Dr Kelsey Madden

Profile

I specialise in Roman visual culture, focusing on depictions of captive 'barbarian' women and children from the 1st century BC to the 2nd century AD. My interests lie in the trafficking of captives by Rome, wartime sexual violence in Roman contexts, and their portrayals. I earned my PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2023. My thesis, From Conquest to Consumption: Identifying Wartime Sexual Violence and the Traffic of Captive Barbarian Women in the Iconography of Roman Conquest (1st c. BC – 2nd c. AD), delves into the meanings behind depicting captive women with insinuating gestures of wartime sexual violence, using Feminist Gender Theories and Wartime Rape Theory. It's being prepped for publication, with a related paper soon in the edited volume "Ancient Rape Cultures" published by Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae.

I plan to advance my research on my next project that focuses on captive children: Vulnerable Victims: Investigating the Traffic and Visual Representation of Captive Children in Roman Iconography. My interdisciplinary approach integrates archaeology, art history, sociology, and anthropology methodologies to examine Rome's function and impact as an imperial power in the context of gender, sexuality, and the predatory notion of Roman conquest. I also have extensive experience managing archaeological projects in the UK and Italy and am the acting fieldwork supervisor for the British School at Rome on the Falerii Novi Project.