Monday, March 4 2019, 4:30pm 101 LeConte A guest lecture by Anna Bonnell Freidin (University of Michigan), sponsored by the Departments of History and Classics and the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. Under the Roman Empire, family fertility was valorized in imperial ideology in unprecedented ways. In this context, how did Romans theorize and work to mitigate the risks of generation, gestation, and birth? Approaches to managing these risks were rooted in constructions of the female body’s hidden interior, drawing on analogies from the external, non-human environment. These strategies constitute a toolkit for understanding gain, loss, nurturance, and danger that operated at the level of the body, family, and state.
