Graduate Students
| Emanuela Bocancea Status: Third Year Emanuela received a B.A. (Honours) in Classical Studies (2007) and an M.A. in Classical Archaeology (2009) from the University of Alberta. She has surveyed and excavated at Hellenistic Kastro-Kallithea (Greece) and Roman Porolissum (Romania), with additional underwater fieldwork in the Roman harbour of Sanitja (Menorca, Spain). Currently she is working in Jordan with the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP), which includes her own investigation of a water management system in Wadi Beqaa. She is also conducting fieldwork on Montserrat (British West Indies), with the Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat (SLAM) project. Emanuela’s research interests are eclectic and broadly include cultural interactions, religious change, colonisation, and imperialism on the edges of the Roman world (especially in the provinces of Dacia and Arabia). She has a longstanding engagement with the Roman cult of Mithras, which is the focus of previous and ongoing research projects. Other areas of interest include archaeological theory and ethics, post-colonial theory, nationalist archaeologies, underwater archaeology, and historical archaeology. |
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| Sarah Craft Status: ABD Sarah graduated from DePauw University with a double B.A. in Latin and Ancient Greek and a minor in Classical Archaeology (2007). Since 2005, she has surveyed in Antalya, Mersin, and Manisa provinces in Turkey, excavated in Sicily, and spent the last three summers in Çorum province, Turkey, as the GIS specialist for the Avkat Archaeological Project. After finishing her undergraduate degree, she received a critical language scholarship (CLS) from the State Department and spent a summer learning Turkish in Ankara, Turkey. She went on to spend a year working as an intern for the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology (CGMA) at DePauw, researching field survey projects in the Mediterranean and compiling their metadata into the project database. As her chronological interests drift further and further into the Byzantine period, her current research interests center on the infrastructure of travel, specifically within the framework of early Christian pilgrimage in the eastern Mediterranean. Her dissertation prospectus, written during a 2011 summer fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, explores the intersection of landscape archaeology, GIS technology, and contemporary texts in understanding how and under what motivations ancient peoples moved through their landscapes, with a particular focus on the late Roman and early Byzantine landscapes of Anatolia. |
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| Andrew Dufton Status: First Year Andrew received a B.A. (Honours) in Anthropology from McGill University in 2003 and went on to complete a M.Sc. in GIS and Spatial Analysis in Archaeology from University College London (2005). Following this second degree Andrew worked for six years within the British commercial sector, initially in geomatics and site survey and expanding into excavation, project management, digital archaeology and community involvement. During this time he was involved in the development of digital recording and outreach strategies for commercial projects (Prescot Street Project), community-led initiatives (Thames Discovery Programme) and research excavations (Villa Magna Project). Andrew's research interests include the influence of past rural and urban landscapes in shaping the present interpretations of space, specifically looking at this interaction between past/present during the Roman colonisation of North Africa. Building on his experience within the Digital Humanities, he is also interested in the potential of new digital technologies to archaeological practice, particularly mobile geo-location services, in serving as a heuristic tool for both academic and non-academic audiences. |
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| Müge Durusu-Tanriover Status: Second Year Müge received her B.F.A. in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design from Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey) in 2006. She completed her M.A. degree in the same university, this time in the Department of Archaeology and History of Art, in 2010. In her M.A. thesis, she focused on the Late Bronze – Early Iron Age transitional landscapes of the Upper Euphrates area and the Amuq Plain. Müge's current research focuses on the production, uses and meanings of the architectural spaces in Anatolia during the Bronze and Iron Ages, with a particular emphasis on the Hittite period. She explores the opportunities of spatial analysis methods to distill aspects of space, while studying the interplay between architectural spaces and their contextual landscapes. Her field experience includes excavating in the mound of Hacimusalar with Bilkent University (2008-2009), surveying in coastal Cilicia as part of the Mopsos Project of Penn State University (2007-2011) and surveying in Konya as part of the Brown University Yalburt Project (2011). She is a Fulbright grantee for the 2011-2012 academic year. |
