Sylvia “Duffy” Engle Graduate Fellow
About
“The Hermeneutics of Pain in the Roman Empire (1st–3rd c. C.E.): Pain and Identity Formation”
"The Hermeneutics of Pain in the Roman Empire (1st–3rd c. C.E.): Pain and Identity Formation," is a dissertation that interrogates the interpretations and meanings of physical pains in various contexts: from the social periphery of provincial athletic performers and Christian martyrs to the elite center of metropolitan intellectuals and medical professionals. Through an assemblage of a diverse archive of pre-modern textual, material, and artistic evidence, this project intervenes in Greco-Roman scholarship by providing the first far-reaching and nuanced social history on the interpretation, or hermeneutics, of pain in connection with the creation of identity in the Roman empire. Drawing from disability studies, anthropology, and reception theory, I argue that pains and their meanings offer a window into the contextual production of identity, and so, I subvert ahistorical, universalistic accounts of pain.
Alanna Heatherly is a PhD candidate in Classical Studies.
