Third year PhD student Claudia Paparella has received two awards for her academic achievements. Claudia studies in the program’s Ancient History stream.
She received the John Lundon Memorial Fellowship in Classics, awarded by the Department of Classics to assist students who travel to present papers at conferences and for research purposes through Departmental Travel Support and Awards. The award will support Claudia’s field work for her doctoral thesis on the social history of indigenous Italian languages and their entanglement with the Roman imperial expansion in Italy. She will be spending the summer surveying archaeological sites and museums in Bologna, Chieti, and Naples, to conduct primary source analysis of under-researched or unpublished inscriptions and incorporate them into a database mapping language shift and changes in writing practices in Italy between the 7th and 1st centuries BCE.
Claudia also received the Graduate Student Presentation Prize for best paper presented by a graduate student at the Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of Canada. For her paper, titled “Speaking Objects, Artisans, and Romanization: The Evolution and Social Context of Artisan Signatures in 7th/2nd century Italy,” Claudia studied a collection of previously unexplored artisan signatures from the Italian peninsula between the 7th and the 2nd century BCE, to examine changes in Italian writing practices. Her work challenges the overstated significance of Rome, and advocates for the restoration of Italian indigenous agency in understanding the social, cultural, and economic changes occurring within Italian societies.
Congratulations, Claudia!