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| Linda R. Gosner Status: Second Year Linda received her undergraduate degrees from the University of Arizona, including an Honors BA in Classics and Anthropology with minors in Spanish and Near Eastern Studies (2008), and an Honors BFA in Dance (2007). Before beginning graduate school, she spent a year in Portugal as a Fulbright scholar doing research at the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia and earning a certificate in Portuguese at the Universidade de Lisboa. She also worked for several years during and after college at the Arizona State Museum as a curatorial assistant. Linda has done fieldwork -- including excavation, pedestrian survey, and ceramic analysis -- in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Egypt, and, most recently, in Jordan with the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project. Linda studies Roman art and archaeology, with current research interests in the technological and social aspects of production, trade, household archaeology, and material culture (including issues of memory and materiality, and tracing object biographies). Though varied, her interests center around postcolonial and object-based approaches to understanding culture contact and colonialism in the Roman provinces, particularly in Iberia, but also in Egypt and beyond. |
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| Katherine Harrington Status: Third Year Katherine received a B.A. in Classical Archaeology from Dartmouth College in 2006, and completed the post-baccalaureate program in Classical Languages at the University of California, Davis in 2009. Her senior thesis discussed methods of analysis of Classical and Hellenistic Greek pebble mosaics, from issues of iconography to the creation of a computer program capable of measuring the size and shape of individual pebbles in an image. Her fieldwork experience includes five seasons in Greece at the Athenian agora excavations (2005-09), two seasons in Jordan with the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (2010-11), and one season in the Caribbean with Brown’s Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat project. Katherine’s research interests focus on the archaeology of Greece, specifically in the Early Iron Age and Archaic Period. Long intrigued by the intersections of science and archaeology, she has recently become interested in the application of science to the study of production. She also enjoys studying domestic space and household archaeology. Other interests include dig dogs, looking at ceramics under magnification, and digging circular features and floor surfaces. |
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| Alex Knodell Status: ABD Alex received a B.A. in 2007 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he majored in Anthropology, Classics, and Classical Humanities, and spent the 2010-2011 academic year Greece as a Regular Member at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He has participated in field projects in Portugal, the United States, and Greece, and most recently has organized and led survey teams in Guatemala and Jordan. Alex's general interests include landscape archaeology, regional studies, GIS and remote sensing, networks of interaction and exchange, and technology. Regionally, he specializes in the Aegean and its relationships with the wider Mediterranean world through time, though principally in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. He is particularly interested in technological change (especially the inception and development of iron metallurgy), the changing networks that accompany it, and the archaeology of regions. These all fall within much wider interests in archaeological theory, ethics, historiography, and world archaeology. |
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| Thomas Leppard Status: ABD Tom holds an M.A. in Ancient History and Archaeology from the University of St. Andrews and an M.A. (Distinction) in Aegean Archaeology from the University of Sheffield. He has undertaken fieldwork - both excavation and pedestrian survey -- in the United Kingdom, the Mediterranean (Italy and Greece) and the Caribbean. Tom’s main research interests relate to comparative island archaeology and anthropology; particularly the prehistory of the insular Mediterranean, but with complementary interests in the pre-contact Pacific and Caribbean. In addition, he maintains interests in the archaeology of pre- or proto-state societies in general, in GIS-led approaches to these societies, and in the relationship between human colonization and the extinction of endemic insular faunas. He also has interests relating to the taphonomic and geomorphological processes - and associated interpretive issues -- which affect plowsoil assemblages. |
