James Burns

(Fragment of a Late Roman slave sale contract (p.mich.inv.4907), University of Michigan) By James R. Burns, with thanks to Erin Thomas Dailey, Sheida Heydarishovir, Sofia...

By James R. Burns The DoSSE project team is working on a sourcebook for late antique slavery, featuring Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Persian...

(Relief showing Roman comic theatre masks. © The Trustees of the British Museum.) By James R. Burns The DoSSE project team is working on a...

By James R. Burns This blog post contains some brief thoughts on how late antique literary sources show female slave owners exploiting the bodies of...

Update (21/5/2025): We have filled our spare paper slot – Broderick Haldane-Unwin (University of Oxford) will be presenting on ‘Captivity and Credit: Gregory the Great...

By James R. Burns The DoSSE project team is working on a sourcebook for late antique slavery, featuring Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, and Persian...

By James R. Burns (Limoges, France, the home of Pelagia.) ‘Since the pressures of the world weighed heavily on a woman, not least on a...

By James R. Burns Last week, I went to the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum. It situated slavery in wide-ranging Eurasian commercial networks,...

(James C. Scott, 1936–2024. Photo credit: Yale.) By James R. Burns Even if one accepts that the serf, the slave, and the untouchable will have...

By James R. Burns At this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies at West Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Sheida, Seth, and I gave our papers...