Graduate Students
| Emanuela Bocancea Status: ABD Emanuela received a B.A. (First Class Honours) in Classical Studies (2007) and an M.A. in Classical Archaeology (2009) from the University of Alberta. She has surveyed and excavated on land at Hellenistic Kastro-Kallithea (Greece) and Roman Porolissum (Romania), and has surveyed underwater in the Roman harbour of Sanitja (Menorca, Spain). Currently she is excavating and surveying in Jordan with the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP), and on Montserrat (British West Indies), with the Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat (SLAM) project. Emanuela's research interests are eclectic and broadly include archaeological approaches to colonialism, archaeological theory and ethics, Greek and Latin epigraphy, Roman social history, and the intersections between classical and historical archaeologies. She has a longstanding engagement with the Roman cult of Mithras, which is the focus of previous and ongoing research projects. Emanuela is currently working on a dissertation that examines and theorizes Roman conquest, colonialism, and colonisation at the height of Roman imperial expansion, through a project focused on the frontier provinces of Dacia and Arabia. |
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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 2008-2010 in Çorum province, Turkey, working on the GIS for the Avkat Archaeological Project. She received a critical language scholarship (CLS) from the US State Department to learn Turkish in Ankara, Turkey, in the summer of 2007, then worked as an intern for the Collaboratory for GIS and Mediterranean Archaeology (CGMA) at DePauw. In 2012, she joined the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (BUPAP) team. Her dissertation project, begun as a 2011 summer fellowship in Byzantine Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, and tentatively entitled "Dynamic Landscapes: Travel Infrastructure and Early Christian Pilgrimage," explores the intersection of landscape archaeology, GIS technology, and contemporary texts in understanding how and with what impact people moved through their landscapes, with a particular focus on the late Roman and early Byzantine landscapes of Anatolia. As a Junior Fellow at Koç University's Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (RCAC) in Istanbul, Turkey, for the 2012-13 academic year, she is continuing her investigation of how travel infrastructure 'on the ground' shaped -- and was in turn shaped by -- the practice of pilgrimage itself. |
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| Andrew Dufton Status: Second 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). Since coming to Brown, he has participated in the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project, the Pantelleria Excavation Project, and the Tunisian-British Utica 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 and rural/urban in Roman 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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| Pinar Durgun Status: First Year Pinar graduated from Bilkent University's Archaeology Department in 2010. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as a short-term intern at the Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara (2009) and participated in the Ephesus Crisler Library Archaeology Camp (2009). Her field experience includes one season at Kinet Hoyuk (2008), and she has been part of the Bilkent University excavation project Hacimusalar since 2009. She receieved her MA from Koc University's Archaeology Department's Anatolian Civilizations and Cultural Heritage Management Program with the concentration area "Archaeology and Archaeological Sciences" (İstanbul-Turkey). Although her interests include cultural heritage management, as well as Anatolian and Aegean Prehistory, her primary interest is prehistoric mortuary practice. Her MA thesis focuses on the theoretical and practical approaches to the Anatolian Early Bronze Age site Demircihöyuk's cemetery, settlement and social organization. Pinar is a Fulbright grantee for 2012-2013. |
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| Müge Durusu-Tanriover Status: ABD 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 joined Brown in 2010, and was a Fulbright grantee for the 2010-2012 academic years. 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), in Konya as part of the Brown University Yalburt Project (2011-2012), and in Manisa with the Boston University team for the CLAS project (2012). Müge's current research focuses on the second millennium BCE in Anatolia, trying to work through the interplay of material culture, architectural space, and texts. She is particularly interested in the potential of the urban space in this endeavour, and is working on issues such as organization, circulation, and use of space in Hittite cities as well as the links between the urban environments and their contextual landscapes. Her other interests include archaeological theory, heritage ethics, and landscape archaeology. |
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| Linda R. Gosner Status: ABD Linda received her undergraduate degrees from the University of Arizona, including an Honors B.A. in Classics and Anthropology with minors in Spanish and Near Eastern Studies (2008), and an Honors B.F.A. in Dance (2007). After college, she spent a year in Portugal as a Fulbright scholar researching 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 Jordan – most recently with Brown's projects in Petra and Abydos. Linda studies Roman art and archaeology, with research interests in the technological and social aspects of production, trade and the ancient economy, household archaeology, and material culture (including issues of memory and object biographies). She has a growing fascination with Roman-period mining and metallurgy in Iberia. 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. Other general interests include museum studies, archaeological ethics and theory, and archaeometry. |
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| Katherine Harrington Status: ABD 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 analyzing Classical and Hellenistic 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. Katherine has done fieldwork in Greece, including five seasons with the Athenian agora excavations (2005-09) and one season at the Sanctuary of Ismenian Apollo in Thebes (2012). She has also worked in Jordan with the Brown University Petra Archaeological Project (2010-11) and in the Caribbean with Brown's Survey and Landscape Archaeology on Montserrat project (2011). Katherine's research focuses on the archaeology of the Greek world during the Archaic through Hellenistic periods. Specifically, she is interested in domestic space and household archaeology, as well as craft production and the domestic economy. Her dissertation will investigate the intersections of these two topics in the sphere of household industry and domestic production. Katherine's other interests include archaeological science, digging circular features and floor surfaces, and dig dogs. |
