Problems in Roman History: The Dark Side of Empire

The title of this seminar is inspired by Manuel Fernández-Götz, Dominik Maschek, and Nico Roymans's fresh provocation in the pages of Antiquity. Our seminar takes up and evaluates their summons to engage more critically with the Roman Republic and Empire's "predatory regime," mainly by bringing models of imperial violence and counter-imperial resistance (e.g., Romanization, hybridity, creolization, epistemicide) into closer dialogue with newly published work on law, religion, economy, and the visual and literary arts in the Roman Mediterranean.