Join us for the Gender & History Annual Lecture!

This year the lecture will be given by Amy Russell, Brown University.

'The Constitution of the Community: Gender, Belonging, and the Populus Romanus'

From myth to contract theory to the Third Reich, understandings of the notion of political community have often been expressed by calling back to its origins. Historians of the distant past are well qualified to talk about origin myths: the populus Romanus is the blueprint for many later notions of the sovereign People. But how does a group of individuals coalesce into a community, and how is that process gendered? I will explore the relationship between gender and the populus in Republican Rome, before mobilizing feminist approaches to explore how the legal and symbolic moves that define We the People have historically encoded violence against women; nevertheless, the past also offers ideas for alternative ways to think about what it means to belong to a political community.