M.A., Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, UC Berkeley, 2021 B.A., Classical Civilization, Yale University, 2016
I am a social historian and archaeologist with interests in Roman religion, law, and funerary practice.
My dissertation, "Ghost Justice: Community, Crime, and the Roman Cult of the Dead (1st c. BCE – 3rd c. CE)," explores how ancient Romans negotiated and contested access to the afterlife via prayer, speech, law, and violence. I draw on archaeological, epigraphic, legal, and literary evidence to argue that,...
M.A. in Classical Studies, École normale supérieure (Paris), 2017
After receiving my pre-baccalaureate education in Hangzhou, China, I came to the U.S. to attend Columbia University, where I got my B.A. in History in 2015. After spending my senior year as an exchange student in Paris, I stayed there and obtained my M.A. in Classical Studies at the École normale supérieure in 2017. I then spent the first half of 2017-2018 as an “auditeur libre” at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris, and the second half as an Erasmus...
I am an interdisciplinary scholar with roots in archaeology and art history whose research covers a broad range of material, visual, and textual cultures from premodern Afroeurasia as well as transhistorical perspectives on constructing the past(s). I have been variously characterized as an Ancient Near Eastern specialist, archaeologist, art historian, comparativist, Classicist, Egyptologist, Mediterraneanist, “material culture person,” and scholarly “swashbuckler.” Regionally, my interests include Africa (especially the Red Sea and East Africa), Asia (Central and Western), and the Mediterranean (sensu lato). I focus on periods spanning from the death of Alexander to Late Antiquity.