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| Kathryn McBride Status: First Year In 2006 Kathryn received a B.A. in History and Ancient Mediterranean Studies from Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She also studied for a semester at the American University in Cairo, taking many courses in Egyptology. Her honors thesis at Coe focused on the ethnic and cultural relationships of Ptolemaic Egypt. She graduated with an M.A. in Classics with an emphasis on archaeology from the University of Arizona in 2008. Her Master's thesis also concentrated on Ptolemaic Egypt, this time on the iconography used by the Queens of that era. From 2009-2011 she taught History and Humanities at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona. Her fieldwork includes one season with the South Asasif Conservation Project on the Theban West Bank, and five seasons with the Mt. Lykaion Excavation and Survey Project in Arcadia, Greece, where she served as a trench supervisor for three years. Kathryn's main research interests include the Greek Art and Archaeology, the Hellenistic world, especially Egypt, Macedonia, and Bactria, cultural interactions and the harmony and tensions they can produce, frontier states, iconography and propaganda, and she currently has a growing interest in numismatics. |
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| Lyra Monteiro Status: ABD Lyra received her B.A. in Anthropology and Classical Civilization from New York University (2000) and M.A.s in Classical Art and Archaeology and in Latin from the University of Michigan (2006). Her many interests in the field include topics of culture change, colonialism/post-colonialism, archaeological theory, archaeological ethics, and ancient literacy. Her fieldwork experience includes excavations at the Roman town of Silchester in England, colonial and prehistoric sites in Virginia and Maryland, and on the Via Sacra in Rome; and the field survey at Metaponto, Italy. She has attended summer workshops in osteology at the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia in Lisbon, and in numismatics at the American Numismatic Society. Additionally, she interned for two years at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, in the department of Egyptian, Classical, and Middle Eastern Art. She is currently enrolled in the Public Humanities M.A. program at the John Nicholas Brown Center, where she plans to explore her interests in the public archaeology of slavery in the United States. |
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| Claudia Moser Status: ABD Claudia graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Classical Archaeology and Classics (2006). Her senior thesis, focusing on the phallus as an apotropaic symbol in the images and texts of Roman Italy, investigated the interactions, correspondences and discrepancies between the artistic and verbal representations of the phallus in the first-century A.D. After graduation, she worked in the Greek and Roman Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She has also spent three years working in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology working on the Corinth Computer Project. As a graduate student at Brown, Claudia has worked at the U.S. Epigraphy Project and interned at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has participated in excavations and post-excavation analysis at S. Omobono in Rome, at Mt. Lykaion in Greece, at Villa Magna in Italy,at Petra in Jordan, at San Venanzo in Italy, and at Akrotiri in Greece. Claudia’s main research interests include Republican sanctuaries in Rome and Latium and the ritual that is enacted within them, theories of sacrifice, the interaction of native Italian with Greek and Eastern religions, changes in burial practices and funerary customs, and the interplay of classical languages and material objects. She is currently working on her dissertation entitled "Material Witnesses: The Memory of Sacrifice and the Altars of Republican Rome and Latium." |
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| Elizabeth Murphy Status: ABD Elizabeth received a B.A. in Anthropology in 2004 summa cum laude from Barrett Honors College, Arizona State University, with an additional concentration in Classical Studies and a Minor in Italian Literature and Language. Her M.A., obtained in 2007 from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, specialized in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Having acquired years of field work in Cyprus, England, the Caribbean, and the American South-West, including a period as a salvage archaeologist, Elizabeth now works with the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project (K. U. Leuven) in Turkey. At Sagalassos, she is currently conducting excavations and studying material from ceramic workshops in the eastern suburbium of the ancient city. By reconstructing production cycles and identifying production techniques, this research is offering insight into the production organization of local industries and changing patterns in production at the site throughout the Roman and into the early Byzantine periods. Her primary interests are in material studies, crafts production, technological choices, ancient economy, and social lives of artisans during the Roman period. |
