I currently hold a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, where I am investigating the impact and reception of Roman-period architecture in provincial contexts of the Greco-Roman world, with a particular focus on North Africa (Libya to Morocco). Since 2020, I have also held the position of Assistant Director at the British Institute for Libyan and Northern African Studies – BILNAS (formerly the Society for Libyan Studies), where I oversee the institution’s management together with the other Council Officers and organize lectures and academic events on a broad range of topics, spanning the ancient and contemporary history of Libya and North Africa. I was recently appointed Book Reviews Editor for the international journal Libyan Studies, published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of BILNAS. Since 2006, I have been involved in archaeological fieldwork and field research at various sites in Italy, Greece, Morocco, and Tunisia.
As part of my studies on the archaeology and architecture of the Greco-Roman world, I make extensive use of epigraphic evidence to assess the socio-political and socio-economic features of built environments in antiquity. In a series of recent articles and book chapters, I have explored the visual impact and perception of monuments in provincial cities under the Roman Empire, which included an appraisal of the buildings’ epigraphic apparatuses along with their architectural and decorative components. I have applied this approach to North African sites such as Lepcis Magna (western Libya), Cyrene (eastern Libya), Thugga (Tunisia), and Sala (Morocco), looking at their urban and architectural development from the first century BCE to the second century CE.
I am interested in the overlap of cultural traditions in the provinces of the Roman Empire, especially those located at the edges of the ancient world, where a dynamic dialogue between local elements and external influences occurred regularly. This is well-reflected in the subjects I treat in my monograph Architectural Decoration and Urban History in Mauretania Tingitana (Quasar 2018) and in the volume De Africa Romaque: Merging Cultures across North Africa (Society for Libyan Studies 2016), which I co-edited with Julia Nikolaus and Nick Ray. These themes are the principal focus of my present and forthcoming publications, including my wide-ranging overview of North African architecture and art that was recently published in R. Bruce Hitchner’s Companion to North Africa in Antiquity (Wiley-Blackwell 2022)