Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill
Principal Investigator
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill is Professor of Roman Studies and Director of Research in the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge University. He is a Fellow and former Master (2009-13) of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge. Before returning to Cambridge, he was Professor of Classics at the University of Reading from 1987 to 2009, and from 1995-2009 was on secondment from the University as Director of the British School at Rome. He took his first degree in Classics at Oxford (1969-73), where he also gained his doctorate. His first book, based on his doctorate, was Suetonius: the Scholar and his Caesars (Duckworth 1983); this was followed by monographs on Augustan Rome (1993), Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (1994), Rome’s Cultural Revolution (2008), and most recently, Herculaneum: Past and Future (2011). He has directed archaeological projects in both Pompeii and in Herculaneum, where since 2001 he has played a leading role in the Herculaneum Conservation project, an initiative of the Packard Humanities Institute.
Dr Elizabeth Key Fowden
Senior Researcher
Sparked by an early interest in Renaissance Italy, Elizabeth Fowden studied Classics, specializing in late antique history and material culture in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Peter Brown at Princeton University and later published as The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (Berkeley 1999), examines religious, political and architectural crosspollination in late antique and early Islamic Syria. The after-life of artistic forms and religious ideas freed from their original contexts is a dominant theme throughout her teaching and research. In her current book project, The Parthenon Mosque, Fowden applies her interest in Islamic re-formulation of the Classical and Christian inheritance to the early modern conjunction of Greek, European and Ottoman views of Athens’ most celebrated building.
Dr Louise Blanke
Research Associate (2019)
Louise Blanke, who will be joining the project in 2019, is currently a postdoctoral researcher funded by the Danish Carlsberg Foundation and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Her main research interests lie within the archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Late Antique and Islamic periods. She has worked on urban and monastic sites in Egypt and Jordan and currently directs a field project in Jarash (Jordan), exploring the logistics of daily life in a residential quarter as well as urban development over the longue durée. Her forthcoming book deals with monasticism in Egypt in the transition to the Islamic period and explores the development of settlement, economy and daily life of a monastic federation led from the White Monastery.
Dr Suna Cagaptay
Research Associate
Suna Cagaptay is an assistant professor of architectural history and archaeology at Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, where her research focuses on architectural production and urbanism in the proto-Ottoman eastern Mediterranean. In particular, she examines the circulation and translation of Byzantine and Latin architectural techniques and forms in Islamic contexts. Since summer of 2009, she has been leading an unprecedented archaeological and cultural heritage management project in Bursa with the goal of reconstructing the city's historical strata. Dr. Cagaptay's work has been supported by institutions ranging from Dumbarton Oaks to MIT's Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. She holds a PhD in architectural history and theory from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (2007) and an MA (2001) and BA (1998) from Bilkent University, Ankara.
Edward Zychowicz-Coghill
Research Associate
Edward Zychowicz-Coghill took BA and MPhil degrees in History and Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at Oxford. Having started his PhD with a couple of years in the Near Eastern departments at UChicago and Princeton, he then completed his DPhil in History back at Oxford. His doctoral research is a study of the emergence of Arabic historical writing in early Islamic Egypt. It is particularly concerned with finding ways to identify and historicise the generation and transmission of historical information in the eighth and ninth centuries, to allow us to explore how historical narrative was arranged to invest events with meanings which supported particular types of authority. He has also edited and translated a late antique Coptic hagiography which survives only in Arabic manuscripts.
Sofia Greaves
PhD Student
Sofia Greaves is a bilingual postgraduate student currently undertaking her PhD and supported by The Impact of the Ancient City project. Previous to joining the project, Sofia gained a distinction in her MA in Modern, Fine Art and Decorative Design at Sotheby’s Institute and achieved a First Class Hons in Classics from Durham University. Sofia’s undergraduate study revolved around Roman art and archaeology and culminated in her dissertation on The real Romanità: new identity in the aesthetics of urban space for Mussolini’s Roma resurgens. Having recently returned from a two-month long study trip to the British School at Rome, Sofia has decided to focus her doctoral research around how 19th and 20th century Italian Urban development considers the ancient city, with an emphasis on hygiene and sanitation.
Dr Javier Martínez Jiménez
Research Associate
Dr. Javier Martínez Jiménez studied Classical Archaeology and Ancient History at Oxford, where he obtained his DPhil in 2014. His main area of research is the evolution of urbanism in the Iberian peninsula from the late Roman into the Islamic period, with a particular interest in aqueducts and water supply. In addition to his past career as a professional archaeologist in the UK, he has directed surveys at the aqueduct of Reccopolis, and excavations at the site of Casa Herrera in Mérida. Since 2012, he has also been involved in the organisation of the International Archaeology Course at Mérida.
Sam Ottewill-Soulsby
Research Associate
Sam Ottewill-Soulsby obtained his first degree in History from the University of York, and his MPhil in Medieval History at Cambridge. He remained at Cambridge for his PhD on Carolingian diplomacy with the Muslim world, 751-888. His work focuses on the influence of ancient ideas of the city on medieval urban ideals and discourse in the Latin West, examining their importance for later thinking on the organisation of the city and the society of its inhabitants. His other research interests include contact between Western Europe and the Islamic World in the early middle ages, stretching from holy war in Carolingian Spain to the diplomatic significance of camels in the ninth century.
Beth Clark
Project Administrator
Beth Clark is the administrator for the Impact of the Ancient City ERC project. She holds a degree in Geography and produced a first class dissertation focused on the representation of immigrants in the UK’s press. In addition to her administrative duties, she also manages and updates the projects cities database, putting to use the GIS skills learnt during her degree. Prior to joining the project Beth worked in digital marketing, retail and hospitality.