Evan Jewell
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, History, Faculty Member
- Cultural Theory, Classics, Ancient History, Roman History, Performance Studies, Historiography, and 44 moreMemory Studies, Latin Literature, Roman Historiography, Cicero, Republican Rome, Conceptual History, Fragmentary Roman Orators, Cultural Memory, Structuralism/Post-Structuralism, Performativity, Classical Reception Studies, Epigraphy, Ptolemaic History, Roman and Greek Sexuality, Latin Epigraphy, Research Methodology, Higher Education, Learning and Teaching, Narratology, Academic Development, History of Slavery, Slavery, Higher Education Studies, Roman social history, Ptolemaic Egyptian History, Petronius, Ancient Greek Novel, Pompeii (Archaeology), Gymnasium, Delphic Oracle and Divination, Roman Villae, Roman Archaeology, Late Roman Republic, Varro Reatinus, Roman Republic, Archaeology and Art History, Ancient Greek and Roman Art, Roman Law, Social History, Gender History, Material Culture Studies, Roman Epigraphy, Roman Slavery, and Gender and sexuality in the ancient worldedit
- I am Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University - Camden. For the 2022-23 academic year, I was the Andrew W... moreI am Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University - Camden. For the 2022-23 academic year, I was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome and in the summer of 2023, a Getty Research Institute Library Grant recipient.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, I taught at Georgetown University (2019-20) and also spent a year long stint in Rome (2018-19) as Mellon International Travel Fellow affiliated with Sapienza Università di Roma. I received my Ph.D. from the interdepartmental Classical Studies graduate program at Columbia University in 2019. My work examines the history of Roman age and ageing and, in particular, the intersection of discourses about youth with the changing power relations at Rome from the birth of Plautus to the death of Nero. I am currently at work on my first monograph, which focuses on the period from 149 BCE to 68 CE, tentatively entitled, "Youth and Power: Acting Your Age in the Roman Empire (149 BCE - 68 CE)."
A second project, currently in its early stages, looks at non-elite and sub-elite spatial identities and modes of spatial perception in Roman urban contexts, as represented in both documentary (primarily graffiti and inscriptions) and literary texts, as well as archaeological contexts and visual media.
I also have strong interests in: the ancient and contemporary history of displacement, migration, and refuge--among various other types of mobility;
Roman art history and archaeology; Latin epigraphy; Roman urbanism and space; ancient gender and sexuality; Roman villa culture; Roman oratory and politics in the Republican period; Roman colonization; Roman slavery, enslaved persons and freedpersons; comparative histories of slavery; Greek, Roman and modern historiography; memory studies; digital history.
For more information, please visit my institutional or personal website:
https://sites.rutgers.edu/evan-jewell/
http://www.evanjewell.netedit
Research Interests:
In an oft-ignored passage of Cicero’s Lucullus (13-14), the representative of Stoicism, Lucullus, draws upon an analogy from oratorical practice, claiming that certain seditiosi cives are accustomed to cite as populares a series of famous... more
In an oft-ignored passage of Cicero’s Lucullus (13-14), the representative of Stoicism, Lucullus, draws upon an analogy from oratorical practice, claiming that certain seditiosi cives are accustomed to cite as populares a series of famous men stretching back to the early Republic. Lucullus takes issue with the popularis credentials of nearly all of those in the catalogue. Besides Lucullus’ critique, however, the catalogue’s connection to the oratorical practice of L. Appuleius Saturninus (Luc. 75) and the consular status of all those named in the list, provoke new questions about oratorical strategy and ideological self-presentation in the late Republic, particularly in the contio. Taking the Lucullus as my starting point, this paper re-examines what might be called the exemplary tradition of populares; that is, the catalogues of (alleged) deceased populares which an orator, most often in the contio, would invoke to claim that he was following in their footsteps and so establish his popular credentials among the contional audience. While scholars have focused on the “martyrological” aspects of these exempla, the Lucullus points to the heterogeneity of contional self-presentation (cf. Russell, 2013), as well as the attendant ideological ambiguity of exempla drawn from memoria which made these different modes of self- presentation possible. Read together with evidence from fragmentary orators, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Cicero himself, I suggest that the memoria of populares was a locus of ideological contest and a crucial element in differentiating oneself in late Republican oratory, not only in the contio, but also in the courtroom with its corona. Indeed, in the final section of this paper, a re-reading of Cicero’s contional oratory in 63 BCE through the lens of his exempla (and lack thereof) demonstrates the ideological limits of Cicero’s contional self-presentation in contradistinction to others who evidently went further, suggesting that Morstein-Marx’s (2004) notion of “ideological monotony” in the contio requires some recalibration.
