2023-24 Graduate Student Research Fellow
About
Brittany Joyce is a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History and a graduate certificate student at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. She specializes in the later Roman empire, with research interests in religion, slavery, and race. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “‘To Buy a Slave and Save a Soul’: The Religious Participation of Enslaved People in Late Antique Households,” considers how enslaved people were incorporated into religious practices and discusses how this inclusion was used to grow religion and control enslaved people. Her dissertation connects the fields of early Christianity, Roman history, and Judaic Studies.
Brittany will continue work on her dissertation over the course of the fellowship. In particular, she will work on chapters about enslaved children and how they are brought into their communities through baptism and circumcision, and enslaved people dedicated to virginity and the contradictions in that status.
