2025-26 Faculty Fellow
About
Anna Bonnell Freidin's research and teaching focus on the history of gender, daily life, science and medicine, and food cultures in the Roman empire. Her first book, Birthing Romans: Childbearing and its Risks in Imperial Rome (2024), examines how pregnancy and childbirth were understood, experienced, and managed in ancient Rome during the first three centuries of the Common Era. Her second book, Empire of Bread: Food and Community in Ancient Rome (under advance contract with Princeton University Press), is a social and cultural history of Roman foodways, especially how bread shaped Romans’ daily lives and concepts of material and metaphysical transformation.
As an Eisenberg fellow, she looks forward to completing an article on wet nursing as foodwork in Roman culture and making headway on another project about experimental archeology and synaesthesia as ways to connect with ancient pasts.
