Guest Speaker Professor Sinclair Bell (Northern Illinois University) will give a talk at OSU on Monday, November 9, 2026, on the topic of Aethiopians in Roman Sculpture and the Problem of Ethnic Portraiture.
This talk reunites a corpus of material that has never been studied comprehensively together: marble heads identified as portraits of Aethiopians (Black Africans) who lived in the Roman Empire. By collectively studying works within this medium together and by foregrounding core issues (such as scale, materiality, archaeological context) besides iconography alone, this lecture attends to larger issues of how ancient “portraits” can—and cannot—inform us about the representation of ethnicity and social rank in the Roman Empire.
This event is open to the public.
