While in residence at the Center, I conducted the research for and writing of my book manuscript. That monograph investigates how Roman artists represented the peoples whom they referred to as Aethiopians (or sometimes Nubians) through visual depictions and material culture. It further explores issues related to the social functions, patronage, and viewership of these works from the late Roman Republic to the high Roman Empire (c. 100 BCE–200 CE).

The works under discussion here have been recovered from across the full extent of the Roman Empire’s diverse territories, with concentrations found in Italy, northwest Europe, and North Africa. As I argue in my book, images of Aethiopians functioned not merely as “transparent” historical documents, banal household implements, or aesthetically pleasing “works of art,” as they have been variously interpreted in the past, but also as material manifestations of imperial systems of knowledge (such as geography) and elite discourses and institutions (such as those addressing enslavement). By collectively studying works within their respective media and by foregrounding issues besides iconography alone, this book attends to larger issues of context and materiality, especially how ancient artworks in color can—and cannot—inform us about the representation of ethnicity and social rank in the Roman Empire. In this way, my book—which is organized into seven chapters—moves beyond entrenched debates and locates these images within a rich and sometimes conflicting web of associations whose full complexity has yet to be mapped.

The book’s introduction has three aims: to review the historiography of the study of Aethiopians in Roman society, especially the nature of the evidence previously discussed (literary, historical, art-historical); to discuss recent studies of race and ethnicity, both in classical studies as well as the humanities and social sciences more generally; and to detail the scope and goals of my project.

Chapter 1, “Aethiopians in the Roman Empire: An Overview,” canvasses nonvisual sources—from Latin literature, inscriptions, and graffiti to isotopic and skeletal evidence—to convey a broad-based and up-to-date picture of the varied forms of evidence for Aethiopians within Roman society. This chapter builds upon the formative historical work done by Frank M. Snowden Jr. and Lloyd A. Thompson by incorporating the results of more recent studies as well as new interpretations of canonical literary works.

Chapter 2, “The Roman Household,” examines domestic artifacts depicting Aethiopians. Most artifacts that depict Aethiopians are genre scenes (such as attendants at the baths or banquets) that were produced for domestic use (such as lamps and perfume vessels). This chapter considers the patterns and formal qualities of these works (scale, materiality, affordance), discusses their original display and find contexts, and weighs their iconographic relationships with representations of other non-Romans (“barbarians”).

Chapter 3, “Figures of Empire: Aethiopian Boys in Bronze,” presents the first of three case studies. This chapter collects for the first time all known bronze statuettes depicting nude Aethiopian youths. While a few of these works are well-known, the neutral language traditionally employed in their descriptions betrays the harsh social reality of ethnic hierarchies and human enslavement.

Chapter 4, “Faces of Empire: Marble Heads and the Problem of ‘Ethnic’ Portraiture,” reunites material that has never been studied comprehensively as a corpus: marble heads identified as portraits of Aethiopian persons who lived in the Roman Empire. The chapter seeks to identify what iconographical characteristics these works share (as, for example, physiognomic, painted) that would allow us to securely identify their ethnicity; to interrogate their categorization as “portraits” versus generic heads; and to investigate the cultural and social significance of their materiality—specifically, the selection of dark-colored marbles versus white marble.

Chapter 5, “Black Power: Aethiopians as Religious Dedications and Grave Goods,” focuses on the potential significance of objects that depict Aethopians in concert with religious imagery and/or contexts. The use of images of Aethiopians on grave goods in the northwest provinces, for instance, suggests that they performed a unique kind of work, one which other “barbarians” (for example, Parthians) did not.

The book’s conclusion synthesizes the findings of the previous chapters about the different contexts, functions, and meanings of images of Aethiopians. The discussion also weighs in on how this evidence fits into the long-standing debate over the Romans’ alleged “proto-racism.” Finally, this concluding chapter will sketch out directions for future research, such as strategies for the curation of these artifacts within museum settings.

Northern Illinois University
Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellow, spring 2026

In fall 2026, Sinclair W. Bell will return to teaching at Northern Illinois University, where he will begin his four-year appointment as the Presidential Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professor.