Please join the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies as we celebrate the recent publication of SCJS faculty member and history professor Mark Letteney’s new book: Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration, co-authored by Matthew D. C. Larsen.

Letteney will be joined by Stroum Center faculty and history professor Joel Walker and classics professor Sarah Levin-Richardson to discuss the book, unpack what role prisons played in ancient societies and how this history continues today, and answer questions. Light refreshments will be provided before the talk and the book will be available for purchase.

Registration required: register here.

Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration examines spaces, practices, and ideologies of incarceration in the ancient Mediterranean basin from 300 BCE to 600 CE. Analyzing a wide range of sources—including legal texts, archaeological findings, documentary evidence, and visual materials—Matthew D. C. Larsen and Mark Letteney argue that prisons were integral to the social, political, and economic fabric of ancient societies. Ancient Mediterranean Incarceration traces a long history of carceral practices, considering ways in which the institution of prison has been fundamentally intertwined with issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and imperialism. By foregrounding the voices and experiences of the imprisoned, Larsen and Letteney demonstrate the extraordinary durability of carceral structures across time and call for a new historical consciousness around contemporary practices of incarceration.

What’s at stake in this study is our picture of history itself, and of how incommensurable one period truly is with another. The odd effect of Larsen and Letteney’s study is to make the continuities more vivid to us than the breaks. Suffering and cruelty, after all, are constants—remarkably consistent in their distribution throughout time.

Even against that darker kind of universalism, however, some light manages to break through. What lingers with us after reading this book is not so much the sense of an abstract argument won or lost as a helpless awareness of the endless, needless suffering of humanity. The idea of a common humanity, in this very stakesy view, is not an invention that separates us from the ancients but an inheritance that connects us to them. It’s what makes the dialogue of the dead a conversation among the living.  – Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Mark Letteney, Department of History at the University of Washington, is an ancient historian and archaeologist working in the history of incarceration, book history, and the archaeology of military occupation. He holds the Carol Thomas Endowed Professorship in Ancient History, and is also a faculty member of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and the Comparative Religion Program.

This event is being co-sponsored by UW’s Department of History.