A Digital Humanities initiative that hosts free, open-access resources for teaching and learning about real people in the ancient world and the people who study them.
Carolyn M. Laferrière
Carolyn M. Laferrière is the Assistant Curator of Ancient Mediterranean Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Center for the Premodern World at the University of Southern California and a Postdoctoral Associate with Archaia, Yale University’s program for the interdisciplinary study of the ancient world, as well as a Lecturer in the Departments of the History of Art and of Classics. She earned her Ph.D. in 2017 from Yale in the Department of the History of Art. Her current book project, Seeing the Songs of the Gods: Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art, examines the significance of divine music in ancient Greek art, exploring how musical sounds are communicated in a visual medium and the effect that images of the gods’ performance had upon ancient viewers. Her publications have appeared in Classical Antiquity and Greek and Roman Musical Studies, as well as in various edited volumes. She is currently working on a number of articles that discuss representations of female dancers on Greek vases, the intersection of gesture and space on relief sculpture, and the depiction of black-figure vases embedded within red-figure painted scenes. Her second book project will explore the rolesensation and memory play in representing the deceased and in conceptualizing the relationship between the living and the dead. In 2018-19 she curated Sights and Sounds of Ancient Ritual, an exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, which took a cross-cultural approach to its investigation into the sensory experience of ancient ritual practice by focusing upon objects created and used by premodern worshippers in the Mediterranean, China, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific region.
Chelsea A.M. Gardner
Chelsea A.M. Gardner is an Associate Professor of Ancient History at Acadia University. She earned her PhD in Classics with a specialization in Classical Archaeology at the University of British Columbia. She has worked on archaeological projects in Canada, Bulgaria, Greece, and Iraqi Kurdistan and is currently the co-director of the CARTography Project and the new Southern Mani Archaeological Project. Her research focuses primarily on the history, archaeology, and identity of the inhabitants of the ancient Mani peninsula in Lakonia, Greece, and her work has appeared in Hesperia, thersites, Mouseion, the Journal of Greek Archaeology, ZPE, and the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. She is currently working on two book projects: Journey to the End of the World: Tainaron in Classical Antiquity, and Following in the Footsteps of the Leigh Fermors. She is also active in the fields of Digital Humanities and Pedagogy, with publications appearing in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Journal for Interactive Teaching and Pedagogy, and the Debates in the Digital Humanities series. When she isn’t podcasting, she runs the Women in Antiquity project and is a Wikipedia Scholar. She has also appeared in documentary series’ for PBS and National Geographic, and has been featured in Nature magazine for her work with stray dogs in Greece.
Christine L. Johnston
Christine Johnston is an Assistant Professor of Ancient Mediterranean History at Western Washington University, and a Natural Environment Area Editor for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a focus on the Archaeology of Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, and the Near East. She currently works with the Kissonerga-Skalia field project in Western Cyprus, but has also excavated in Israel and Turkey, as well as Vancouver, Canada. Her research centres on the cultures and history of the Ancient Mediterranean world, particularly on economic exchange and cross-cultural interaction. She employs historical, anthropological, and network methodology to examine political economy and exchange systems in the eastern Mediterranean, particularly the roles of non-institutional actors and extra-palatial trade networks. Current research articles in preparation examine changes in production communities during periods of sociopolitical change in Western Cyprus, and analyze the relationship between political and economic institutions and the distribution of imported goods in both Cyprus and Egypt. In addition to the study of political economy, she is active in research on environmental and climate change in Ancient Egypt with colleagues from the University of British Columbia, and co-edited a recent volume on Ancient Egypt and the Environment. She also engages in research on cultural heritage protection and the pedagogical value of integrating legacy material collections in the classroom, and is working on a project with graduate students that explores strategies of increasing classroom accessibility through the incorporation of 3D printed objects. Since 2017 she has been a volunteer instructor at the North Shore ElderCollege, running short courses each spring on different cultures of the ancient world for retired learners.
