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Main Conference Schedule, Abstracts and Handouts

This page is a work in progress as participants and speakers submit information.

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Everyone attending will have an opportunity to share ideas and interact with other participants (if they so desire).

Lea Beness is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient History and a member of the Centre for Ancient Cultural Heritage and Environment (CACHE) at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Classical and Near Eastern Studies of Australia (CCANESA) at the University of Sydney. She is Vice-President of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies (ASCS) and President of the Australasian Women in Ancient World Studies (AWAWS). Her research interests and publications focus on Roman Republican History (particularly the political world of the mid to late Republic), gender in the Graeco-Roman world and landscape/harbour archaeology (specifically a project focused on the location and mapping of the harbour of ancient Torone in northern Greece). She is also one of the chief investigators of the Macquarie Dictionary of Roman Biography.

Hamish Cameron is a Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. He works on space and it’s representation in the ancient world, especially in the Roman Near East. His book, Making Mesopotamia: Geography and Imperialism in an Romano-Iranian Borderland deals with the representation of regional space in imperial geographic writing. Among his ongoing projects is a student-focused digital reconstruction of Dura Europos.

Jocelin Chan, University of Sydney

Virginia (Ginna) Closs is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research focuses primarily on Latin literature and Roman cultural history during the early imperial period, with a particular interest in how Latin texts reflect notions of material culture, urban space, and temporality. Her first book, entitled, While Rome Burned: Fire, Leadership, and Urban Disaster in the Roman Cultural Imagination (University of Michigan Press, 2020), examines the role of fire as a metaphor for political instability in literary texts from the mid-first century BCE through the early second century CE. She also recently completed work on a co-edited volume entitled Urban Disasters and the Roman Imagination (De Gruyter, 2020). Faculty Profile.

Hannah Cornwell: (she/her) is a lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Birmingham. She has published on the ideology of peace during civil war of the late Republic and its development into an imperial ideal. She continues to work on ideas of civil conflict, as well as diplomatic space in the Republican and early Imperial periods. For more information, see her faculty profile, or find her on Twitter.

Penelope J. E. Davies is a Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. Specializing in the architectural history of ancient Rome, she is author of Death and the Emperor (Cambridge University Press 2000, University of Texas Press 2004) and Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome (Cambridge University Press 2017). She has also written numerous articles and essays in scholarly publications, and collaborated on re-conceptions of Janson’s History of Art (seventh and eight editions, Prentice-Hall 2007 and 2011) and Janson’s A Basic History of Art (eighth and ninth editions, Prentice Hall 2009 and 2013). Current projects include two book projects, Ancient Lives of Roman Buildings and Architecture and Regime Change in Ancient Rome, and the co-edited Cambridge Urban History of Europe. Faculty Profile.

Allison Emmerson is an assistant professor of Classical Studies at Tulane University. She studies ancient cities and is particularly interested in marginal spaces and activities, including waste management and the treatment of the dead. She is the author of Life and Death in the Roman Suburb (2020). For more information, see her faculty webpage.

M. Cristina de la Escosura is a post-doctoral researcher in Ancient History at the University of Zaragoza with the Research Group HIBERUS . Her research focuses on Epigraphy, Onomastics, Citizenship, and Administration in the Late Republic. She is part of the Epigraphy.info community. Further details are available on her university webpage.

Diane Favro is Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. Her publications include The Urban Image of Augustan Rome (CUP 1996) and most recently Roman Architecture and Urban Design (co-authored with Fikret Yegül, CUP 2019) which received the Prose Excellence Award as best reference work of 2020. In addition, she is known for influential early digital visualizations and studies of gender in architecture as well as writings on ancient architecture, urban laws, the experience of Roman cities, and architectural history methods. Among various honors she was named Samuel H. Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art, Resident at the American Academy in Rome, and Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. Dr. Favro served as Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, for the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture and President of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Zoe Fox is a PhD student in Classics, Archaeology, and Ancient History at the University of Birmingham. She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College and her MA from UCLA. Her research compares the demolition, reconfiguration, and reception of the Roman urban landscape during the Augustan and Fascist periods. Select Publications.

Rachael Goldman is a Lecturer in General Studies at Kean University. She received her Ph.D. in Ancient History at the City University of New York. She has published on Global Ancient Color and the Perceptions of Color in Ancient History. She is writing a history of slaves and freedmen with Color-terms for names. Select Publications. Faculty Profile.

Zachary Herz is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is particularly interested in the role of law in legitimating ideology of the late Principate, but also works in Imperial political history more broadly. His dog is currently ill. Faculty Profile. Select Publications.

Tom Hillard is an Honorary Associate Professor within the Discipline of Ancient History in the Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, New South Wales, Australia. His chief research interests are in Roman social history and the politics of the Roman Republic.

Emily Hurt is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University studying cultural memory in cities destroyed by the Romans in the Republican Period.

Gregor Kalas is an associate professor of architectural history and the Riggsby Director of the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His interests include examining the reuse of ancient buildings during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. He is the author of The Reconstruction of the Roman Forum in Late Antiquity (University of Texas Press, 2015).

