Q&A

I was asked the following question in the comments of a previous entry and I thought, why not answer it here?

Did I hear you're going to grad school next year? How did you discover your love for archeology?

Yes, I am! I’m beginning as an MPhil candidate at Oxford in October. I’ll be studying Egyptology with a focus on Graeco-Roman Egypt. The woman who literally wrote the book on the Fayoum Portraits (my Barnard thesis topic) is going to be my adviser. I got the Clarendon Scholarship, which is full funding given to promising foreign students at Oxford whose research will likely contribute most to their fields. And the most amazing (but not unexpected, given Barnard’s awesome student body) part of it all is that a friend of mine, a current Barnard senior, also got the Clarendon Scholarship! She’ll be in Africana Studies at Oxford.

During my first semester of college, I took an anthropology class and really loved it. I was searching for another anthro course for my second semester—something that would count for credit at Barnard, since I had known since the first day that I would be applying to transfer to BC—when I found an archaeology class. It sounded cool, so I enrolled. My professor encouraged her students to dig over the summer, and I volunteered on a project in Israel (my first international trip alone!). The rest is history: when I got to Barnard I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life, so I became a familiar face in the anthro department and an advisee of Sev Fowles, resident archaeologist extraordinaire. I went on to dig in Israel, Cyprus and Egypt, and to found the Gotham League of Archaeology Majors at Barnard/Columbia.

So what are you ladies interested in studying?