Research Interests

• Roman social history
• Slavery (ancient and comparative)
• Documentary texts
• Gender and sexuality
• Ancient law (in theory and in practice)
• Non-urban life in antiquity

Projects

One of ancient Rome’s most significant legacies is a legal framework for hereditary slavery through the maternal line: partus sequitur ventrem (the child follows the womb). For centuries, across the globe, this legal doctrine was invoked to justify control over enslaved women’s reproductive labor. My book, The Child Follows the Womb: Gender, Reproduction, and Roman Slavery (YUP 2026), is the first to examine matrilineal slavery in the Roman world. It follows five women subject to different forms of corporal control, from coerced reproduction to concubinage to forced marriage to reveal the diverse ways that slaveholders used the partus principle to their advantage.
My next project seeks to gender slaveholding by exploring Roman women’s investment in slavery and, by extension, empire. I have also published articles and book chapters on marriages between enslaved women and their former owners, slave revolts, and captives of war. A forthcoming article explores the testimony of an enslaved woman in one of Plutarch’s Lives and the challenge of recovering enslaved people’s voices. I am particularly interested in creative approaches to gaps in the historical record and am drawn to topics for which we have only the smallest and most difficult scraps of evidence to work with.
To learn more about my work, listen to my guest appearance on the podcast Peopling the Past.

Huemoeller, K. 2026. The Child Follows the Womb: Gender, Reproduction, and Roman Slavery. Yale University Press.

Huemoeller, K. Forthcoming. “Lost and (Not) Found: An Enslaved Woman’s Voice in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus.” Classical Philology.

Huemoeller, K. 2024. “Doubling Up: Patronal and Familial Designations on Epitaphs,” in Freed Persons in the Roman World, edited by R.MacLean, S. Bell, and D. Borbonus, 119–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huemoeller, K. 2023. “The Human Spoils of the Roman Republic,” in Spoils in the Roman Republic, edited by M. Helm and S. Roselaar, 341–54. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Huemoeller, K. 2021. “Captivity for All? Slave Status and Prisoners of War in the Roman Republic.” TAPA 151: 101-125.

Huemoeller, K. 2021. “Sexual Violence in Republican Slave Revolts” in D. Kamen and C.W. Marshall (eds.), Slavery and Sexuality in Antiquity (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press). 159-173.

Huemoeller, K. 2020. “Freedom in Marriage? Manumission matrimonii causa in the Roman world.” Journal of Roman Studies 110: 123-139. (Winner of the Barbara McManus Award for Best Article from the Women’s Classical Caucus).