of ‘critical fabulation, the second half of the book offers a set of vignettes that revolve around one historical person born into enslavement. The resulting narratives are uncomfortably visceral, compelling us to take seriously the lives of those on the margins and exposing the personal consequences that an empire built on slavery had for those conceived in servitude.