John Rich Faculty Fellow
About
"Roman Kinship"
At the Institute for the Humanities, I will be working on a book tentatively entitled Roman Kinship, which approaches anew the field of Roman “family” studies. Roman Kinship unfolds in four chapters that take a critical approach to Roman perceptions of relatedness, mutuality, and belonging in conversation with feminist, queer, and diasporic frameworks of kin-making. These frameworks, I argue, can actually help us get closer to Roman ideas about kinship. In short, the project reframes the history of the elusive Roman “family” through a version of kinship that’s more elastic—where acts of breaking bread, sharing a tent, or laboring together might create kin, sometimes as a result of violence and coercion, as well as through small but persistent acts of care and honor that can reverberate through lives and afterlives.
Anna Bonnell Freidin is Associate Professor of History.
