Brandon Bourgeois

Summary Statement of Research Interests

Brandon Bourgeois’ primary research interests concern the Roman political tradition from the Republic to late antiquity/early Byzantium, and include law, political and institutional history, and rhetoric and communication. He also maintains interests in topics pertaining to ancient Mediterranean religion and classical reception, particularly the reception of classical antiquity among members and communities of the African diaspora.

His current book project surveys and analyses the political history of Roman imperial accessions. The project maps the gradual shifts in the emperorship’s electoral base and ultimately attempts to answer the questions: How did emperors introduce themselves to their subjects and obtain their consent? What were the rhetorical tools of legitimation beyond brute force?

Brandon is the founder and creative director of “The Hype4Homer Project.” The Project translates and adapts ancient Greek epic and lyric poetry from its original language into musical audiobooks and live performance-pieces using the linguistic, cultural, and artistic idioms of contemporary Hip Hop and R&B. The project, while deeply informed by scholarship, offers entertainment in order to advocate for the wider and more inclusive engagement of the general public with the classical world. Currently, the Project is staging performance art adapted from, inter alia, its first full-length work-in-progress: an unabridged translation of Homer’s Iliad into the world’s first Hip-Hop audio book—The Trilliad.

Research Specialties

the Roman political tradition; Roman Republican and imperial history and literature; late antique/early Byzantine history and literature; rhetoric and oratory; reception studies; Classica Africana (“black classicism”); religions of the ancient Mediterranean

Detailed Statement of Research Interests

The complete manuscript of my first monograph is entitled The Emperor’s First Words: Roman Imperial Accessions from the First to the Fourth Century AD (under review). It is a continuation and revision of my dissertation research, Roman Imperial Accessions: Politics, Constituencies, and Communicative Acts, which covered the first six centuries of imperial accessions in the Roman empire. The Emperor’s First Words surveys and analyzes the political history of the first four centuries of Roman imperial accessions, from Rome’s second emperor Tiberius to Valens, the first emperor to hold an accession on the parade grounds of Constantinople. Its narrative maps the first gradual shift in the electoral base of the imperial office (from the Roman Senate to frontier armies). The first of two through-lines in the book emphasizes gradual, centuries-long institutional and demographic transformation by arguing that changes in accessional practice and the imperial persona track, not just geographical change, but the expansion of citizenship and accompanying shifts in the dominant shareholders of imperial power. The book’s second through-line complements the first by emphasizing continuities in political culture over these same four centuries, continuities that in many respects were longer-term survivals from the Roman Republic. The ultimate significance of these two lines of argumentation is that several long and short-term trends and events in Roman imperial politics both drove and were themselves driven by the rituals of imperial accession.

The monograph encompasses a wide chronological and thematic scope; it also delves in some depth into the analysis of a great variety of source material: literary sources such as histories, letters, panegyrics, and poetry, but also archaeological reports, coins, epigraphic sources, papyri, sarcophagi, monumental structures and reliefs, mosaics, and even ceremonial silver dishes (missoria). The scope and depth of this project require an adventurous interdisciplinarity: expertise in what is traditionally studied as three distinct periods of Roman imperial history; working knowledge of the methods and findings of several sub-disciplines within the field (philology, history, archaeology, numismatics, epigraphy, papyrology, ancient and late-antique epistolography, etc.); even a familiarity with the research conducted by scholars of modern political rhetoric and communication.

Ultimately, the book attempts to answer two related questions in regard to accessional practice: How did emperors introduce themselves to their subjects and obtain their consent? What were the rhetorical tools of legitimation beyond brute force? While ancient rhetoricians taught imperial subjects how to address the emperor, none of their treatises specified how emperors should address subjects. Thus, the project culminates in a hypothetical, source-based construction of a late Roman handbook for the proper delivery of an imperial accession speech.