Daniel Richter

I am an intellectual historian, focused on how and why ideas about race, politics, and community take the particular shapes they do in both the early Roman empire and the antebellum American South.  My scholarly work has always proceeded from the historicist’s question of why a particular writer makes a particular argument at a particular place and time.  Why did elites at the height of the Roman empire espouse Stoic cosmopolitan ethics and reject an Aristotelian divisions of the human race into naturally free Greeks and naturally slavish barbarians?  Why did slaveholders in the antebellum South turn specifically to moribund Aristotelian natural hierarchies to justify their own peculiar institutions?  My work on both the post-classical Mediterranean and the antebellum South examines how notions of human difference inform political, social, and domestic institutions and, in turn, shape the ideologies that sustain them.  More specifically, my scholarship has focused on how, on the one hand, a general commitment to the idea of the unity of the human community can give rise to universalizing, cosmopolitan ethics, while, on the other hand, notions of biologically or climatically determined human difference are often deployed to justify protocols of dominance and submission along the lines of both race and gender.