State of the Field 2023 Home | Full Program | Abstracts
Biographies for Speakers and Discussants
Cicek Tascioglu Beeby is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. She specializes in the art, archaeology, and social history of Greece. At the center of Cicek’s research lies the human body. She has done extensive work on funerary contexts and the manipulation of the human body after death, including bioarchaeology, funerary adornment, cremation, and secondary practices involving human bones. Her interest in the epistemology of the human body has also prompted her to explore embodied space and performance, archaeology of the senses, gender and sexuality, and the construction of personhood in the ancient world. She is particularly interested in the social implications of the representation of bodies in Greek and Roman art and literature, currently focusing on how marginalized bodies—such as women, people with disabilities, and “barbarians”—contribute to the Classical aesthetics of power and privilege. She also works in the fields of museum studies and public humanities, advocating disruptive curatorial practices that bring into question exclusionary histories of museums.
Leah Bernardo-Ciddio is a Ph.D. Candidate at in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Archaeology at the University of Michigan. She holds an M.Phil. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford, and earned her B.A. in Classical Studies and History at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her dissertation examines the production and circulation of matt-painted pottery across and around the Adriatic in the Iron Age. She has worked on field projects at or around Ossaia, Gabii, Roccagloriosa, Roca Vecchia, and the Basentello Valley in Italy, and has conducted lab-based study in Lecce and Taranto, Italy and Tirana and Korce, Albania.
Joseph Carrino is a doctoral student at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. He received a B.A in History from Rutgers University – Newark and an M.Phil. in Classics from the University of Cambridge. His M.Phil. thesis examined the economic conditions of early and mid-Imperial Italy by examining the macellum – a Roman covered market complex. Carrino has excavated in the Sabina, Italy as part of the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project. He has also spent a semester at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (ICCS), during which he also interned at the archaeological collection of the American Academy in Rome. Additionally, he has worked in the Education department of the Newark Museum of Art, where he helped design and run tours, and taught a Roman Civilization course at Rutgers University – Newark. His current research interests include socio-economic development and exchange, cross-cultural interactions, and connectivity studies, especially at the local level across the Mediterranean. Moreover, he is interested in how microhistories can tell big stories of change attendant on empire.
Stephen Collins-Elliott is Associate Professor and Associate Head of the Department of Classics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He received his B.A. in Classics and Mathematics from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Florida State University, during which time he received a Fulbright grant to Italy to work at the ceramology lab of the University of Siena. His work focuses on artifact assemblages and broader economic, historical, and cultural questions on the rise of Rome over the longue durée, focusing on applied statistics and probability. He co-directs the project, Gardens of the Hesperides: The Rural Archaeology of the Loukkos Valley, which analyzes the impact of the Roman occupation on the rural economy around Lixus, the earliest city in northwestern Africa, through regional survey and targeted excavations of small rural sites.
Lara Fabian is an archaeologist and historian working on the Iranian-Mediterranean interface zone in the Achaemenid through Sasanian periods, with a particular focus on the South Caucasus. She earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on the archaeology, history, and historiography of Caucasian Albania, a polity in the eastern Caucasus. Since 2017, she has been working as part of the ERC-funded “Beyond the Silk Road” project at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, where she has participated in the production of a three-volume handbook on the economies of Eurasia between 300 BCE and 300 CE. She co-directs a collaborative Azerbaijani-American fieldwork project in the Talish mountains of Azerbaijan, which looks at highland communities in the Late Iron Age.
Lisa Fentress is an Honorary Visiting Professor at University College London. She was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, University College London and St Hugh’s College, Oxford (D.Phil. 1979 Roman Archaeology). She was a Visiting Professor at University College London, Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Mellon Professor at the American Academy in Rome, and is a former President of the International Association of Classical Archaeology (AIAC). In 2003, she set up Fasti Online, an international database of Mediterranean archaeological excavation which was the winner of the inaugural Archaeological Institute of America Award for Outstanding Digital Archaeology. She was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s gold medal for distinguished archaeological achievement in January 2022. Her primary concentration has been on the application of archaeology to history of the longue durée in both the Italian peninsula and the countries of North Africa. She has directed or co-directed survey and excavation projects in the Albegna Valley, Cosa; the abbey of San Sebastiano at Alatri and Villa Magna in Italy; Sétif in Algeria, Jerba; Utica in Tunisia; and currently, Volubilis in Morocco.
