Graduate Students
| Lisa Anderson Status: Sixth Year Lisa received her B.A. from the University of Montana-Missoula with a concentration in Latin and Classical Civilizations (2002). With archaeological interests tending toward small finds of all varieties, she has undertaken specialist training in Roman epigraphy (at Brown), ancient numismatics (ANS summer seminar 2006), and human and animal bones in archaeology (at MIT through a Brown exchange). One of her main projects as a graduate student has been assisting with the U.S. Epigraphy Project as the main content provider. Lisa served for three years as secretary of the AIA Narragansett Society. From 2003 on, she has worked as an intern in the Ancient Art Department at the RISD Museum of Art, and she spent fall 2006 volunteering in the archaeology department of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Since arriving at Brown, she has excavated at Gesher, Israel; Tongobriga, Portugal; Tropaeum Traiani, Romania; and Suasa, Italy. Her main interests are Roman archaeology in general, esp. military studies, museology, mortuary archaeology, epigraphy, and numismatics. For her dissertation, Lisa is examining the Roman military community during the empire as expressed through its burial practices. |
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| Erin Christensen Status: Seventh Year Erin finished her B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000 with a double major in Anthropology and Classical Civilizations. Her first excavation, to test the waters, she says, was in Ireland at Mainister Chiarain in 1999. It turned out that archaeology was addictive. Since then Erin has gained extensive excavation experience in the Near East, digging in both Israel (Tel Dor 2000, Gesher 2003 and 2004, and Tel Zahara 2006) and Jordan (The Islamic Jarash Project 2005 and 2006), and swears she’ll never go back to digging where it might rain. Her dissertation focuses on Roman silver picture-plates of the Imperial period, combining anthropological theory, economics, art history, and classical sources, among other things. Like her dissertation, her interests are wide-ranging, including urbanism, emulation and art, cross-cultural exchange, numismatics, Roman Britain, and the Roman Near East. |
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| Sarah Dawson Status: Fourth Year Sarah obtained a double B.A. in Classics and French from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2003. Before joining JIAAW, she studied at the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille in Aix-en-Provence, France, specializing in Classics and French Literature. Sarah's fieldwork includes two seasons in Portugal at Tongobriga, an early Roman settlement. In 2005, she excavated in south-central England at Silchester, a multi-period Roman settlement. In 2006, she attended the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Sarah has recently returned from Greece, where she worked at Kenchreai, a Greek multi-period burial site. She is currently preparing her dissertation on negative evidence, cultural change, and the Visigoths in France and Spain. Other interests include Late Antique Gaul, mortuary studies, paleopathology, and sanitation. She is concurrently pursuing an M.A. in Classics at Brown University, with a thesis entitled “Epicurean Thought in Horace’s Satires and Epistles.” |
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| Alex Knodell Status: First Year Alex received a B.A. with honors in 2007 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he majored in Classics, Classical Humanities, and Anthropology. He also had the opportunity to participate in the Summer Session with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in the summer of 2006, and worked on the JIAAW’s excavation at Tongobriga, Portugal in the summer of 2007. While broadly interested in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology, his primary fields of research interest are Aegean Prehistory and trans-Mediterranean interaction through the Bronze Age and into the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, particularly cross-cultural exchanges and domestic use and interpretation of these exchanges. His interests also include Greek (language, archaeology and people), the Mediterranean in general, and Mount Olympus. |
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| Thomas Leppard Status: First Year Tom graduated from the University of St. Andrews with a degree in Ancient History and Archaeology (2006). He was awarded an MA with Distinction in Aegean Archaeology from the University of Sheffield, to be conferred in January 2008. His thesis addressed continuity and change in Laconia in the period 1100-900 BCE, with a particular emphasis on examining repeated ritual practice within a defined landscape. He has excavated in the UK, Greece and Italy, and in 2007 initiated a small-scale extensive field survey in the Abruzzo, Italy, under the auspices of the Sangro Valley Project. Tom’s main research interests relate to Mediterranean landscape archaeology, especially the prehistoric and early historic Aegean, but also Italy and the Eastern Mediterranean. Within the context of landscape archaeology he is particularly interested in the study of memory and identity, and of their material manifestations. He also has interests relating to the archaeology of complex societies in general, to archaeological theory and method (particularly survey), and to the Western reception of Greece in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. |
