January 19, 2026 by
George Boys-Stones
Congratulation to Prof. Seth Bernard, who has secured a SSHRC Connection Grant to support a major conference on slavery in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean worlds, to be held at the University of Toronto in April 2026!
Slavery is a major theme of historical studies, an awful but near ubiquitous institution, which contributed to our modern world but has been present across most of human history. Within substantial scholarly interest on the topic of slavery in ancient and medieval societies, we find that *slaving* presents a nearly unexplored theme-- slaving intends to refer to the various processes by which people were taken and transformed into commodities, and forcibly moved to places of enslavement (Miller 2012). By contrast to slavery in action, the wider concept of slaving has seen far less attention in scholarship on premodern history, and this gap has resulted in a narrow understanding of slavery’s societal impacts. By focusing on slaving, this conference hopes to expand knowledge of past slavery to encompass not only slave-owning societies themselves, but the communities from which slaves were taken, the agents who enslaved and moved them, and the routes and modes of their enslavement.In addressing this gap, moreover, this conference also promotes the possibilities of new, interdisciplinary methodologies for studying slavery. The event brings together an international group of experts from diverse backgrounds and career stages including historians, epigraphers, archaeologists, and genetic scientists. The event recognizes the extraordinary relevance to the study of slaving of a particular moment of discovery in terms of new archaeological evidence, new historical tools, and especially new genetic science. To our knowledge, the event will be the first in Canada to bring genetic scientists and historical researchers together to think about ancient and medieval Mediterranean slavery. There is urgency to this conversation, as a flood of new research considers the genetic makeup of past populations but does not yet to account for slaving as a factor in creating genetic diversity and contributing to premodern human mobility. This disconnect greatly contrasts, for example, the study of modern Transatlantic slavery, where genetic science leads to important breakthroughs in understanding the source and impacts of slave-trading. By integrating new approaches to ancient and medieval slaving, we will create new knowledge on the topic, while our unique assemblage of scholars will form a new network and pave the way for future collaborative research on the topic, combining multiple methodologies.