Lin Foxhall, FSA, MBE, is a Professor of archaeology and ancient Greek History. She has written on women, men, and gender in the classical world. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of Leicester, and in 2017 she was appointed to the Rathbone Chair of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. Foxhall studied for her bachelor’s degree at Bryn Mawr College. She received her master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania. She was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool in 1990 for a thesis entitled, Olive Cultivation Within Greek and Roman Agriculture: The Ancient Economy Revisited. She is the Principal Investigator on the ‘Tracing Networks’ Project. She is the co-director of the Bova Marina project. Foxhall joined the University of Leicester in 1993, and was made Professor of Greek Archaeology and History in 1999.
Tyler Franconi is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. He holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in classical archaeology, and has held previous academic positions at the University of Oxford, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Alberta. He has excavated at a number of different sites in Italy, Tunisia, and the USA, and currently co-directs the Upper Sabina Tiberina Project, which investigates the long-term development of rural settlement and economy in the Sabine region of Italy, located today in the province of Rieti of the region of Lazio. Tyler’s research more generally focuses on the economic and environmental history of the Roman Empire, with particular interests in the frontier regions of Britain and Germany. His research in these zones investigates the changing relationship between Roman economic exploitation and environmental dynamism from the time of initial conquest into the early medieval period.
Benjamin Luley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and is currently the Chair of the Department of Classics at Gettysburg College. He completed his B.A. in Anthropology and History with honors at Penn State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His research interests focus on the impact of the Roman Empire on the colonized peoples of the western Mediterranean, particular the region of Mediterranean Gaul. More generally, he is interested in the archaeology of colonialism and rethinking paradigms of inequality and equality for understanding the diversity of human social organization across space and time. Luley has excavated in France, Italy, Tunisia, and the United States and has been working at the archaeological site of Lattara (modern Lattes, France) since 2006. Since 2017 he has helped to lead the excavations of the Roman-era port of the settlement at Lattara. In 2020 he published a single-authored book on his research at Lattes with Oxbow Books, entitled, Continuity and Rupture: An Archaeology of Colonial Transformations at Ancient Lattara.
Ileana Micarelli is Marie Sklodowska-Curie European Fellow in the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at University of Cambridge. She has a Master’s in Bioarcheology and M.Sc. in Medieval Archaeology; and, she earned her Ph.D. at the Department of Classics and Environmental Biology in Sapienza, University of Rome. Over the last two years, she has been the Assistant Researcher at the Department of Environmental Biology researching on Bioarcheology, Paleopathology and, specially, focusing on themes related to Bioarcheology of Care and Disability. From 2008 she has been involved in numerous archaeological campaigns ranging different time periods/areas from the Roman to Medieval Ages (Europe and Africa). During her current Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project (B-CARED) at the McDonald Institute, she is specializing in archaeological theory related to disability and care in past populations.
Eva Mol earned her Ph.D. at Leiden, University the Netherlands. Before moving to the United Kingdom to work at the University College London, she completed postdoctoral fellowships at Chicago Classics and at the Joukowsky Institute. She is now at the University of York as Assistant Professor in Roman archaeology. In addition, she is a senior editor at the Cambridge University Press Journal Archaeological Dialogues. She published articles on digital archaeology & theory and archaeology & ethics, and has a forthcoming book out at Oxford University Press on style and assemblages in Roman Archaeology. She is currently working on a new monograph about mythology and Mediterranean archaeology.
Dimitri Nakassis is professor and chair of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his degrees from the University of Michigan (BA) and the University of Texas at Austin (MA, PhD), and has held positions at Trinity University, the Florida State University, and the University of Toronto. He’s the author of Individuals and Society in Mycenaean Pylos (2013) and is co-director of the Western Argolid Regional Project and the Pylos Tablets Digital Project. He is currently at work on a project that proposes a new way of understanding Late Bronze Age “Mycenaean” Greece that begins by rejecting interpretations premised on its essential unity.
