Kimberly Bowes specializes in Roman archaeology. Her first two books and early career focused on the archaeology of the later Roman Empire, particularly the ways in which elite households responded to new Christian hierarchies and the way that houses are – or are not – a useful mirror of social practice. Her more recent work deliberately leaves elites aside and addresses the material experience of non-elites, particularly the poor. Together with Cam Grey and an international team she started the Roman Peasant Project in 2009 to better understand the lives of rural peasants in central Italy. As part of that work she has developed interests in economic history, Roman landscapes and the history of poverty. Kim was the Mellon Professor and the 22nd director of the American Academy in Rome. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.
Kristina Marie Darling: It was an honor and a delight to get to know your work when you were Director at the American Academy in Rome. Can you tell us more about the Academy, its mission, and your vision while in this leadership role?
Kimberly Bowes: The American Academy is that all-too-rare space in modern academic and creative life – a genuinely interdisciplinary space, where artists, musicians, writers, scholars from all branches of the humanities, work, live and collaborate together. Given the siloed nature of the world we live in, making such a radically interdisciplinary space work is easier said than done, so a big part of my role as director was setting the table – creating an environment where the work was central, and helping scholars and artists find the intersections between theirs and others’ work. The Academy is also the Academy in Rome: opening the gates of the institution to the city and helping the Fellows add their extraordinary work to the city’s cultural life was also a major priority.
KMD: You recently finished a book entitled Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, which unearths the lives of working class people in the Roman empire. What initially drew you to this topic? What surprised you most in your research?
KB: I began my career writing about rich people. I didn’t mean to. The rich – their writings, their buildings – dominate our evidence from the ancient world, and I just accepted their perspective was the only one we were ever likely to have. One day, writing a footnote trying to justify this for about the tenth time, I thought “This is absurd. You’re an archaeologist. Surely you could excavate the perspective of someone other than rich men.” So myself and two colleagues from the University of Siena decided to start digging up smallholder farmers. We were all young and it didn’t occur to us that this might be impossible. The Roman Peasant Project was the result. Surviving Rome is a big-picture story of many different kinds of working people – farmers, potters, weavers, enslaved and free. The thing that surprised me most about their many stories is their unwillingness to stay in the categories that we as historians or archaeologists like to put them. They were relentless hustlers, born of a complex and hard world, where to survive they had to do many things. Just because they were “poor” didn’t mean they didn’t consume lots of things; tenants were also owners, enslaved people might own other enslaved people. People in the past are complicated, and survival was a complicated business.
KMD: As I’ve followed your career over the years, I’ve been impressed by your commitment to the public humanities. Can you speak to the importance of bringing history, classics, and archeology outside of and beyond the university?
KB: As we become ever more specialized in what we do, as the amount of knowledge required to do every one of our myriad jobs increases, we lose our ability to see outside our silos. The humanities is the escape hatch. The skills we learn when we learn history, literature, or languages are bridges to others. They permit us to understand other perspectives, and they provide a basis from which to bridge disciplines – even and especially the sciences and social-science disciplines. The more we as a society depend on science, the more we need the humanities. History, I think, is essential not becuase it repeats itself – but because it never does. History, especially ancient history, is so important because of its strangeness, its foreignness. A world like the Roman world, where over 50% of children never reached their fifth birthday, where humans routinely owned other humans, where death might be a spectacle sport – these are reminders of our progress. The strangeness of history is like road markers: without them, we readily forget how far we’ve come.
KMD: How has your work in the public humanities shaped your approach to curriculum design?
KB: It’s shaped it in two, seemingly opposite ways. On the one hand, we need to constantly answer – and ask our students to answer – the “who cares” question. It’s no longer obvious to either our students or our many publics why the humanities matter. We should be emphatic about the skills students are learning when they do humanistic studies, and get them to make those skills transparent – to themselves, to their parents. Second, we need to not give up on disciplines, but double-down on them. This may seem a strange idea, especially coming from someone who ran an interdisciplinary research center. I’ve come to see disciplines not as answers, but as particular rules of the game. Sociology, anthropology, history, English- they aren’t just fields of study, they constitute a particular way of looking at the world. We need to insist that learning those rules matter, because in learning them, you learn a particular epistemology, a particular way of knowing. Once you know the rules, then you can set about bumping them up against other sets of rules – the rules of biology, or computer science – and see which sets of rules work, and when, and when none of them work. A new interdisciplinarity should insist on disciplines as the basic equipment necessary to interact – collaborate, challenge, innovate – with others.
KMD: What advice do you have for aspiring leaders in the arts and humanities?
KB: Two things have been much on my mind of late. The first is that our students need us to explain to them why the humanities matter. We can’t shy away from their anxieties about career and futures. We should constantly cite the many statistics that show that employers want the kind of skills they learn from humanistic study. Frank conversations about skill building aren’t a sell out – they are a way of including bigger, more diverse communities.
The second is our relationship with the sciences. The sciences and social sciences are not our enemies: we need each other more than ever. Our colleagues in these fields care about ideas as much as we do, and making ideas – big ideas – central to our curricula are ways of insisting on this mutual independence.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can we look forward to?
KB: I’ve got two new projects. I want to understand how the end of the Roman empire impacted the economic lives of ordinary people. And I’m starting a new archaeology project in Italy to understand how large-scale Roman industry – in particular the brick business – impacted ordinary people. In both cases I’m curious to see how the 90 percent responded to “the man” – the state, big business, elites.