Isabel Köster is an assistant professor of Classics at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her main interests are in Roman religion, imperialism, and Ciceronian insults. Faculty Profile.

Alina Kozlovski is a Curatorial Assistant at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and a Research Affiliate at the University of Sydney. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge which explored how the Romans of the late republican and early imperial period curated their past using material remains, focusing on themes of ruins and architectural reconstruction. More recently she completed a postdoc at the British School at Rome where she researched the history of how stories of regal Rome have been presented in museum spaces. Find her on Twitter.  Select Publications.

Chris Kraus works on Latin prose, particularly historiography, and on the commentary form. She teaches at Yale. Faculty Profile. Select Publications.

Ann Kuttner is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on and teaches Hellenistic, Roman and Late Antique objects, images, and designed space and structure, and has broad interests in the cultures of the Mediterranean world; those include social and political histories, and forms of duration, memory, and mutability. Faculty Profile.

Lynne C. Lancaster is a Professor in the Department of Classics and World Religions at Ohio University currently serving as Mellon Professor in Charge of the Humanities at the American Academy in Rome. Her research focus is on ancient construction technology. She is the author of Concrete Vaulted Construction in Imperial Rome: Innovations in Context (Cambridge 2005) and Innovative Vaulting in the Architecture of the Roman Empire, 1st-4th centuries CE (Cambridge 2015). She has published numerous articles on major monuments in Rome and the Roman Empire.  Select Publications.

Antonio Lopez Garcia (PhD, History and Archaeology of the Ancient World, 2014) is a postdoctoral researcher of ‘Law, Governance and Space’ (SpaceLaw), a project funded by the European Research Council based in the Centre for European Studies at the University of Helsinki. He teaches Roman Topography and Roman Administration at the Faculty of Humanities. He is currently researching the physical spaces of Roman administration from the republican period to the Late Antiquity in the Urbs. His first book Los Auditoria de Adriano y el Athenaeum de Roma based on his award-winning doctoral thesis about the halls discovered around the Forum of Trajan in Rome was published in 2015 in Florence. Recently, he has been working on the spaces for meetings and tribunals in Rome and has discovered the remains of a Roman road in Guadix (Granada, Spain). Further information is available on his faculty webpage.

Ayelet Haimson Lushkov is Associate Professor of Classics at UT-Austin. She specializes in Roman historiography, the ways that Roman historians told the stories of their own past. She is the author of Magistracy and the Historiography of the Roman Republic: Politics in Prose (CUP, 2015), You Win or You Die: The Ancient World of Game of Thrones (Bloomsbury, 2017) and co-editor of Reception and the Classics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition (CUP, 2012), as well as a number of articles on Livy, historiography, political theory, classical reception, and Latin literature. Her work has also appeared in USA Today, the Guardian, Women’s E-News, Independent, BBC History Extra, Eidolon, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and has been featured on UT News, Refinery 29, El Pais (Spain), and NPR. She is currently working on a monograph on Livy’s poetics of citation, as well as developing an interest in the state of the humanities and in the working conditions of academic motherhood. In 2020-21, she is also a public fellow of the Op-Ed Project. She wishes she had a professional website. Faculty Page. Select Publications.

Dominik Maschek, Associate Professor of Roman Archaeology and Art, University of Oxford. A trained Classical archaeologist, his research covers a wide array of topics from Archaic Greece to the Roman Empire, with a special focus on late Republican architecture and material culture in Rome and central Italy. His latest book is Die römischen Bürgerkriege: Archäologie und Geschichte einer Krisenzeit (Philipp von Zabern 2018).  Further information is available on his faculty webpage.

Katrina Moore is a PhD student at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her focus is on gender and the construction of identity in the late Roman Republic and early Principate. She has a forthcoming Routledge companion chapter entitled ‘Octavia Minor and Patronage.’ is a PhD student at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her focus is on gender and the construction of identity in the late Roman Republic and early Principate. She has a forthcoming Routledge companion chapter entitled ‘Octavia Minor and Patronage.’

Madeleine Nelson, University of Pennsylvania.

Carlos Noreña is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently working on a project on law and imperialism in the Roman Republic, and has published on (and maintains interests in!) the topography and cityscape of Rome. Faculty Page.

Eric Orlin is Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the University of Puget Sound. He earned his BA from Yale and his PhD from the Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests lie at the intersection of Roman Republican history and Roman religion. He is the author of Temples, Religion and Politics in the Roman Republic (1997) and Foreign Cults in Rome: Creating a Roman Empire (2010), and served as general editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions (2014). He is also a co-founder of the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions.  Faculty Profile.

Eileen Panetta is a retired English professor currently studying archaeology at Hunter College, CUNY.

Danielle Perry is a PhD student in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania studying the intersection of religion and politics in the Roman Empire and the political power of marginalized social groups.

Katie Robinson, Interim Chair, National Committee for Latin and Greek; Retired from 40 years teaching Latin; National Language Advocate; Lifelong Learner; Interests in archeology, STEM, young learners, outreach, teacher recruitment and mentoring.

