Diversitas: The Roman Roots of Racial Capitalism

In a multi-continental empire built on conquest, exploitation, and slavery, Roman leaders and thinkers understood the pragmatic benefits of providing opportunity to constituent peoples regardless of race. Many Romans also learned to appreciate ethnic variety within local contexts, where dining-rooms, gardens, and circuses became "heterotopias" for exploiting, manipulating, and commodifying difference. This talk explores these Roman practices in hopes of encouraging critical reexamination of why and how our modern institutions pursue the admirable goal of "diversity." 

Dr Nandini B. Pandey is an associate professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin‒Madison. Her first book, The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome (Cambridge 2018), won this year's CAMWS First Book Prize. Her second book project on Roman diversity, funded by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Academy in Berlin, will come out with Princeton University Press in 2022.

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