CONF: Sex and Slavery

Seen on the Classicists list:

Sex and Slavery

An international conference co-organised by the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History (Leicester),
the Department of Classics (Nottingham) and the Institute for the Study Of Slavery (ISOS)

Nottingham, 13-14 September 2012

As part of the ongoing collaboration between Nottingham and Leicester, we are pleased to announce an
international conference on Sex and Slavery. Sexual activity involving individuals of unfree or slave status
is known throughout slave-owning societies. Sex is often a tool through which power relationships and
dominance can be asserted; however, sex can also be means through which power relations are blurred and
inverted.

We approach the topic from an interdisciplinary, global and diachronic perspective which reaches from
antiquity to the present. Ten speakers specialising on different areas and periods have been invited to give
papers on a range of aspects, while another ten scholars will provide responses to these papers. In order to
enhance and focus comparison, we have invited scholars specialising on modern slaveries to respond to papers
on ancient slaveries and vice versa.

The provisional programme is as follows:

Thursday, September 13th 2012

09.00-10.15 Registration

10.15-10.30 Introduction

10.30-11.30 Camillia Cowling (Edinburgh): ‘Carnal Acts’: sex and the significance of freedom for ex-slave
women in Havana and Rio de Janeiro, 1870s-1880s. Respondent: Kostas Vlassopoulos (Nottingham).

11.30-11.45 Coffee

11.45-12.45 Andrea Nicholson (Nottingham Trent): Exploring cultural identity in contemporary female slavery.
Respondent: David Lewis (Durham).

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.15-16.15 Constantina Katsari (Leicester): Slaves, sex and money in the Roman world and the antebellum
American South. Respondent: Yossef Rapoport (Queen Mary)

Susanne Seymour (Nottingham): Reproducing slavery: planters ʽbreedingʼ schemes and enslaved African women on
early 19th-century plantations in Grenada. Respondent: Niall McKeown (Birmingham).

16.15-16.45 Coffee

16.45-17.45 Walter Scheidel (Stanford): Sex, slavery, and the cultural evolution of normative monogamy.
Respondent: David Mattingly (Leicester).

17.45-18.15 General discussion

19.00 Dinner

Friday, September 14th 2012

10.45-11.45 Lynn Fotheringham (Nottingham): Offspring of slave and free in historical novels set in Greece
and Rome. Respondent: Melanie Ulz (Osnabruck).

11.45-12.00 Coffee

12.00-13.00 Judith Mossman (Nottingham): Becoming slaves: Hecuba and Andromache in Euripidesʼ Trojan Women.
Respondent: Jonathan Taylor (De Montfort).

13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-16.00 Esther Eidinow (Nottingham): Ancient Greek slavery and sexuality: strategies and risks.
Respondent: Gad Heuman (Warwick).

Jane-Marie Collins (Nottingham): ‘Declaro que sempre me conservei no estado de solteira e nunca tive filhos’:
symbolic celibacy, childlessness and the religiosity of freed women in nineteenth-century Brazil. Respondent:
Jennifer Baird (Birkbeck).

16.00-16.15 Coffee

16.15-17.15 Junia Ferreira Furtado (UFMG/Brazil): Women of color and slavery in colonial Brazil. Respondent:
Lin Foxhall (Leicester).

17.15-18.15 General discussion and future prospects

19.00 Dinner

Those willing to attend the conference can register online at
http://store.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?
compid=1&modid=2&prodid=81&deptid=9&catid=8

For any queries concerning registration, please contact Heather Sowter:
heather.sowter AT nottingham.ac.uk

For any queries concerning the conference, please contact Kostas
Vlassopoulos: konstantinos.vlassopoulos@ AT nottingham.ac.uk

The co-organisers
Constantina Katsari (Leicester)
Naoise Mac Sweeney (Leicester)
Kostas Vlassopoulos (Nottingham)