Jordan Rogers is a PhD candidate in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation project, titled “Vicinitas in Urbe: Neighborliness and Urban Community in Republican Rome,” examines the shifting perceptions of urban neighboring at Rome during the Middle Republic as a function of the city’s material and demographic growth. More information is available on his university page.

Marguerite Ronin is a Research Fellow at the CNRS in Paris. After a joint PhD in Nantes (France) and Université Laval (Québec), she was a Topoi post-doc fellow in Berlin and a Marie-Curie post-doc fellow in Oxford. She is interested in the management of natural resources within the legal framework of the Roman Empire. On that line, she’s been (and still is) writing on water and hydraulic risks, in rural as well as in urban contexts, and has recently turned her attention towards urban risks and the complicated interactions between neighbours during the process of construction, maintenance and demolition of buildings and infrastructures. Select Publications.

John Sigmier is a PhD candidate in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World program at the University of Pennsylvania. His research deals with the transmission of architectural knowledge in the Roman Mediterranean.

Riley Snyder is currently based at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering as a Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust funded Earthen Empire project. His research focuses on the energetics of building in earthen materials, which stems from his previous research on late-antique Ravenna and Constantinople where he specialised in the technological change, environmental reliance, and economic impact of lime mortar within large-scale masonry construction projects. is currently based at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Engineering as a Research Fellow on the Leverhulme Trust funded Earthen Empire project. His research focuses on the energetics of building in earthen materials, which stems from his previous research on late-antique Ravenna and Constantinople where he specialised in the technological change, environmental reliance, and economic impact of lime mortar within large-scale masonry construction projects.

Diana Spencer is Professor of Classics and Dean of Libera Arts and Natural Sciences at the University of Birmingham. She is interested in what we think Romans thought about themselves (as reflected in texts), how they conceptualized themselves as a people, and responded to (and were shaped by) the world they lived in. This is evident in her recent monograph on Varro (Language and Authority in De Lingua Latine: Varro’s Guide to Being Roman), and informs her current interest in the expression of experience of place and materiality in metal and stone in the late Republic and Augustan Principate. She enjoys investigating how identity and cultural politics are manifest through narratives emphasising space, territory, cultivation of place, and ethos (see e.g. Roman Landscape: Culture and Identity; The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory). She works on authors and texts fascinated by the built environment, but also engaged in interrogation of what “self”, “nature”, and “wild” mean, and why. This interest has developed into work touching on biophilia and ecocriticism, as well as object-oriented ontology.  Link to further information.

Melanie Ashton Trump is a recent undergraduate from USF interested in the use of epigraphy in constructing the memory of space, particularly in the early Roman West. She endeavors to use interdisciplinary methods in research of the ancient Mediterranean, using both language and material culture to understand dialogue within a space. Outside of ancient Mediterranean studies, she composes music and poetry.

Jean Vanden Broeck-Parant is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Utrecht. I’m interested in Greek monumental architecture and more specifically in ancient restorations and the organization of construction sites. For more on his work see the Sacrality and the Greek Polis website and the Emblema: Architectural Restorations in the Ancient Mediterranean website.

Henriette van der Blom, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, University of Birmingham. Further information is available on her faculty webpage .

Gavin Weaire teaches in the Classics Department at Hillsdale College. He was born in the United States, but grew up in Scotland and (mostly) in Ireland. Early in his career, he thought of himself as a Latinist who intended to work on Roman oratory and historiography, but one thing led to another, and he turned out to be a Hellenist who works on later Greek prose. But intellectually, he still spends most of his time in the first century B.C. He has been responsible for a modest number of articles, mostly on Dionysius of Halicarnassus (yes, he is that interesting), and also on Plutarch and Polybius. He is currently working on a book on Sallust.

Lewis Webb is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. His postdoctoral project is entitled “(In)visible women: Female spatial practices and visibility in urban spaces in Republican Rome (509–27 BCE)” and is funded by the Swedish Research Council (2020–2022). His research interests include gender, law, religion, and space in Republican Rome. With Irene Selsvold, he has just published an edited volume in the TRAC Themes in Roman Archaeology series entitled Beyond the Romans: Posthuman Perspectives in Roman Archaeology (Oxbow, 2020). He is currently working on a new monograph Senatorial women in Mid-Republican Rome for Bloomsbury. Find him on Twitter.

Mantha Zarmakoupi is the Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor in Roman architecture and urbanism in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published widely on Roman luxury villas, including the monograph Designing for Luxury on the Bay of Naples (c. 100 BCE – 79 CE): Villas and Landscapes (Oxford UP 2014) and edited volume The Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum: Archaeology, Reception, and Digital Reconstruction (De Gruyter 2010), as well as on the architecture, harbor infrastructure and urban development of late Hellenistic Delos. She currently co-directs underwater fieldwork surveys around Delos and Levitha. She is also working on two book projects, on Roman Landscape: Eco-critical approaches to Roman Italy and on the urban growth of late Hellenistic and Roman Delos. Further information is available on her faculty webpage.