Call for Papers:

Harvard-Yale-Brown Graduate Conference in Book History:

Preservation, Absence, Erasure

Harvard University
Cambridge, MA | May 6, 2024

Sponsored by the Seminar in the History of the Book at the Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard; Brown University; and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale.

We are pleased to announce the fifteenth annual Harvard-Yale-Brown Graduate Conference in Book History, hosted this year by Harvard University in Cambridge, MA on Monday, May 6, 2024 at the Barker Center. The programs for the previous conferences are available here.

Proposals are invited from graduate students (at any stage) and postdocs for papers on any aspect of the history of the book. Priority will be given to current students affiliated with Harvard, Yale, and Brown, though we will consider submissions from students at other institutions in New England. Topics might include manuscript, print, and digital cultures; new media; authorship, forgery, and anonymity; readers and reading practices; publication, circulation, and transmission; censorship, copyright, and piracy; spaces for producing and consuming media; and the history of library and information science. Papers relating to all time periods and geographical locations are welcome.

Our 2024 conference theme, Preservation, Absence, Erasure, encourages submissions that investigate the practices and ethics of collecting, consuming, and recovering material texts as objects using the methods of book history. What do we choose to collect and why? What is left out of the archive or left behind, either passively or intentionally? What stories do book objects themselves tell or elide? How can we as scholars recover voices lost in the archive? How do trends in digitization challenge ideas about materiality, and how might new developments in AI shape our understanding of authorship? How do texts and objects survive and adapt to varying circumstances of creation, consumption, and circulation? How do metaphors—e.g. book and archive as body, historical witness, container—amplify or obfuscate the material histories of the book? Speakers may engage with this theme to the extent they see fit.

Proposals are due Monday, January 29, 2024. These should include a title and a brief abstract (approximately 200 words), as well as your university and departmental affiliation. Speakers will have 15 minutes to present their work, followed by 15 minutes of discussion. Please submit proposals using this Google Form.

Please do not hesitate to contact the graduate coordinators with any questions: Ashley Gonik (ashleygonik@g.harvard.edu), Elinor Hitt (elinor_hitt@g.harvard.edu), Alicia Petersen (alicia.petersen@yale.edu), Dandan Xu (dandan_xu@brown.edu), and Dima Nasser (deema_nasser@brown.edu).

Hidden Labor and Precarity in the Roman World

A Panel to Be Held at the SCS Meeting in January 2025

Organized by Lorenza Bennardo, University of Toronto and Rebecca Moorman, Boston University

The realities of labor are often hidden in the ancient Roman world. Writers conspicuously exalt the virtues of hardworking Republican farmers (Livy 3.26), the productivity of an idealized pastoral landscape (Verg. Ecl. 4; Longus 1.2-11), and the labor of philosophical inquiry (Lucr. DRN 2.730). In contrast, recognizing antiquity’s unseen labor often requires radically new perspectives, such as that of the human-turned-donkey protagonist of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, Lucius, who recounts the horrific state of human and animal slaves at a mill (9.11-13). Emaciated humans display vivid welts while animal hooves are painfully widened from constant circuits around the mill. The material evidence of forced human and animal labor is newly perceptible to the lector scrupulosus from Lucius’ “humanimal state” (Chesi and Spiegel 2019 with Haraway 2016), a posthuman perspective that decenters anthropocentric experience to reveal a spectrum of involuntary interspecies production.

Extending discussions into ancient Rome’s “weaker voices” (Matzner and Harrison 2019), this panel seeks new approaches for decentering dominant perspectives (human, male, elite) to reveal the hidden labor of marginalized groups such as slaves, women, children, foreigners, and animals. We welcome papers exploring any aspect of Roman antiquity’s unseen labor (physical, emotional, intellectual, social, poetic, etc.), especially in ways that cut across traditional boundaries of both the classical Roman world and modern disciplines to consider, e.g., Greek, Egyptian, and other Roman-era literatures and cultures from literary, historical, and material perspectives. Papers might address one of the following questions:

• How does the revelation of hidden labor break down distinctions between boundaries of the self (human/animal, free/unfree, gendered, geographic, racial or ethnic, etc.)?
• What are the ancient terminologies for labor (labor, ἔργον, bꜣk)? What are the varying linguistic and cultural expressions of hidden labor in, e.g., Roman Egypt, Greece, Italy, Carthage, and/or Asia Minor?
• How does social status affect perceptions of artistic labor, e.g. in the slave theater of Roman comedy (Richlin 2017)? Is poetic labor something to show off or hide? What are the lost labors of poetic production?
• How do elite representations of poetic labor as otium obscure the economies of poetic production?
• Where does the aestheticization of labor enhance or obscure ugly, shameful, or otherwise stigmatized production, e.g., slave and child labor (Laes 2011), sex work (Glazebrook 2015), patron-client relationships, reproductive labor (Geue 2021), or industries of death and dying (Richlin 2014; Bond 2020)?
• What are the advantages or limitations of Marxist readings, e.g. the simultaneous over- and underworking of the gimmick (Ngai 2020), in revealing antiquity’s hidden labor (Geue 2018; cf. Bernard 2020)?

Please submit abstracts (500 word maximum, excluding bibliography) by February 15, 2024 to info@classicalstudies.org with the panel title in the subject line; do not include your name in the abstract itself. Abstracts will be judged anonymously.

Questions can be directed either to Rebecca Moorman (moorman@bu.edu) or Lorenza Bennardo (lorenza.bennardo@utoronto.ca).

The 2025 Annual Meeting of the Society for Classical Studies will be held January 2, 2025 – January 5, 2025 at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown (1200 Filbert Street, Philadelphia, PA 19107, United States)

Literature cited

Bernard, Seth. 2020. “The Economy of Work.” In A Cultural History of Work in Antiquity, ed. E. Lytle, 19-32. London.

Bond, Sarah E. 2016. Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean. Ann Arbor.

Chesi, Guilia Maria and Francesca Spiegel, eds. 2019. Classical Literature and Posthumanism. London.

Geue, Tom. 2021. “Power of Deduction, Labor of Reproduction: Vergil’s Sixth Eclogue and the Exploitation of Women.” Vergilius 67: 25-45.

——–. 2018. “Soft Hands, Hard Power: Sponging Off the Empire of Leisure (Virgil, Georgics 4).” JRS 108: 115-140.

Glazebrook, Allison, ed. 2015. Beyond Courtesans and Whores: Sex and Labor in the Greco-Roman World. Helios special issue 42.1.

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC.

Laes, Christian. 2011. Children in the Roman Empire: Outsiders Within. Cambridge.

Matzner, Sebastian and Stephen Harrison. 2019. Complex Inferiorities: The Poetics of the Weaker Voice in Latin Literature. Oxford.

Ngai, Sianne. 2020. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge, MA.

Richlin, Amy. 2014. “Emotional Work: Lamenting the Roman Dead.” In Arguments from Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women, 267-288. Ann Arbor.

——–. 2017. Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy. Cambridge.