Katharine Huemoeller
Area
Focus
About
After receiving my undergraduate degree from Middlebury College in Vermont, I worked in the non-profit sector in Washington, DC for a few years on issues of gender equity. I then went to Princeton University where I earned my doctorate in Classics through the interdisciplinary Program in the Ancient World and completed a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Following a year as a Rome Prize fellow at the American Academy in Rome, I joined UBC’s Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern studies department in 2016.
Teaching
Research
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
I am currently writing a book that traces four individual women’s experiences of slavery in different parts of the Roman world from 200 BCE to 200 CE. Their stories reveal the role of the socio-legal principle of maternal descent (partus sequitur ventrum) in gendering both slavery and freedom. Future projects include a book on captivity in war in Republican period, a social history of property ownership, and an analysis of women’s experiences of slave revolts in Roman Italy. 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. I work primarily with literary and documentary textual evidence, including epigraphic and papyrological sources. The more material side of my research takes place in Sicily, where I am a member of the American Excavations at Morgantina Contrada Agnese Project. To learn more about my current work, listen to my guest appearance on the podcast Peopling the Past.
Publications
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).
Graduate Supervision
I would be happy to supervise graduate students in topics related to Roman history, Roman culture/society, Roman law, ancient gender and sexuality, and ancient slavery.