John Bodel is W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of History at Brown University. He is the author of articles on the ancient Roman slave trade, slave religion, and the culture of ex-slaves in the early Roman Empire, and he is the co-editor (with Walter Scheidel) of On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (Oxford, 2017), in which historians of slavery of different periods and places assess the impact of Orlando Patterson’s groundbreaking work. The comparative study of social institutions is central to Bodel’s interests, and his current research on the funerary culture of the ancient Romans intersects with his interest in slave religion in the importance to both of individual personal commemoration.