guest lecturing

I gave a guest lecture for my dad's Economics of Slavery class today, on slavery in Rome. This is pretty far out of my wheelhouse as classics go, but I gave the same lecture last year, so most of my work this year was rereading a couple articles I found especially helpful and reformatting my slides.^[1]

It must be said, this year's lecture seemed to go a lot better than last year's. My dad assured me that last year's students really enjoyed it (something the student evals did eventually bear out), but only like half the class showed up and the ones who did seemed mostly asleep. I mean, I've definitely been there, but it's not terribly encouraging.

Also, like the caricature of an academic that I am, I ran way over time last year, so much so that I couldn't get to the entire last section I'd written up on Roman manumission, which is one of the ways that slavery in Ancient Rome was especially unusual.^[2]

So, between the listlessness and the time crunch, this year I decided to adjust my approach. I basically did a bare-bones slideshow of the stuff I felt like I really had to get through, and then I did a bunch of bonus materials at the end. Those were a little more verbose than I tend to make my slides and I put recommended further reading at the foot of each, so that if they happen to be interested, they can read more on their own. This was (a) a way to console myself over not being able to say absolutely everything I wanted to and (b) a safety measure for the format experiment I was going to do, which was to delive the core slides and then just open the floor for questions.

I told the kids that if they asked questions, they could hear about what they were interested in, and if they didn't, they were just going to hear about what I was interested in. Luckily for all of us, they had a ton of questions, and the format worked really well. I was so pleased with their engagement, and so happy to be able to just...talk to them.

Anyway, if anyone is particularly interested in a presentation on the basics of Roman slavery, here it is: