Health, Children, and Slavery in the Ancient Mediterranean World

This project unites complementary expertise spanning 2,000 years of ancient Mediterranean history. Seed funding will catalyse team integration through collaborative activities: joint workshop planning, co-authored publications, and shared methodological development. Laurence (team lead) brings internationally recognised expertise in Roman childhood and the life course, and innovative methodologies for integrating literary, medical, and material evidence. His published work with Vuolanto on Roman childhood provides the methodological foundation for this project. Hamilton (co-lead) contributes Egyptological expertise in social history and material culture, connecting the project to Egyptian evidence for childhood and care. Her current work on ancient Egyptian children and identity, with a focus on enslaved children, complements the project’s analysis of how legal status shaped access to care. Neil extends the chronological range, bringing ARC track record (Future Fellowship; Discovery Projects) and expertise in care within early Christian communities. Vuolanto (Tampere) is a leading international scholar of ancient childhood. Connor (Monash) contributes expertise in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, including research on enslaved peoples in Greco-Roman Egypt. Together with invited speaker Dr Debby Sneed (CSU), whose work on ancient disability bridges medical and social history, the seed funding connects these trajectories into a coherent programme on how dependency, legal status, and age structured access to care in antiquity.

The project is supported by a Faculty of Arts Seed Funding Grant in 2026.