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| Alex Knodell Status: Degree to Be Conferred May 2013 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: Degree to Be Conferred May 2013 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, 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 also in the Caribbean, where he currently works on Montserrat. He also 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 is currently writing his dissertation, the working title of which is "The Logics of Island Life: The Archaeology of Movement, Distance, and Settlement in the Neolithic Aegean and Ceramic Age Lesser Antilles." He remains fascinated by all things insular. |
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| Kathryn McBride Status: Second Year In 2006 Kathryn received a B.A. in History and Ancient Mediterranean Studies from Coe College in Iowa. She studied Egyptology for a semester at the American University in Cairo, also visiting sites throughout the country. Her honors thesis at Coe focused on the ethnic and cultural relationships within Ptolemaic Egypt. She graduated with an M.A. in Classics with an emphasis on archaeology from the University of Arizona in 2008, and her Master's thesis there 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. Fieldwork has taken her to Greece, Egypt, Jordan, and most recently Turkey. Kathryn's main research interests include 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 and osteology. |
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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 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, altars, 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 based in Rome for the 2012-2013 academic year, working on her dissertation entitled "Material Witnesses: The Altars of Republican Rome and Latium and the Memory of Sacrifice." |
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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. She has done fieldwork in Belize, Ukraine, and southern Italy at Metaponto and Croton with the Institute of Classical Archaeology (University of Texas). She currently conducts fieldwork as a member of the topography team in the excavations of Gabii in northern Latium, Italy. Her research interests at the site focus on urban development during the Orientalizing period as well as how digital techniques of three-dimensional recording, especially close-range photogrammetry, can create an entirely new documentary record. She is now working on her dissertation, tentatively titled "Reorienting Orientalization: Local Consumption and Value Construction in Central Italy between the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Sea". This work explores the ways in which local Italian populations actively incorporated eastern materials through inland trade networks that cross the central Apennines between the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic coasts. It focuses on investigating the entire funerary context instead of isolating 'exotica', entire cemeteries instead of solely elite tombs, and the interior Italian landscape rather than only the costal contact zone. Her broader research interests include culture contact and postcolonial theory, landscape archaeology, the application of GIS and remote sensing, theories of value and exchange, public archaeology and archaeological ethics. |
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| Ian Randall Status: Second 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, to shed light on the changing social landscape of 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, 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, and in the Athenian Agora working on the Byzantine levels (2012). 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 worked 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, postcolonial theory, and ceramic consumption. |
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| Timothy Sandiford Status: Fourth 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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| Alexander Smith Status: ABD 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 has since returned to work with the Boston University team in Menorca as a survey specialist, completing the first season of systematic survey in and around the site of Torre D'en Galmes in 2012. His main research interests include the archaeology of Spain, Roman and indigenous interaction, theories of colonization and imperialism, 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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| Catherine Steidl Status: First Year Catie graduated from Wesleyan University in 2011 with a B.A. in both Archaeology (Honors) and German Studies. Her honors thesis there addressed the difficulties with the various interpretations of the Korai on the Athenian Acropolis, and the possible social implication of their dedication during the Greek Archaic period. She spent a field school season with the UCLA Cotsen Institute in Pucará, Peru, excavating at a continuously inhabited site in search of more remains from the pre-Incan Pukara culture. After graduating, she spent a summer working on artifacts from St. Catherine's Island (Georgia, U.S.) in the North American Archaeology Lab at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Before beginning graduate school, Catie spent a year at the University of Tübingen on the Connecticut—Baden-Württemberg Exchange Scholarship, where she studied Latin, Ancient Greek, and a variety of archaeological topics. Her interests include Greek vase painting, sculpture, the archaeology of women and gender in the ancient world, and museum theory and ethics (including the ethics of repatriation). |
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| Jennifer Thum Status: First Year Jen received her B.A. in Archaeology (Honors) from Barnard College/Columbia University in 2009, with a thesis focusing on modern viewership of Graeco-Roman mummy portraiture from Egypt; and her M.Phil. in Egyptology (Distinction) from the University of Oxford in 2012, as a Clarendon Scholar with a dissertation on Late Period sacred animal "reliquaries". As an undergraduate, Jen interned with both the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Archaeology Department at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Before beginning at Oxford, she spent a year split between the registration department (RCMDD) at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and the Pleiades Project at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (NYU). Jen has excavated with the Megiddo Expedition at Tel Megiddo, Israel, since 2006, where she is a registrar. Her other field experience includes two seasons with the Jezreel Valley Regional Project, Israel, two seasons with the Amheida Project in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt, and two seasons with the Athienou Archaeological Project in Athienou-Malloura, Cyprus. Jen's interests include archaeological science for small finds, depictions of the human physiognomy in ancient art, Egyptian cult practices, the "Late Ramesside Letters", panel-painting in Graeco-Roman Egypt, and Coptic art. |
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| Jason Urbanus Status: Degree to Be Conferred May 2013 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: Third 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- 2009), Gibraltar (2009) and Jordan (2011-2012). 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 and emergent social complexity, which includes proto-urbanism and especially fortified Bronze Age settlements. |
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