Kelly Wrenhaven

Kelly Wrenhaven is Associate Professor of Classics and the Director of Classical Studies at Cleveland State University. Her research interests include ancient Greek slavery; epigraphy, especially manumission documents; the construction of civic and cultural identity through opposition; perceptions of the body, especially ancient ideas about beauty and ugliness and perceived differences between slave and free, barbarian and Greek bodies; how language can be used to construct identity; the use of evidential torture in Greek law courts; ancient sepulchral inscriptions and relief sculpture, with a concentration upon how status was illustrated; depictions of prostitutes in art and literature and, more broadly, ancient ideas about sexuality.

Her first book, Reconstructing the Slave (2012), examines how the Greeks used literary, lexical, and artistic images of slaves to justify, naturalize, and perpetuate the institution of slavery in Classical Greece. Her second book, Animate Tools and Invisible Men (under contract with Penn Press), is a comparative study of the ideology of slavery. This book will examine themes/ideas in Classical (Greek) and American (17th-19th centuries) slavery in order to illustrate some of the similarities and differences between the ways in which each society defined, depicted, and ultimately justified slavery.
Address: Department of History
2121 Euclid Ave. RT 1319
Cleveland, OH 44115