Turin, 4-6 September 2024
The Summer School aims to discuss the role of notions and constructions of otherness for the practice
of human exploitation, focusing on the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean.
The relation between racism and enslavement is famously debated in the study of modern systems of slavery. In his fundamental (and long overlooked) study of the economics of modern slavery, Eric Williams argued that racial discrimination was more a result than a presupposition of slavery. His thesis is still a focus of controversy for modern historians. Meanwhile, the scholarly consensus, recently restated by Stanley Engerman, holds that ancient systems of enslavement were race-blind, as it were, that is, that they were underpinned by a fundamental notion of the arbitrariness of enslavement, whereby no specific class of individuals was seen as especially prone or likely to be enslaved. The research group of the Turin Humanities Programme seeks to challenge this consensus, pointing to the gap between the theoretical arbitrariness of enslavement and the practice of enslaving individuals of specific ethnic groups. In the framework of this revision of ancient ideologies of enslavement, in the 2024 Summer School invites junior and senior scholars to join a discussion on the nexus of otherness and human exploitation in the ancient Mediterranean.
While the importance and the very existence of racial and ethnic discrimination in antiquity have been debated and more often than not denied in scholarship after the Second World War, in recent years many scholars have advanced a revisionist line of interpretation, which argues for the existence of racial discrimination and/or racism long before the so-called scientific racism that emerged from the seventeenth century onwards, culminating in the twentieth. Without necessarily accepting wholesale the consensus that is emerging in this new wave of scholarship, the question that the 2024 Summer School intends to explore is to what extent the human exploitation that was fundamental to ancient Mediterranean economies, typically in the form of enslavement, was supported by or itself generated or promoted ethnic and racial discrimination, and more broadly, an image of the exploited individual as other, culturally or naturally, in comparison to the ancient observer, and the role of gender in such notions of otherness.
SCIENTIFIC COORDINATION: NINO LURAGHI
SPEAKERS
JUNIOR FELLOWS
PARTICIPANTS
Marios Anastasiadis completed his PhD in Greek History at the University of Edinburgh in 2024 and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Haifa Center for Mediterranean History. His doctoral dissertation investigates in a sustained fashion slaves’ chances for agency and social mobility in various slave systems of the archaic and classical Greek world. He has additional interests in occupational (micro)history, epigraphy and, ancient medicine, with a forthcoming article in Historia on “Slave Medical Treatment in Classical Greece Before and After the Slave Market”. For the THP Summer School, Marios will be presenting aspects of his research on the role of ancient doctors in the slave trade.
Cecily Bateman is a PhD student in Classics at the University of Cambridge, writing her dissertation on the use of Classics by the post-war far-right. When not examining the worst of humanity, she is interested in disability history. She is currently formulating a postdoctoral project on Roman disability, particularly the intersection of disability and slavery.
Roberta Dainotto is a philologist specialising in Greek oratory, with research interests in forensic narratives and the negotiation of individuality in dicastic speeches. She studied at the University of Catania for her BA and MA and then moved to the University of Crete where she obtained her PhD in Classics. During her studies, she was awarded several prises and fellowships which allowed her to broaden the scope of her research by spending study periods abroad at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Reading, the Centre for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University, and the Hardt Foundation. Since 2022, she has been working on the LacrimaLit project at the Institute of Mediterranean Studies in Greece. She is currently working on her first monograph, based on her PhD thesis.
Mathilde Defosse is a first-year doctoral candidate at University Lyon 3 in France, working on “The Mobilities of Subaltern Groups in Aegean Greece from the 4th to the 3rd Century BCE” under the supervision of Madalina Dana and Paulin Ismard. Previously, she has also worked on the theme of slavery through two dissertations directed by Paulin Ismard and completed at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Gaia De Luca holds a joint PhD in History from the University of Naples l’Orientale and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, with a thesis on mixed marriages in the eastern part of the Greek world. She is a post-doc researcher at InCIAM – Institute for creativity and innovation of Aix-Marseille, with a project on the intertextuality between ancient mythology and contemporary feminist literature in France and Italy. She is currently an associate member of the research team Anhima, Anthropology and History of the Ancient Worlds, in Paris. Her research focuses on the social history of the ancient world and the role of family structures in the articulation of political institutions. In her studies, she developed an interest in the reception of classical antiquity and the transmission of classical representations in contemporary culture, particularly in theatrical rewritings.
Giacinto Falco has obtained a double MA in Classics at the University of Pisa and at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where he also completed his PhD in Greek History in 2020. He currently holds a position as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Milan. His main research interests are Attic oratory, Greek epigraphy, ancient Greek law, ancient economy. His most important publications are a book on Demosthenes 49 (Against Timotheus), various articles on Athenian bankers, an article on the Second Athenian League and an essay on citizenship in Athenian drama, recently accepted for publication.
