M.A.R.I. Lunch Talk Series

Speaker/Performer Name

Allison L.C Emmerson

The Roman city of Pompeii, utterly destroyed by the volcano Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE, has long occupied a privileged place in modern imaginings of the Roman past. Beyond the city’s well-known monuments, however, lies a well of data that has barely begun to be tapped. This talk will introduce the research program of Tulane University’s Pompeii I.14 Project, a new excavation that brings the most cutting-edge archaeological technologies to stratigraphic exploration below the floors, streets, and sidewalks buried by Vesuvius. A series of case studies will illustrate how the excavation team—made up of both international experts and student trainees—applies interdisciplinary techniques to restore the experiences of some of Pompeii’s hidden and forgotten residents: the enslaved, the women, and the urban poor who might appear only rarely in traditional sources, but who shaped their town and their own lives in distinct ways.

 

Allison L.C. Emmerson, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Tulane University, is a Roman archaeologist who specializes in the study of cities. She is particularly interested in the “marginal” aspects of ancient urbanism, not only literal city edges and the activities they attracted, such as waste management and the treatment of the dead, but also the people who have been marginalized both in ancient life and in modern reconstructions of it, including women, the enslaved, and the sub-elite. She currently pursues related questions particularly through her excavation, the Pompeii I.14 Project, which examines life in the city prior to the catastrophic eruption of 79 CE. Her first sole-authored book, Life and Death in the Roman Suburb, was published by Oxford University Press in 2020 and was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Book Award in 2022. She was field director of the University of Cincinnati’s excavations at Pompeii and has recently co-authored the first volume of the final publication of that work: The Porta Stabia Neighborhood at Pompeii (Vol. 1): Structure, Stratigraphy, and Space (Oxford, 2023). Emmerson’s articles have appeared in leading journals, including the American Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of Roman Archaeology, and the Journal of Roman Studies. She is a Fellow and former Interim Mellon Professor of Humanities of the American Academy in Rome and a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and has been awarded the highest honor in teaching given at Tulane University, the Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellowship for Undergraduate Education.

 

M.A.R.I. Lunch Talks invite guest speakers to host seminars at M.A.R.I. on a wide variety of topics related to the archaeology, history, and ethnography of Mesoamerica and other world areas. The events typically take place on Fridays around noon and can be delivered in English and Spanish.