Carl Rice
Carl R. Rice is a social and cultural historian of the Roman empire. At Vassar, he teaches a range of courses that explore various aspects of Roman society and history, as well as Greek and Latin languages and literatures.
Carl R. Rice (he/him [they/them is also fine!]) is a social and cultural historian of the late Roman empire. He is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled Legislating Religion at the End of Antiquity: Lawmaking, Religious Identity, and Empire c. 200-450. In Legislating Religion, he explores how and why late Roman emperors became concerned with making laws that regulated various religious identities starting in the third century CE. At Vassar, he teaches a range of courses that explore various aspects of Roman society and history, as well as Greek and Latin languages and literatures.
Prof. Rice earned his undergraduate degrees in history and religious studies from West Virginia University in 2013, before finishing a Master of Arts in History at North Carolina State University in 2016. He completed his doctorate in classics and history at Yale University in 2023 before joining the Vassar faculty later that year. He is a proud first-generation, low-income college grad from Appalachia.
Contact
Box 654
Research and Academic Interests
(Late) Roman imperial, legal, cultural, and social histories; Late Antiquity; early Christianity; the Roman Republic; premodern legal history; premodern gender and sexuality; comparative slavery studies; Latin prose; Greek prose; epigraphy; digital humanities; post-classical historiography
Departments and Programs
Courses
- GRST 105: Introduction to Greek and Roman Civilization (F26)
- GRST 126: Elementary Greek (F26)
- GRST 245: Intermediate Latin (F26)
- GRST 146: Elementary Latin (S27)
- GRST 343: Tacitus (S27)
Selected Publications
- “Escaping a ‘Prostituted Pudor’: A Law of Constantius II on Enslaved Christian Women (CTh 15.8.1),” in Studies in Late Antiquity (forthcoming)
- “Digital Epigraphy at Dura-Europos: Toward a FAIR-er Inscriptional Corpus,” with Ilaria Bucci, Anne Chen, and Jennifer A. Baird in Valeria Vitale and Gabriel Bodard, eds. Open Data in Ancient and Byzantine Studies (University of London Press, forthcoming).
- “Saving World Languages at WVU” in Pasts Imperfect (9.7.23)
- “Religious Violence in the Later Roman Empire: The Tetrarchic Persecutions, 302-313 CE,” pp. 3454-375 in T.M. Lemos, Tristan S. Taylor, and Ben Kiernan, eds. The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Vol. 1: Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds (University of Cambridge Press, 2023).
Grants, Fellowships, Honors, Awards
- Premio alla Ricerca (Research Award), Associazione Internazionale di Studi Tardoantichi (2025)
Photos
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