Was There Color Bias in the Ancient Mediterranean World? with Dr. Rebecca Kennedy

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Was There Color Bias in the Ancient Mediterranean World? with Dr. Rebecca Kennedy

Thursday, May 27, 2021 6:00 pm EDT to 7:30 pm EDT

Live-steamed event

Join Denison Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy as she discusses the concept of race in the ancient Greek and Roman societies.

While modern societies structure their categories of race around skin color, such identities would have seemed strange to ancient Greeks and Romans, who had their own ways of understanding race and who lived in diverse ancient societies very different from our own.

Join Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy as she presents a lecture as part of a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida. The exhibition features the famed 1930s excavation of the ancient city of Antioch through rare documents, artifacts, and the exquisite mosaics that were discovered during the archaeological dig.

At this event, she will discuss the different ways the ancient Greeks and Romans depicted human diversity and foreignness in their texts and art, while exploring how modern conceptions of Greco-Roman antiquity are presented as foundational to contemporary white, Western identities.

Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Ph.D., teaches Classical Studies at Denison University. She has wrote numerous articles on tragedy, Greek history, ancient immigration and modern racialized receptions of antiquity, as well as two monographs, Athena’s Justice (2009) and Immigrant Women in Athens (2014). She is currently completing a short book for general audiences on race and ethnicity in the ancient world and its receptions, in addition to a short historiography on how the ancient Greeks and Romans were racialized as “white” in U.S. popular and academic contexts in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries. Prof. Kennedy has been featured in podcast and news articles for The New Yorker and the New York Times.

This event is open to all members of the Denison community. Tickets are $20. Registrants will receive a Zoom link prior to the event. For more information, view the museum’s website.