References:
Russell, A. (2013), “Speech, competition and collaboration: tribunician politics and the development of popular ideology.” in Steel, C. E. W. & van der Blom, H. (eds), Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 101-115.
Morstein-Marx, R. (2004), Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge.
[For offprints, please contact me]
References:
Russell, A. (2013), “Speech, competition and collaboration: tribunician politics and the development of popular ideology.” in Steel, C. E. W. & van der Blom, H. (eds), Community and Communication: Oratory and Politics in Republican Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 101-115.
Morstein-Marx, R. (2004), Mass Oratory and Political Power in the Late Roman Republic. Cambridge.
[For offprints, please contact me]
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Although Paul Zanker’s (1987) seminal work on Augustus has led to burgeoning scholarship on the imperial image which combines a variety of media—literary, numismatic, sculptural, epigraphic and more—to arrive at a more holistic... more
Although Paul Zanker’s (1987) seminal work on Augustus has led to burgeoning
scholarship on the imperial image which combines a variety of media—literary, numismatic, sculptural, epigraphic and more—to arrive at a more holistic understanding of imperial messaging, this multimedia approach has not yet been applied in depth to the study of age(ing) in Roman imperial history, nor to that of the emperor Nero more specifically. Therefore this paper adopts a multimedia approach to the imperial image and its representation of age(ing) by examining as a case study a particular type in Nero’s portrait series which appears to deliberately signal his physical maturity. This type (Hiesinger 1975: coiffure type II, coin type IV), featuring an incipient beard, is dated to the period 59-64 CE on the basis of numismatic evidence. Tellingly, its inception coincides with Nero’s Iuvenalia (or ludi Iuvenales), celebrated in 59 CE to mark his depositio barbae (Tac. Ann. 14.15; Suet. Nero 11.1; Dio 62.19). This paper brings Nero’s portrait type into dialogue with these later literary sources and their stylization of the Iuvenalia as an age-based spectacle, while also demonstrating that Nero's celebration of his ritual shave represents an intensification of the advertisement of this rite by other male members of the imperial family, beginning with Octavian in 39 BCE. I suggest that Nero’s budding beard represents a carefully orchestrated instance of imperial self-fashioning that sought to mitigate the issue of Nero’s youthfulness (Sen. Clem. 1.1) by deploying a physical and ritual sign of his maturing aetas.
scholarship on the imperial image which combines a variety of media—literary, numismatic, sculptural, epigraphic and more—to arrive at a more holistic understanding of imperial messaging, this multimedia approach has not yet been applied in depth to the study of age(ing) in Roman imperial history, nor to that of the emperor Nero more specifically. Therefore this paper adopts a multimedia approach to the imperial image and its representation of age(ing) by examining as a case study a particular type in Nero’s portrait series which appears to deliberately signal his physical maturity. This type (Hiesinger 1975: coiffure type II, coin type IV), featuring an incipient beard, is dated to the period 59-64 CE on the basis of numismatic evidence. Tellingly, its inception coincides with Nero’s Iuvenalia (or ludi Iuvenales), celebrated in 59 CE to mark his depositio barbae (Tac. Ann. 14.15; Suet. Nero 11.1; Dio 62.19). This paper brings Nero’s portrait type into dialogue with these later literary sources and their stylization of the Iuvenalia as an age-based spectacle, while also demonstrating that Nero's celebration of his ritual shave represents an intensification of the advertisement of this rite by other male members of the imperial family, beginning with Octavian in 39 BCE. I suggest that Nero’s budding beard represents a carefully orchestrated instance of imperial self-fashioning that sought to mitigate the issue of Nero’s youthfulness (Sen. Clem. 1.1) by deploying a physical and ritual sign of his maturing aetas.
