Sarah E. Bond is an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. She blogs on antiquity and digital humanities, and is the author of Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire (Yale University Press, February 2025).
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In his new book, Roland Betancourt examines how stories of gender, race, and sexuality from the Byzantine world of the Eastern Mediterranean provide insight into the intersectionality that existed in the medieval world.
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When machine learning and the use of computers are emphasized in artistic research, in reconstructions, or in beauty contests, viewers often take the results to be scientific, objective, and unbiased. But they are not.
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Emerging technologies used for chemical and isotopic analysis combined with new archaeological discoveries are uncovering the sources, craftsmanship, and long-distance trade of the delicate commodity of "Alexandrian glass."
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The story behind the rise and decline of the popularity of the black magus during the Renaissance has been largely forgotten, but at one time, the tale was used to explain the perceived need for conversion to Christianity, the three ages of man, as well as emerging theories of race.
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A new book by classicist and historian Andrew M. Riggsby investigates the types of information technologies drawn, painted, and inscribed on the surfaces of the ancient Roman world.
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This fear of being replaced can be traced to the French far right, but racist fears regarding supposed White genocide, and invasion by varied ethnic groups, go back centuries.
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Animals were an important part of the everyday lives of ancient and medieval people, whether they were real or imagined, and their literary use in the Middle Ages formed a moral language.
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It is disturbing to see how gravely inaccurate 19th-century depictions of the destruction of Rome are used to illustrate news stories today, particularly those that draw parallels between Rome and the United States.
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Excavations conducted around the largest Christian cathedral built in the ancient Mediterranean have yielded new archaeological discoveries.
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In antiquity and in the Renaissance there was an inherent sensuality to being able to visually consume a sculpture from every angle.
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Modern constructions of beauty and biological race were heavily influenced by the study, replication, and measurement of classical sculpture in eighteenth century Europe.
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Thousands of fingerprints and footprints survive from the ancient world, while the modern science of fingerprints to identify criminals has relatively recent and racist origins.