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| Jessica Nowlin Status: ABD Jessica received her B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2007 with a double major in Classics and Archaeology and a minor in Anthropology. Her senior honors thesis, titled "Settlement Patterns in Veii and Arezzo between 400 BC and AD 14", focused on combining archaeological and literary evidence to better understand the cultural interaction between Rome and Etruria as Rome began its expansion. After one season of excavation in Belize (2004), she conducted the majority of her fieldwork with the Institute of Classical Archaeology (Univ. of Texas), including two years of excavation in Chersonesos, Ukraine, one year of survey in Metaponto and Croton, Italy, and one year as the GIS specialist for the excavation of a Roman tile factory in Metaponto. She currently conducts fieldwork as a member of the topography team in the excavations of Gabii in northern Latium, Italy. Jessica is broadly interested in dissecting processes of cultural contact and interaction within central Italy, in particular ‘romanization’ and increasingly Orientalization. Her other research interests include landscape archaeology, the application of GIS and remote sensing, economy and trade, road networks, boundaries, public archaeology and archaeological ethics. |
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| Ian Randall Status: First Year Ian received his B.A. in Anthropology in 2005 and M.A. in the Social Sciences in 2009 from the University of Chicago. His M.A. thesis concentrated on the potential of Port St. Symeon Ware, a 13th century Levantine ceramic, for examining the changing social landscape in the late Crusader States. He has conducted fieldwork on the island of Gotland in Sweden (2004) at the Viking Age Settlement of Frojel as part of a University of Gotland project, at Abydos in Egypt (2006), working on the early 18th Dynasty temple of Queen Ahmose-Nefertary with a team from the University of Chicago, and at Tell Hamoukar in Syria (2010), uncovering Akkadian and Ninevite V industrial levels in the lower town in a joint University of Toronto and University of Chicago excavation. Ian has also worked in the private sector, conducting excavation and survey at Fatumafuti in American Samoa (2005), in central Illinois (2007), and most recently in North Dakota (2011), where he had the opportunity to work with the Three Affiliated Tribes and the Sioux. His current research focuses on early medieval Cyprus, the transitions that occurred in material culture during the Arab-Byzantine Condominium and the Lusignan Dynasty, and the implications this may have for developing a more nuanced picture of the decision making processes that shaped group identity. Ian's other interests include GIS, human osteology, colonial theory, and ceramic consumption. |
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| Timothy Sandiford Status: Third Year Timothy graduated from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 with a B.A. (with Honors) in Archaeology. He then studied for an M.Sc. in Forensic Archaeological Science at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (2004). Since 2005, he has concentrated on a number of projects based in Middle East as a trench supervisor, surveyor, cartographer and GIS technician. These projects include the Greater Abydos Mapping Project, the Shunet el-Zebib Conservation Project, the Kilise Tepe Archaeological Project, the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (2010-present), and the Brown University Abydos Project: Ptolemaic Settlement Site (2009-present). Timothy's research interests are based within the use of urban space, patterns of settlement and migration, and perceived ethnicity within the material culture of the Hellenistic World and especially in regard to Egypt and Bactria. In addition, his interests also encompass the methodology of cartography, GIS and remote sensing as it is applied more broadly across time periods within archaeology. He also has interests relating to the historiography of Egyptology and their relation to what could be termed 'political archaeologies'. |
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| Bradley Sekedat Status: ABD Brad earned a B.A. in Latin and a B.A. in Anthropology from Michigan State University in 2004, and an M.Phil. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford, St. Anne’s College, in 2006. Since 2001, Brad has worked as an excavator, surveyor, and field walker in the United States, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Jordan. At Brown, Brad has pursued further his interest in survey methodology and has developed an interest in reevaluating the relationship between people and the material aspects of sites such as quarries, mines and modified locations in the eastern Mediterranean. His dissertation focuses on the social aspects of small-scale quarries in the Roman period of western Turkey, endeavoring to highlight the integration of resource locations and community practices. He is interested in the long-term use and re-use of space, the overlapping of practices in industrial places, and the interconnections between industries. He is intrigued by the notion of quarries that are also not quarries. |