Research Interests:
Metaphors move--and displace--people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman... more
Metaphors move--and displace--people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of 'domestic displacement'-the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory-elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of 'draining' expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar's colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city-Rome-of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus' asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus' asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists' volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary 'mass migrations'. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of 'popular' politics in the Republican period.
Research Interests: Roman History, Metaphor, Cicero, Migration Studies, Asylum seekers, and 11 moreClassical Reception Studies, Internal Displacement, Australian colonial history, Greek and Roman Colonization, Julius Caesar, Displacement, Roman colonization, Australian colonial and convict history, migration in the Roman world, Roman Colonies, and Romulus
The strategic mobilisation of family ancestry either to launch an attack upon an opponent, or to shore up one’s own case for credibility is a well-known technique observable in Republican oratory, especially in forensic contexts. Yet... more
The strategic mobilisation of family ancestry either to launch an attack upon an
opponent, or to shore up one’s own case for credibility is a well-known technique
observable in Republican oratory, especially in forensic contexts. Yet very little
attention has been accorded to the intersection of familial and ideological exempla in
Republican oratory. What were the specific political contexts which allowed an orator
to invoke a family exemplum—their own or their opponent’s—in an ideological
contest, beyond the domain of character building or invective? This chapter unpacks
this question through an examination of some oratorical fragments that feature diverse
ideological flashpoints (a popularis tribunate, the Social War, and tyrannicide) in
which orators within and outside of families capitalised upon their ideological
histories. Three families—the Lutatii Catuli, the Livii Drusi and the Junii Bruti—and
their exempla are adduced as case studies, demonstrating that family exempla could
become ideological exempla too. At a methodological level, this chapter’s use of
fragmentary oratory grapples both with the Ciceronian bias inherent to the study of
Late Republican oratory and with the interpretation of oratorical fragments in multiple
historical contexts, such as those found in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium.
opponent, or to shore up one’s own case for credibility is a well-known technique
observable in Republican oratory, especially in forensic contexts. Yet very little
attention has been accorded to the intersection of familial and ideological exempla in
Republican oratory. What were the specific political contexts which allowed an orator
to invoke a family exemplum—their own or their opponent’s—in an ideological
contest, beyond the domain of character building or invective? This chapter unpacks
this question through an examination of some oratorical fragments that feature diverse
ideological flashpoints (a popularis tribunate, the Social War, and tyrannicide) in
which orators within and outside of families capitalised upon their ideological
histories. Three families—the Lutatii Catuli, the Livii Drusi and the Junii Bruti—and
their exempla are adduced as case studies, demonstrating that family exempla could
become ideological exempla too. At a methodological level, this chapter’s use of
fragmentary oratory grapples both with the Ciceronian bias inherent to the study of
Late Republican oratory and with the interpretation of oratorical fragments in multiple
historical contexts, such as those found in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Dissertation Abstract. I am currently converting the text into a monograph covering the period from 149 BCE - 68 CE, as well as multiple articles.
Research Interests:
Research into undergraduate research and inquiry in Australian universities was conducted during an Australian Learning and Teaching Council National Teaching Fellowship. In this paper we share experiences of this project as a student and... more
Research into undergraduate research and inquiry in Australian universities was conducted during an Australian Learning and Teaching Council National Teaching Fellowship. In this paper we share experiences of this project as a student and an academic, reflecting on key challenges, including undergraduate research as an immersion experience for students; negotiating changing staff–student relationships; funding implications; and institutional challenges. We argue that academic developers have a key role in informing institutional policy concerning the integration of research and inquiry and interpreting the spirit of this for the academic community, bridging the divide between research staff and teaching staff, making links between research and teaching committees, changing academics’ attitudes about the value and implications of undergraduate research, working with research staff on teaching and learning issues, and making available to staff resources to facilitate undergraduate research implementation.