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Seneca’s De Otio, a first-century CE philosophical treatise, and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, an essay collection published in 1903, both attend to the relationships between leisure, learning, and political participation. Writing in exile, Seneca, once an imperial advisor, argues that learning offers a way to serve our fellow human beings. Du Bois, an African American scholar, writer, and activist, insists that freedpersons and their descendants in the United States require leisure to benefit themselves and the nation as a whole.

This paper examines the first Chinese translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric by Luo Niansheng (1904–1990). Completed in 1965, shortly before the start of the Cultural Revolution, Luo’s translation was only published posthumously in 1991. Since then, it has been celebrated as a masterpiece and a must-read for students of ancient Greek literature and culture in contemporary China. However, despite its significance, Luo’s translation of the Rhetoric has not yet been comprehensively studied.

In a recent contribution on Phillis Wheatley's use of the classical tradition, Emily Greenwood pinpointed a blind spot in current scholarship: critics tend to discount or neglect the potential complexity of the poet's engagement with Greek and Latin literature. Since then important new work has continued to appear on Wheatley's late 18th-c. American context, her life as an enslaved and then manumitted Black woman, and the full extent of her preserved writings (Carretta, Hairston, Roberts, Waldstreicher, e.g.), but her dynamic appropriation of classical texts remains underexplored.

María Cristina Mena (1893-1965) is the first Mexican-American woman whose short fiction gained wide American readership. Her stories have largely been dismissed as simple and unchallenging, pandering to an American audience by depicting a stereotyped Mexico filled with naïve Mexicans. Recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that her works can be read as pieces of opposition and resistance (Sheffer 2013; Toth 2013).

The paper contrasts the different modes in which the high Roman Empire and the early Chinese empires (Qin and Han, 221 BC–AD 220) organized and taxed their respective populations and discusses the consequences each mode had on its respective society. Furthermore, it seeks to explain why each polity came to develop its specific mode of population control and taxation.

This paper probes the relationship between law and bureaucracy in the Roman Empire. Often law has been understood as a tool of bureaucratic dictate and central regulation. But Rome was a tributary empire, based on conquest, and with a miniscule state apparatus. It’s government was not that of an elaborate bureaucracy, but of a small number of aristocratic officials sent out to preside over provincial elite society. Tight control was far beyond their means. What they could do, however, was to serve as adjudicator in the conflicts of provincials.

In this paper, I investigate the relationship between social status and legal treatment in early imperial China, roughly from the third century BCE throughout the first century CE. I argue that on the one hand, the privileged groups received more favorable legal treatment than the remaining social members; on the other hand, the judicial discrimination contributed to the social distinctions through the application of perpetual stigma signifying criminality and degradation.

This paper aims to revisit the meaning and purpose of the Athenian Standards decree (IG I³ 1453; Osborne-Rhodes, GHI 155).

This paper offers a comparative perspective of information technologies in the classical Roman world—it forays into the techniques of collecting, organizing, and controlling administrative information and legal knowledge in early imperial China (221 BCE-220 CE). As the number of writings increased enormously under the imperial administrations, the practical issue for Qin-Han scribes of how to handle the huge number of texts became more urgent.

What are the historical conditions for the idea of abstract labor? This paper will look at the Qin and Han (roughly 221 BCE-220 CE) statutes and institutions that created, used, and maintained the idea of “person-day” as a unit of labor. The unit of “person-day” was useful in shaping early imperial ideas of population, convict and corvee labor, and official service. As a term in widespread use, “person-day” could presume to organize the entire imperial realm.