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| Alexander Smith Status: Third Year Alex graduated from Brandeis University in 2009 with a B.A. in both Classical Archaeology and Anthropology. As an undergraduate, Alex was part of the Boston University Mediterranean Field School in Menorca, Spain from 2007-2009, as well as the American Institute for Roman Culture excavation at the Villa delle Vignacce site in 2008. He also participated in the Classical Artifact Research Center at Brandeis University as both an intern (2007-2008) and a student supervisor (2008-2009). In 2010, Alex was introduced to regional jungle survey in Guatemala with the El Zotz Archaeological Project. He participated in two survey projects during the summer of 2011, the Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat (SLAM) project and the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP). Alex is also one of the co-organizers of the North Eastern Graduate Archaeology Workshop (NEGAW) for 2010 and 2011. His current research interests include the archaeology of Spain, Roman and indigenous interaction, as well as comparative methodologies of regional survey around the world. Some of Alex's other interests include geographic information systems, geophysics, industrial archaeology, and archaeometric applications. |
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| Carolyn Swan Status: ABD Carrie received her B.A. in Classical Archaeology from Dartmouth College in 2002, her M.Sc. in the Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials from University College London in 2004, and her M.A. in Archaeology and Heritage from the University of Leicester in 2005. Her field experience ranges from excavating at Pompeii, to conserving Bronze Age artifacts in Greece, to working on GIS for the pyramid workers' village at the Giza Plateau. Carrie’s major research interest is in the field of archaeological science, exploring how to link materials science research strategies and techniques with archaeological questions and approaches. In chronological and geographical terms, she is interested in the Classical and early Medieval/Islamic periods and the Eastern Mediterranean. Carrie’s dissertation focuses on glass and the glassmaking industry of the Near East during the 7th-12th centuries CE, exploring the technological impact and implications of sociocultural, economic, and political change. |
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| Jason Urbanus Status: ABD Jason earned his B.A. in Classics from Boston College (2000), where he spent time studying archaeology in Italy and worked as a research assistant helping to edit Greek-English translations of ancient works for publication. In 2002 he received his M.A. in Classics from Columbia University, with an emphasis on Latin literature of the early Roman Empire. He entered Brown University in 2003 and has continued to study Latin literature and Roman archaeology. His interests include urbanism in the ancient world, Roman domestic architecture, survey archaeology, GIS, Pompeii, and the Romanization of Iberia, particularly northern Portugal. He is currently working on his dissertation about the transition of the Castro culture of northwest Portugal during the Roman period. He spent four seasons (1998-2002) excavating in Pompeii and has recently spent the last four field seasons (2003-2007) working at the Roman and Iron Age site of Tongobriga, Portugal. He is currently organizing a new project in Tongobriga that will focus on the archaeology of the ancient town and its environs. |
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| Clive Vella Status: Second Year Clive received his B.A (with Honors) in Archaeology from the University of Malta in 2004, and in 2009 completed his M.A with distinction in Archaeology from the same university. His graduate dissertation was the first research-driven study in the Maltese Islands to deal with lithic tools and their subsequent effects on prehistoric interpretation. Between 2008 and 2009, he held a government research grant at the Universita Degli Studi Di Roma "La Sapienza" where he worked on the application of use-wear analysis to lithic assemblages. Clive has numerous years of CRM and post-excavation experience in Malta and the US. He has also participated in research excavations in Southern Italy (Chiancudda 2009 and Coppa Nevigata 2007, 2008, 2009), Gibraltar (2009) and Jordan (2011). He is currently a staff researcher at the Tas-Silg excavation led by the Missione Archeologica Italiana a Malta. He is also studying the extensive lithic material recovered by the Brown University Petra Archaelogical Project in Jordan. His research interests are focused on the Late Neolithic to Late Bronze Age Western Mediterranean, especially offshore islands. He studies the effects of islands on their settlers, subsequent trade, and the act of voyaging. He is also interested in examining prehistoric socio-political processes, which includes proto-urbanism and the organizational set-up of settlements, especially fortified Bronze Age settlements. |
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