Language and Labour in the Ancient World

This two-day conference seeks to bring together scholars working on the language(s) of the ancient labour force. Our focus spans free and unfree labour, from the elite to the enslaved, across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. We will explore workers as speakers, language learners and producers of texts in a variety of times and spaces, from the earliest surviving sources to Late Antiquity.

All workers in the ancient world, whether free or unfree, used language. However, their language often belongs to contexts that are only partially visible to us: the factory, the shop, the trade route, the home, the battlefield, the slave market. This conference aims to better understand workers as speakers and writers, in order to shed light on understudied aspects of both language and labour. We also hope to explore aspects of the language used to describe and label ancient workers in various kinds of texts.

Many aspects of ancient labour have been enjoying unprecedented levels of study in recent years, and we intend to bring scholars exploring these themes together around the focal point of language.  We will use language as a window onto wider historical themes including agency, visibility, control, oppression, solidarity, self-expression and identities of groups of workers.

Topics for individual papers could include: the language used by and about enslaved people in the ancient world; bilingualism and multilingualism in work contexts; language learning as labour; gender, language and work; metaphors of work, freedom and leisure; labour and silence, whether enforced or adopted. Approaches from linguistics, history, literature, and material culture are all welcome at this interdisciplinary event, and we warmly encourage scholars from all career stages.

 

Prof. Claire Holleran (University of Exeter)

Prof. Myles Lavan (University of St Andrews)

Prof. Sarah Levin Richardson (University of Washington)

Prof. Kostas Vlassopoulos (University of Crete)

 

 

Dr Katherine McDonald (Durham University)

Dr Caroline Barron (Durham University)

Dr Olivia Elder (University of Oxford)

 

This conference is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. We aim to provide partial financial support to early career colleagues, and to any others who would need financial support to attend, but these details are yet to be confirmed.