Paula Gaither is PhD candidate in the Classics department and Stanford Archaeology Center. She specializes in Roman archaeology with a PhD minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her research examines representations of Aethiopians in ancient Roman art collections through the lens of the modern museum. In addition to her art historical work, Paula excavates as a trench supervisor at the Tharros Archaeological Research Project at Tharros, Sardinia where the project seeks to understand how cities develop under the influence of the Roman Empire. Paula received her BA in Classics from Columbia University and her MPhil in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford as a Euretta J. Kellett Fellow. Before beginning her PhD, she worked as the Graduate Intern in the Antiquities department at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. Originally from Los Angeles, Paula spends significant time between California and the UK. In her free time, she enjoys spending time in nature and dancing.
Elisa Le Bail is a third year PhD candidate at the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University under the supervision of Violaine Sebillotte-Cuchet, and Sophia Aneziri of the University of Athens. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on women’s agency in the ancient societies of the Northern regions of Greece, mainly in Epirus and Macedonia. This work combines her interests in gender studies, social history and greek epigraphy. She is also a participant of the Eurykleia database project to gather data about ancient women whose names appear in Greek and Latin documentation.
Rosanna Muratore graduated from the University of Genoa in archaeological literature with a thesis in archaeology. She subsequently obtained a degree in history with a thesis in archeology of the Roman provinces on the mosaics of Cyprus (she had a scholarship for this study on the island of Cyprus). She has a specialization in Classical Archeology obtained at the University of Genoa. She is currently doing her PhD in Cultural Heritage: memories, cultures, transitions at UNIMOL. Her research is aimed in particular at the investigation of the ancient and the recovery of motifs from the ancient over the different centuries.
Sofia Piacentin holds a PhD in Ancient history from King’s College London 2017. Her research interests focus on Roman social and economic history, including the definition of private property and the role of financial penalties from the Republican age up to the Principate (Piacentin, S. Financial penalties in the Roman Republic: a study of confiscations of individual property, public sales, and fines (509-58 BC), Leiden 2022). In 2018, she joined the ERC PATRIMONIVM project to survey and investigate imperial properties in Gaul, Germany, and Britain. She works at the University of Verona with a project on domestic violence in the Roman world, funded by the Rita Levi Montalcini program 2022.
Joel Pollatschek is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford focusing on the ideological underpinnings of ancient Greek slavery: How can a people that ostensibly hold freedom as the highest good enslave millions? This project is based on his M.Phil. thesis work on social dimensions of the conceptions of the value of slaves in ancient Greece and Rome and his BA thesis on the role of paternalism narratives in U.S. slavery. He is currently the Euthenia Fellow at the Bonn Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies.
After graduating from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice with a thesis in Roman History and Latin Epigraphy, Davide Trivellato continued his education at the University of Verona and Trento (Master’s Degree Course in Historical Sciences), with a thesis on the Roman provinces of Rhaetia and Noricum. In 2019, he took part in the Erasmus+ Traineeship programme with a six-month internship experience within the editorial staff of the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, at the Universität zu Köln (DE). Between 2019 and 2023, he attended the XXXV cycle of the Doctoral Course in ‘Cultures of Europe. Environment, Spaces, Histories, Arts, Ideas’ at the University of Trento, carrying out under the supervision of Elvira Migliario the thesis I liberti imperiali nella vita dei municipia italiani: presenze e assenze. The research, focusing on the presence and participation of imperial freedmen within the civic communities of the peninsula on the basis of epigraphic documentation, was discussed in October 2023. In 2022, he was in charge of the Epigraphy Laboratory within the project “AnticheAlpi: le Alpi centro-orientali nell’antichità e oggi” (Research Group “Romanizzazione delle Alpi”), organised by the Liceo Classico Giovanni Prati of Trento, and the following year he was in charge of the Didactic Support for the course Storia Romana I LM organized by the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento. Since March 2024 he has been collaborating as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC project “SLaVEgents. Enslaved persons in the making of societies and cultures in Western Eurasia and North Africa, 1000 BCE – 300 CE,” under the direction of Kostas Vlassopoulos, at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Rethymno (GR).
Palazzo d’Azeglio
Via Principe Amedeo 34 – Torino
Palazzo d’Azeglio is a historic building located in the center of Turin, it has been the headquarters of the Turin Humanities Programme – THP – of Fondazione 1563 since 2021. Its history began in 1679, when it was built as part of the second expansion of the city. It was the residence of local noble families, including the Taparelli d’Azeglio, hence the name. Since 1970 it has housed the Luigi Einaudi Foundation, a national point of reference for the social sciences. The interiors and the decorations of the building feature a variety of architectural and decorative styles, which are the result of several refurbishments due to the various owners who have alternated over the course of more than three centuries.
