Elizabeth A. Meyer is the T. Cary Johnson, Jr. Professor of History at the University of Virginia. She earned her A.B. (1979), M.A. (1982), and Ph.D. (1988) from Yale University, and specializes in Greek and Roman history with a focus on legal epigraphy, ancient law, and documentary practices. 

Her scholarship has significantly contributed to our understanding of social and legal phenomena in antiquity, particularly:

• Ancient manumission and slavery, through her work on Greek manumission inscriptions and their social contexts.
• The evolution of documentary practice in Roman law and Greek epigraphy.
• Broader themes in Greek and Roman society, including literacy, political institutions, and regional histories (e.g., Molossia, Dodona). 

Meyer is the driving force behind an innovative electronic archive of Greek manumission inscriptions, designed to serve both specialists and general audiences. This archive features high-quality images, textual transcriptions (in both Greek and English), metadata, and tagging to facilitate comparative and interdisciplinary research. 

Colloquium: “Manumission in Hellenistic Greece"

Abstract
Slavery and the release from slavery has a long history in ancient Greece, but the evidence for it is very uneven and the status (and the lives) of the freed are difficult to determine. The later Hellenistic period, starting in around 205 BC, provides much more extensive evidence about legal actions involving the enslaved, all of it from inscriptions, and almost all of it from central and western Greece. This lecture provides an overview of these legal actions, which took different forms in different places with different legal results (not all resulting in freedom), and explores what all had in common and what might have provoked this explosion of inscribing in these places at this time.