James Newhard, RPA, is Director of Archaeology, Director of the Center for Historical Landscapes, and Professor of Classics at the College of Charleston. As a landscape archaeologist, he focuses on the interplay between environmental and human history. As an informaticist, his work focuses on the application of data and geospatial science within archaeology and history. He has served in leading roles on archaeological projects in Turkey, the US, and Greece. In 2005, Dr. Newhard served as the inaugural Director of Archaeology and has served as either Director of Archaeology or Chair of Classics for the better part of his career. Newhard earned a dual Bachelor of Arts in Classical Art & Archaeology and Classical Languages from the University of Missouri, an M.A. in Classics from the University of Cincinnati, and a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Cincinnati.
Giulia Saltini Semerari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Assistant Curator in the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She arrived in Michigan after one postdoc in Amsterdam and one in Tübingen, and a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford. Her main research interest is Mediterranean connectivity in the early first millennium BC, with a focus on the central Mediterranean. To address this, she conducted an international, collaborative project (AMICI) applying a spectrum of bioarchaeological and archaeological analyses to indigenous and early colonial cemeteries in southern Italy. A new project on Adriatic connectivity is set to start in 2023. She is also the vice-director of the fieldschool at the indigenous-Greek site of Incoronata (southern Italy), where she is responsible for metal finds and textile tools. A second research interest is the archaeology of gender, and she has recently co-organized a new research initiative on gender in the Early Iron Age Mediterranean.
Anna Soifer is a doctoral candidate at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2017 with a B.A. in Archaeology and Classics. She received honors in Archaeology for a thesis examining the socio-political implications of Etruscan and Etrusco-Campanian antefixes, focusing specifically on the analysis of a set of barely published Capuan antefixes in the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum. While at Hopkins, she also participated in the Archaeological Museum’s ‘Recreating Ancient Greek Ceramics’ project. Anna has excavated with the S’Urachi Project, Sardinia (2018-), the Uronarti Regional Archaeological Project, Sudan (2019), the Poggio Civitate Archaeological Project, Italy (2015-17), serving as the site registrar in 2017, and at the Buried Gardens of Kampsville, Illinois with the CAA (2012). She has also interned in the Study Collection at the American Academy in Rome, and has worked on the digital illustration of artifacts and architecture from Umm el-Marra, Syria. Her current research interests include ancient craft and industry, knowledge transfer, communities of practice, and ceramic analysis, particularly in the context of understanding community development and interaction in Pre-Roman Italy.
Peter van Dommelen is a Mediterranean archaeologist, whose research and teaching revolve around the rural and indigenous Mediterranean past and present. The regional focus of his work lies in the western Mediterranean, where he carries out long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia. He studied Archaeology and Classics at the University of Leiden (the Netherlands), specializing in Theoretical and Classical Archaeology (MA, 1990; PhD, 1998); he also studied Anthropology and Material Culture at UCL (1990-91). He taught Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Glasgow between 1997 and 2012, before coming to Brown University. He has served as Director of the Joukowsky Institute since 2015.
Mateo González Vázquez completed his undergraduate studies in History at the Universitat de Barcelona, his M.Phil. at the University of Oxford, and his Ph.D. from Universitat de Barcelona. He has been a visiting scholar at Brown University, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, and Cincinnati. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universität Trier in Germany, working on a DFG-funded project that explores maritime connectivity in the Mediterranean during Classical Antiquity and as a co-PI on the four-year project “Contact Landscapes and Rural Communities around Emporion (10th-2nd century BC).” He co-directs work at several sites in L’Escala, Baix Empordà, and he has been a member of the archaeological mission team at Monte Testaccio (Rome) since 2011. His research is focused on the history and archaeology of the Western Mediterranean, with a particular interest in economic structures, local responses, and imperial power mechanisms from the Iron Age to the Roman era.