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Material Texts: Dee E. Andrews (California State University, East Bay) and Christopher S. Parmenter (Ohio State University), "Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution."

  • Monday, October 6, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library


We are excited to welcome Dee E. Andrews (California State University) and Christopher S. Parmenter (Ohio State University) for a talk titled “Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution."

 

Professor Andrews and Professor Parmenter write:

 

“We will be discussing two elements of our forthcoming book, Thomas Clarkson’s Latin Essay: Radical Antislavery, Classical Reception, and Abolitionist Print in the Age of Revolution. Based on the first translation of Clarkson’s “An Liceat Invitos in Servitutem Dare” since 1786, our work explores in depth the composition, publication, distribution, response, and reprinting, not least of all in Revolutionary France, of a key text in the first abolition movement.

 

Charles Parmenter will introduce the subject of the Latin Essay itself, the significance of its translation, and how Clarkson reverses the formerly conventional argument regarding slavery in the classical tradition. Dee Andrews will then provide examples of unusual reader response to An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786) -- the Latin Essay (greatly expanded) in print -- and the essay’s endurance as an abolitionist symbol.”

 

Dee E. Andrews is the author of The Methodists and Revolutionary America (Princeton, 2000, pb 2002), which won the 2001 Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award for the best first book in the humanities by a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and articles and reviews on the first abolition movement.

 

Christopher S.. Parmenter is author of Racialized Commodities: Long-distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, c. 700-300 BCE (Oxford, 2024), Social History in the Mediterranean Iron Age: Poverty, Disability, and Enslavement (Cambridge, forthcoming), and articles on slavery and race in the ancient world.