Dr Emma-Jayne Graham

Teaching Fellow in Roman Archaeology

BA, MA, PhD (Sheffield)

Tel: 0116 25522155

Email: eg153@le.ac.uk 

Following a BA and MA at the University of Sheffield I completed a PhD in 2005 at the same university. My thesis focused on the burial of the urban poor in Roman Italy, presenting a reassessment of the evidence for the use of mass graves. After this I spent 9 months at the British School at Rome as Rome Fellow, conducting further research into the mortuary customs of Rome with a project concerned with the rite of os resectum, purification ritual and the treatment of the corpse. Subsequently I spent some time working for an archaeological consultancy, held an Early Career Lectureship at Cardiff University (2007-2008), and two Teaching Fellow positions in the School of Classics at the University of St. Andrews (2008-09 and 2010-2011) before arriving at Leicester in 2011.

Research

My research interests focus primarily on the archaeology of Roman and Etruscan Italy. Mortuary archaeology and the treatment of the body lie at the heart of my work and I am involved in exploring a number of themes, notably experiences of the body (both living and dead), personhood, manipulation of the corpse, memory, as well as space and place, and the connection of these with the construction of identity. I am particularly interested in how bodily experiences of the material world gave meaning to people’s sense of self and I am beginning a broad project which will look at divergent experiences of ‘the Roman body’ and their contribution to the negotiation of multiple embodied identities. Recent work has also taken me away from the bodies of the dead towards the opposite end of the life-course, into the realm of infant health and votive practice in the Etrusco-Italic world. I was recently awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant for a project entitled ‘Swaddled infants and the terracotta votive tradition in ancient Italy’. This project aims to catalogue and analyse the phenomenon of terracotta ex-votos in the form of small babies wrapped in swaddling bands found across Central Italy from the 4th to 1st century BC. It will examine their chronological and geographical spread, their implications for infant health, family ritual and the socialisation of the child, as well as their relationship to more well-known anatomical offerings. 

Bodies of evidence: re-defining approaches to the anatomical votive.

A conference to be held at The British School at Rome, 5th June 2012. For more information please see the conference website: http://www.bsr.ac.uk/bodies-of-evidence

• Publications

Teaching

My primary role within teaching at Leicester involves writing a new Level 2 Distance Learning Module on the Archaeology of the Roman World and I am involved with Distance Learning more generally. I also teach on the following campus-based modules:

Postgraduate
AR7064 Death and Burial in the Roman World (module convenor)
AR7052 Classical Antiquity: Traditions, Approaches and Debates
AR7008 Rome and its Neighbours

Undergraduate

AR2035 Archaeology of the Mediterranean
AR3071 Archaeology of Death and Burial

Select Recent Publications

Death, disposal and the destitute: The burial of the urban poor in Italy in the late Roman Republic and early Empire. British Archaeological Reports. International Series 1565. (Archaeopress, Oxford, 2006).

Devlin, Z.L. and Graham, E-J. (eds.). Death Embodied: Archaeological Approaches to the Treatment of the Corpse. (Oxbow Books, Oxford. Forthcoming 2012).

Memory and materiality: re-embodying the Roman funeral. In V. M. Hope and J. Huskinson (eds.). Memory and Mourning: Studies on Roman Death, 21–39 (Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2011).

From fragments to ancestors: re-defining os resectum and its role in rituals of purification and commemoration in Republican Rome. In M. Carroll and J. Rempel (eds.) Living through the Dead: Burial and Commemoration in the Classical World, 91–109 (Oxbow Books, 2011).

Becoming persons, becoming ancestors: personhood, memory and the corpse in Roman rituals of social remembrance. Archaeological Dialogues 16(1), 51–74 (2009).