Dr. Eugenia Vitello, MA

I am an ancient historian working on the economic history of the pre-modern Mediterranean area, with a core focus of specialty in the urban economies of Roman Anatolia. I am also interested in ancient social history, material culture studies, gender studies, the history of historiography, and the political reuse of classical antiquity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

I graduated cum laude for my BA in Classics and my MA in Philology, Literatures, and History of the Ancient World at Sapienza Università di Roma in 2017 and 2020. Subsequently, I got my PhD (DPhil) in Ancient History at the University of Oxford in 2025, where I was a Clarendon Scholar: the monograph project stemming from the dissertation focuses on female economic agency in the Graeco-Roman cities of Asia.

From 2019 to 2021, I joined the excavation project in Hadrian’s Villa (Columbia University of New York). In 2021, I worked as a Research Assistant in a project on the Imperial Villas in Northern Italy at the Universität zu Köln. In 2022, I became a member of the excavation team at Aphrodisias (New York University and Oxford University) as a resident epigraphist and historian. In 2023, I worked as a Teaching Assistant and Tutor at Oxford University. In 2024/25, I spent a year as Hanseatic Visiting Scholar at the Universität Tübingen.

Current research projects

• Gendering Wealth: Women and Economic Agency in Roman Asia (monograph project)
• Late Roman Stamped Unguentaria and Mediterranean Connectivity (Aphrodisias Excavation)
• Instrumenta Domestica and the Economy of Daily Life (Aphrodisias Excavation)
• Epigraphic Habit in the Global Pre-Modern History (with Meera Visvanathan and Mekhola Gomes)
• Negotiating Honours (with Jinyu Liu and Zhengyuan Zhang)
• The Political Economy of Capital in the Pre-Modern World (workshop project)
• Late Roman Stamped Unguentaria from Olympos (with Özgür Özdemir)

Publications on Academia.edu