Talk by Invited Guest Speaker Prof. Anna Bonnell Freidin

 

Speaker: 

Anna Bonnell Freidin is an associate professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Birthing Romans: Childbearing and its Risks in Imperial Rome (Princeton, 2024). She’s now working on a new book project entitled, Empire of Bread: Food and Community in Ancient Rome, a social and cultural history of Roman foodways, especially how bread shaped Romans’ social lives, urban landscapes, and concepts of material and metaphysical transformation.

 

Talk Description: 

“Generation and/as Foodwork in Roman Culture”
From fetal nourishment to breastfeeding, Greeks and Romans viewed nutrition as absolutely central to human generation, profoundly shaping how they performed pre- and post-natal care. This talk takes this observation as a starting point to rethink the labor of human generation in Roman culture, particularly what I call “generative nurturance”—the range of activities that support fetal and infant nutrition (e.g., wet nursing). What happens if we approach “generative nurturance” as a form of “foodwork” in the Roman empire?  And more specifically, how did regimes of enslavement shape this “foodwork”?