Format: This event will be held via Zoom webinar. Register here: https://myumi.ch/V75p9

Description: Pioneering advances in material culture studies over the past half-century and more sustained engagements with (some branches of) postcolonial theory have emboldened historians of the ancient Mediterranean to grant more and more space in their scholarship to the resistance strategies and survival tactics of imperially minoritized groups. At the root of this intensifying attachment to narratives of resistance is the belief that histories of the subaltern can be written; all we need to do is “read against the grain” of the literary sources, or avail ourselves of new frameworks for interpreting non-literary material evidence, in order to recover these histories. Organizing itself around the concept of epistemicide, my paper will reevaluate this historiographical tendency and propose some alternatives.

Biography: Dan-el Padilla Peralta is associate professor of classics at Princeton University. He is the author of Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton University Press, 2020) and Undocumented: A Dominican Boy's Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin Press, 2015); he is coeditor of Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge University Press 2017).

This event presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible in part by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.