The aim of my DPhil project is understanding how the inhabitants of Roman Anatolia made sense of the world they lived in through language and other signs. In practice, my work mostly consist of perusing a wealth of often repetitive yet never dull inscribed material left behind by a diverse array of individuals across the Anatolian peninsula, looking for patterns and outstanding singularities that may reveal something about the socio-cultural underpinnings of the words these individuals committed to writing. This choice of topic has grown out of and is driven by a broader interest of mine in the cultural history of rural and subaltern groups, in particular the study of imaginaries and social creativity and the linguistic articulation thereof.
I am, broadly speaking, a Roman historian, and my main area of expertise is Roman provincial society, especially as seen through the lenses of documentary sources (epigraphy and papyrology). I got a bachelor's degree in Ancient History and a master's degree in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Pavia, but I have spent a good part of my master's as a visiting student in Leiden and Cambridge.
