Astrid van Oyen is currently professor of archaeology at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She is a leading archaeologist studying the social, economic and cultural aspects of empire, rural economies, craft production, and storage in Italy and the western provinces.
Education.
Van Oyen gained her BA and MA in Archaeology at University of Leuven, Belgium. She received a PhD in Classics in 2014 from the University of Cambridge, with a thesis titled "'Rethinking terra sigillata: an archaeological application of Actor-Network Theory"', which was supervised by Martin Millett.
Career.
Van Oyen was a Junior Research Fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge from 2013-2016. In 2016 Van Oyen joined Cornell University as an Assistant Professor in Classics. In 2019, she was a External Faculty Fellow, Stanford Humanities Centre at Stanford.
Van Oyen has published a series of books. "How Things Make History," published in 2016, traces the historical trajectories of terra sigillata pottery in the Roman empire, and was described as "a very welcome study opening up new approaches to the analysis of ancient ceramics, or material culture in general." In 2017, she co-edited "Materialising Roman Histories"with Martin Pitts, exploring how historical narratives are constructed through artefacts, which was described as having "a coherence that one rarely finds in volumes resulting from seminars...". Her 2020 publication" The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage" examined the practice and implications of storage in the western Mediterranean and in a review Caroline Cheung described it as "a book that offers so much food for thought that will inspire new avenues of research for years to come.""" Conor Trainor in "The Classical Review" praised its accessible writing, despite a complex topic.
Van Oyen co-directs the "Marzuolo Archaeological Project" with Gijs Tol and Rhodora Vennarucci, which is excavating the rural multi-craft site of Marzuolo, Tuscany.
In 2011, she was appointed as an associate editor of the "Journal of Roman Archaeology".
References.
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