Faculty Research Fellow
Seth Bernard (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 2012) is associate professor of Roman history in the Department of Classics. He works on the social and economic history of Roman Italy, and his work is characterized by its broad methodological interests in combining historical, textual, archaeological, and scientific evidence. He has been a Regular Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He has published over forty papers on various aspects of Roman social and economic history. His first book, Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture and the Urban Economy (Oxford, 2018) looks at the transformative impact on the city of Rome of the early stages of imperial conquest. He is finishing up a second book on Historical Culture in Early Italy looking at unwritten ways of encoding history in Iron Age Italy, and he is writing a third on the economic history of Italy during the period of Roman conquest for which he has received a SSHRC Insight Grant. He is also actively involved in fieldwork and co-directs archaeological excavations at Populonia and Falerii Novi in Italy.
Fellowship Research Project—At the Origins of Roman Labour: The Making of a Slave Society in Italy, 500-200 BCE
My project investigates the early development of Roman slavery, long considered an archetypal system of labour in global premodern history. The exploitation of enslaved persons was central to Rome’s economy, and slaves appear throughout Roman culture and society. Previous work has struggled to understand the origins of this slave society between textual and material evidence, as each corpus has tended to emphasize different trajectories of development. My project presents an entirely new reading of the material by turning to a broader and more interdisciplinary approach, one that situates the rise of Rome’s slave economy within wider Italian and Central Mediterranean labour history. I argue that Roman slave society developed significantly during the earliest phases of imperial conquest in the fourth and third centuries BCE, but not necessarily because of any exceptional Roman interest in slaveholding. Rather, early Roman slavery should be understood as part of regional and more fundamental changes in the structures of labour. The project points out the benefit to approaching Roman slavery not as a discrete phenomenon, but as a part of broader histories of pre-modern labour.