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| Katherine Marino Status: Fourth Year Kate came to the JIAAW in 2004 after graduating from Yale with a B.A. in Classical Civilization. Her senior thesis was concerned with the potential efficacy of contraceptives and abortifacients in the Graeco-Roman World. She currently digs at Tongobriga, Portugal and has done survey work in the Duchessa National Park in Italy, as well as conservation and analysis work of Inka textiles in Arequipa, Peru. Her research interests include mortuary studies, ancient craft technology, archaeological theory, and the prehistory of Europe, although she is primarily a Romanist. Currently she is beginning work on her dissertation, on the mortuary landscapes of Northern Portugal from the Bronze Age through the Roman period, and is writing her Master’s thesis in Classics at Brown. In addition, she works at the RISD Museum analyzing and cataloguing their Coptic textile collection and is the current secretary of the Narragansett chapter of the AIA. She is also the Instructor for Brown's field school: "The Archaeology of College Hill." |
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| Lyra Monteiro Status: Fourth Year 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: First Year Claudia graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Classical Archaeology and Classics (2006). During this past year, 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. She has participated in excavations and post-excavation analysis in San Venanzo, Italy and in Akrotiri, Greece. 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. Claudia’s main research interests include the field of Roman religion, 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. |
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| Bradley Sekedat Status: Second Year 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. His M.Phil thesis, entitled “Cultural Identity, Settlement and Land Use in Central Italy," uses survey data to analyze changes in the social organization of central Italian landscapes between the pre-Roman and Roman periods. Since beginning at Brown, Brad has broadened his interest in survey and archaeological landscapes. Building on his excavation experience in Aztalan, Wisconsin, and in the southern Abruzzo, Italy with the Sangro Valley Project, Brad has participated in projects in central Turkey and in Greece looking at social relationships with Hittite rock relief sites and the mechanisms by which archaeologists synthesize diverse landscapes, respectively. Now in his second year at Brown, Brad hopes to continue studying the broader implications of landscapes as an integral part of the cultural experience. |
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| Carolyn Swan Status: Second Year Carrie obtained her B.A. in Classical Archaeology from Dartmouth College in 2002. Before coming to Brown she earned two Master's degrees in the UK: an M.Sc. in the Technology and Analysis of Archaeological Materials (UCL 2004) and an M.A. in Archaeology and Heritage (U. Leicester 2005). Her field experience ranges from excavating at Pompeii, to conserving Bronze Age artifacts in Greece, to working on the GIS for the pyramid workers' village at the Giza Plateau. Carrie’s primary research interest is archaeological science, specifically the use of material analytical techniques to explore the technology and change of production in ancient high-temperature industries (glass, metals, and ceramics). The transition from the Late Antique to Early Islamic period is of key interest to her. Since beginning her studies at Brown, Carrie has become more interested in Islamic archaeology, in particular the “peripheral” regions of the Muslim world such as al-Andalus, the Maghrib of North Africa, and the Silk Road region of Central Asia. |
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| Christopher Tuttle Status: Eighth Year Christopher finished his B.A. in Classical Studies summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts-Boston in 1997, after completing most of his studies at Boston University between 1985-1994. His undergraduate work focused on ancient mystery cults from the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. Upon commencing his doctoral program he chose to shift his area of research to the Middle East, to explore the period of transition between the end of the independent Hellenistic kingdoms and the rise of Roman hegemony in the region. His current work focuses on the Nabataeans, who were the last independent kingdom in the area to be absorbed by the Romans. His dissertation will present an analysis of the possible functions and meanings of Nabataean terracotta figurines. He has worked in Israel/Palestine on both excavations and surveys (Qumran, Ramat Hanadiv, Khirbet Jiljil, Jerusalem, Tzuba, Sepphoris, Mizpe Ramon, Mampsis, Sobeita). In Jordan he has excavated with the French at Khirbet es-Samra and as a trench supervisor on the Brown University Petra Great Temple project for its final three seasons. Christopher currently resides in Amman, Jordan, where he works as the Assistant Director of the American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) while completing his doctoral dissertation. |
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| Jason Urbanus Status: Fifth Year 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, 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, investigating the development and evolution of a city block, and has recently spent the last three field seasons (2003-2006) working at the Roman and Iron Age site of Tongobriga, Portugal. |
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| Cecelia Feldman Weiss Status: Third Year Cecelia received a B.A. in Archaeology and Art History from Tufts University (2003). After graduation she moved to Rome, where she worked for two years at an American tour company educating people about the art, history, and archaeology of the eternal city. Her field experience includes Caesarea Maritima (2000), Ostia Antica (2005), and Pompeii (2001-2006). Since entering the JIAAW in 2005, she has worked on conceptualizing and implementing the exhibit Believing Africa at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and continues to pursue an additional curriculum in the public humanities. Her main interests include dress, adornment, hygiene, and body modification, particularly as these relate to personal and cultural identity within the sphere of Roman expansion and colonization. |
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