Megan Daniels
Megan Daniels is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek Material Culture in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia. She obtained her PhD in Classics from Stanford University, her M.A from UBC, and B.A. Hons. from Wilfrid Laurier University. As an archaeologist and ceramic analyst she has worked on excavations around the Mediterranean world as well as in Canada and Bermuda. Her love of teaching and travel has also led to stints teaching English in China and Vietnam, and she most recently taught ancient Greek and Egyptian/Near Eastern history at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia. Following completion of her PhD, Megan was the Redford Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Puget Sound. She then took up another postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology at SUNY-Buffalo. Her research focuses on migration, religion, and cross-cultural interaction in the Mediterranean world, and she is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how people moved, interacted, and worshipped. Her current monograph project examines ideologies of divine kingship in the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia over the late Bronze and Iron Age, and how these ideologies were shaped through the myths and rituals of numerous interacting cultural groups over these periods. Other publications include the edited volume Homo Migrans: Modeling Mobility and Migration in Human History and the forthcoming co-edited volume, Data Science, Human Science, and Ancient Gods: Conversations in Theory and Method.
Melissa Funke
Melissa Funke is Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Winnipeg and a member of the Ancient Love Letters research network at the University of Leeds. She completed her PhD at the University of Washington with a dissertation on gender in the fragmentary plays of Euripides. Her work focuses on dramatic performance (ancient and modern) as well as gender and status in classical antiquity, particularly as it is depicted in literature; it has appeared in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies along with several collected volumes. Her current project is a biography of the (in)famous Greek courtesan Phryne that examines the role of anecdote in fashioning literary-historical narratives. She also directs the Lux Project at the University of Winnipeg, which is an outreach project based on a collection of Roman-Egyptian artefacts that aims to make them accessible to both the local community and scholars around the world.
Sabrina C. Higgins
Sabrina C. Higgins is an Assistant Professor cross-appointed between the Departments of Global Humanities and Archaeology at Simon Fraser University. She completed her Ph.D. in Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, with a focus on the material evidence for the cult of the Virgin Mary in Late Antique Egypt, a project she is currently transforming into her first monograph. She is also an active field archaeologist, currently serving as the Assistant Director of the excavations of a late antique church at Golemo Gradište in North Macedonia. In addition to this project, she has excavated at various sites in Egypt, Bulgaria and Greece. As an archaeologist and art historian, moreover, her work is inherently multidisciplinary, intersecting the fields of Late Antique Studies, Archaeology, Religious Studies, Art History, Papyrology, and Gender Studies, and her work has appeared in various journals, including the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Eastern Christian Art, and the Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies. She is also a recent recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for her project ‘The Early Cult of the Virgin and the Hegemony of the Text’, which interrogates the material evidence for the early cult of the Virgin across the entire Eastern Mediterranean Basin. More broadly, she is also interested in the ways in which art and space interact within Late-Antique Christianity religious structures and the manner in which art is used by socially-marginalized populations to exert agency.
Victoria Austen
Victoria Austen is the Oden Postdoctoral Fellow in Innovation in the Humanities and Classics at Carleton College. She received her PhD in Classics from King’s College London in 2020 and her monograph, ‘Analysing the Boundaries of the Ancient Roman Garden’, was published in March 2023 as part of Bloomsbury’s ‘Ancient Environments’ Series. Alongside her research, she is a Wikipedia scholar and contributor to the Women’s Classical Committee #WCCWiki project; and her use of Wikipedia in the classroom has been featured on the WikiEducation blog and in the Winnipeg Free Press. She has also appeared as a guest on the podcasts Let’s Talk About Myth’s Baby, The Endless Knot, and When in Rome.
Awards and Honours
2023. SCS Outreach Prize, Society for Classical Studies.
2022. Knowledge Mobilization Grant, University of Winnipeg.
2022. Elaine Fantham Award, The Classical Association of Canada.
2021. Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities Grant, Society for Classical Studies.
2021. Public Scholarship Award, Women’s Classical Caucus.
2021. Open Educational Resource Grant, University of British Columbia.
2021. Honourable Mention, Emerging Open Scholarship Award, Canadian Social Knowledge Institute.
2020. Classics Everywhere Grant, Society for Classical Studies.
2020. Acadia University Research Fund.
Peopling the Past 