Biography
I received my PhD from McMaster in the summer after my 2020-2021 Crake Doctoral Fellowship. Over the next two years, I did a postdoctoral fellowship followed by a visiting assistant professor position, both at the University of Toronto. I was a postdoc at Western working for the Vindolanda Archaeological Leather Project for the past two years. This project studies the leather finds, including the famous assemblage of thousands of shoes, from the Roman fort at Vindolanda near Hadrian's Wall in the UK. During this time, I began working on the coins from the site and I continue to work as the numismatist for Vindolanda and the nearby fort Magna, identifying new coin finds each year and working on the database and storage of the collection.
My primary research focus is the portraits of Roman imperial women. I work with coins and sculpture from Rome and the provinces in order to understand the role of these women in the imperial messaging system and the practicalities of how the images were distributed and copied throughout the empire. I wrote my dissertation on the portraits of Sabina, Hadrian's wife, and I am currently working on a book on the same topic. My other main project is a study of the representation of women on coins from the eastern Roman provinces. I have also recently started doing archaeological numismatics with the Vindolanda coins, investigating what the coins can tell us about life and economy at the fort and surrounding settlement.