Sarah Levin-Richardson (she/her/hers)

My work examines the intersection of Roman material culture (art, architecture, archaeological finds, inscribed texts) and social history. I’ve explored the embodied experiences of slaves, 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. This body of research aims to recover the contours of agency for marginalized groups like enslaved individuals, male and female prostitutes, penetrated men, and lusty women, and is thus influenced by and contributes to feminist and queer theory.

In The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class, and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society (Cambridge 2019), I explore the physical, social, and emotional environment within Pompeii’s “purpose-built” brothel. In the process, I illuminate 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.”

My current monograph project, Roman Slavery and Emotional Labor, focuses on four groups whose affective states and emotional energy were of particular concern to Roman slave owners: wetnurses, pedagogues, children, and sex laborers. Through close reading of a range of Roman literary and epigraphic sources, especially through the lens of emotional labor (the creation and manipulation of affect in work contexts), this book demonstrates the ways in which the exploitation of enslaved individuals permeated even into their affective states and shows how enslaved people manipulated affect as a tool for survival, to protect friends and family, and for upward mobility or freedom..

I previously served as co-chair of the Lambda Classical Caucus and co-chair of the Women's Classical Caucus.

Photo Credit: Libby Lewis