This talk concerns the documentary, literary, and visual evidence of women’s participation in the credit economy of Roman Pompeii. It argues that the project of investigating women’s economic roles is one which is at once real and representational – that is, an issue both of finding evidence of their actual impact and also of considering how and why that impact has been excluded from the historical record. Ultimately, we will see that female economic actors have long been hiding in plain sight in the ruins of Pompeii.

Kristina Milnor is Professor of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College. Her books include Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life (Oxford, 2005), winner of the Goodwin Award of Merit, and Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (Oxford, 2014). She has received fellowships from the NEH and ACLS, and held a prestigious Rome Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2003–4. She received her Ph.D. in Classical Studies, along with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.