Felipe Rojas
Postdoctoral Fellow in Archaeology
Phone: (401) 863-6292
Email: felipe_rojas@brown.edu
Biography
I received a BA in architecture from Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, an MA in classical philology from Harvard, and a PhD in classical archaeology from Berkeley.
My interests in the ancient world are diverse, but I specialize primarily in the art and archaeology of the Roman East. I am particularly interested in how different communities in Roman Anatolia reimagined and redeployed archaic material remains to articulate their visions of the local past; in my dissertation, for example, I studied individuals and communities in Roman Sardis who re-used Lydian artifacts to celebrate Lydian, Persian, and Jewish narratives about antiquity.
For the past decade I have conducted fieldwork at various sites in Asia Minor and the Levant, including Sardis, Aphrodisias, and most recently, Petra. In addition to excavating and surveying, a great deal of my fieldwork has been devoted to the graphic documentation of archaeological information. While in Turkey I worked primarily on monumental architecture (including an archaic Lydian altar and a provincial Roman temple), my work in Jordan involves giving a sense of the landscape while recording fairly modest scattered interventions (e.g. wine-presses, cisterns and check-dams) over vast stretches of territory. I am interested in producing images that are archaeologically precise and visually compelling.
As a result of my varied training, I want to promote dialogue between scholarly communities that frequently work more or less independently of each other. I hope to encourage archaeologists, philologists, and architects to encroach on each other’s disciplines and usurp each other’s methodologies.
At Brown I will be teaching a class that combines literary and archaeological approaches to the Second Sophistic and another on social meaning and technical process in ancient architecture.
CURRICULUM VITAE
