Ella Grunberger-Kirsh, who completed her Classics Ph.D. last fall, is challenging traditional views of who held power and shaped knowledge in the ancient world, highlighting the critical, often invisible, contributions of enslaved and low-status writers.
Kirsh, now a junior research fellow at Christ's College at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the Joukowsky Prize in the humanities for her dissertation, ‘The Memory-Writers': A Social and Intellectual History of Shorthand in Late Antiquity.
Rather than focusing solely on the well-documented elite male authors who account for the majority of the surviving literary sources, Kirsh examines the intellectual worlds of enslaved and low-status writers: the scribes, notaries, and stenographers, who shaped the historical record by transcribing text on wax tablets, papyrus, or parchment in the late Roman world. Kirsh’s dissertation transforms the expansive textual legacy produced between the second and seventh centuries CE, in Latin, Greek and Syriac.
“In providing compelling proof that stenographers played a key role in the production, organization, and preservation of all kinds of other knowledge, Ella finds herself on the leading edge of an exciting new wave of thought about non-elites and their literary creation, selfhood, and management of elite reputational politics in the ancient world,” says Jonathan P. Conant, associate professor of history and classics and Kirsh’s advisor.
The first part of Kirsh’s dissertation explains how free authors projected their own cultural anxieties onto their enslaved shorthand-writers. She describes the painful positions of physical submission that scribes and stenographers were forced to maintain for extended periods of time and the potential for irate masters to inflict brutal, dehumanizing punishment.
Kirsh also examines the challenges of stenographical education: how learning to use shorthand from a rigid, socially regressive textbook provided students both with a set of technical skills and a moral education. Learning the symbols and phrases required associative thinking which, Kirsh argues, helped non-elite writers to internalize the social rules of late Roman society.
The second part of the dissertation focuses on how stenography directly shaped the major institutions of the late Roman world, particularly law and the Christian church. Stenographers were the ones transcribing sermons and theological debates. Kirsh argues that their choices – what speech to preserve, what to omit, and how to frame the final transcript – critically influenced social expectations for figures like bishops. This role culminated at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE, where skilled stenographers notably managed proceedings that shaped central tenets of contemporary Christian belief.
Kirsh concludes by considering how stenographers similarly curated everyday late Roman legal proceedings, particularly in a world that increasingly relied on written documentation rather than oral testimony to bear the burden of proof.
In placing enslaved and low-status writers at the center of ancient knowledge-production, Kirsh convincingly shows that elites could not have achieved what they did without the assistance of their enslaved shorthand-writers. “This insight is an important reminder that complex societies are never built entirely from the top down,” shares Conant.
To uncover this hidden history, Kirsh drew on extensive research from letters, hagiographies, histories, conciliar acts, documentary papyri, legal contracts, seals, and related material evidence where scribes and shorthand-writers are mentioned, whether identifying themselves as such or referenced by those dictating or composing the texts. She learned to read late antique shorthand, gained training in papyrology (the study of ancient papyri) and traveled to Harvard to take classes in Syriac.
A chapter of Kirsh’s dissertation has been published in the Journal of Roman Studies, vol. 114. She is currently preparing a monograph based on the full dissertation.
In addition to the Joukowsky Prize, Kirsh has received the Mary Isabel Sibley Postdoctoral Fellowship and was offered the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania.
“It's an enormous honor to be selected for this award and I couldn't be more grateful,” Kirsh shares about the Joukowsky Prize. “It's testament to the extraordinary instruction, support, and mentorship I received at Brown from my committee, and particularly from my advisor, Professor Jonathan Conant.”
Doctoral candidates and graduates, Ella Grunberger-Kirsh, Zhaowei Jiang, John Antolik, and Isabella Bellezza Smull were selected for the Graduate School's Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award. Prizes are awarded at the Doctoral Ceremony on May 25, 2025.