Academic Profile

Elizabeth C. Robinson is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Dallas Rome Program (Due Santi Rome Campus). She is a specialist in Roman archaeology, focusing on the cultural and physical landscapes of Italy in the first millennium BCE, Italian urbanism, and the nature of Roman interactions with the other inhabitants of the Italian peninsula in this period. Her current interest is in central-southern Italy. Her first book, Urban Transformation in Ancient Molise: The Integration of Larinum into the Roman State, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021. Her other recent publications include: the article on "Larinum" in the digital edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary, a chapter on the Empress Livia for a general interest volume on the city of Rome, and a contribution on the "Prosopography of the Leading Families of Larinum in the Roman period" in the conference proceedings of the "People of the Ancient World" conference. She also published an edited volume for the Journal of Roman Archaeology (Supplement 97: Papers on Italian Urbanism in the First Millennium B.C.), for which she was also a contributor.

In addition to her role at the University of Dallas Rome Program, she has taught for numerous universities in Rome, including the Duke University Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies, American University, and John Cabot University. She was also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at Binghamton University.

Elizabeth received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation entitled, "The Impact of Roman Expansion in Central-Southern Italy: The Case of Larinum." The dissertation was an archaeological and historical study of the continuities and changes that took place in the political, social, and cultural spheres at the site of Larinum over a five hundred year period (400 BCE to 100 CE) as the site transitioned from being an independent community to being a Roman municipium. She received research funding for her dissertation from the Olivia James Traveling Fellowship from the Archaeological Institute of America, a Fulbright grant, the Irene Rosenzweig/Samuel H. Kress Foundation Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and the Werner P. Friederich Off-Campus Dissertation Research Fellowship from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The dissertation forms the basis of her 2021 monograph.

She has presented material relating to her research on Larinum at the 113th, 114th, 116th and 119th Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2012, 2013, 2015, and 2018. She also presented her findings at the “Integration and Identity in the Roman Republic” conference in Manchester, England in 2010, whose proceedings were published by Brill as Processes of Integration and Identity Formation in the Roman Republic, edited by S.T. Roselaar. She presented further results of her research at the "Processes of Integration in the Roman World (300 BC - AD 200)" conference in Nottingham, England in 2013, the "People of the Ancient World" conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 2016, and the "Pacific Rim Roman Literature Seminar 32: Interiority in Roman Literature" conference in Sydney, Australia in 2018. She has also made presentations at several venues in Italy, including local cultural gatherings in Molise in 2010 (the Fiera di Ottobre in Larino) and 2011 (D'Estate Faifoli in Montagano), a meeting of the Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica in Rome in 2011, the 16th Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology in Florence in 2012, the “L’Italie ‘à parts égales’: écrire l’histoire de l’Italie avant la conquête romaine” atelier doctoral in Naples in 2013, the Symposium Peregrinum in Tarquinia in 2016, the "Diverging Trajectories: Approaches to Italian Urbanism in the Era of Roman Conquest" in Rome in 2019, and multiple presentations at the American Academy in Rome. She has also given invited lectures on her research at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, and the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.

Elizabeth's M.A. thesis (Rural Settlement Patterns and Sanctuaries in the Middle Volturno Valley) allowed her to combine her interests in pre-Roman Italy and Italic religion, while allowing for a thorough exploration of Samnite settlement patterns in the eastern part of Campania. Research from her thesis was presented at the 109th Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in 2008, and was published in the journal Ostraka in 2009.

Her fieldwork experience includes a season of excavation at Paestum, two seasons of fieldwork with the Upper Simeto Valley Survey, several seasons of fieldwork with the Gabii Project, and two campaigns as director of the resurvey of previously discovered archaeological sites in the area surrounding Larinum. As a staff member for the Upper Simeto Valley Survey, she was in charge of collection, management and interpretation of GPS and GIS data. She currently serves as a GIS Specialist on the topography team for the Gabii Project.

Elizabeth's other research interests include GIS and digital mapping, the integration of digital technologies in the field of Classics, and cultural heritage protection. She has had ample experience using GIS and digital mapping techniques in the field in Sicily and peninsular Italy. She also spent two years as the Acting Director of the Ancient World Mapping Center at UNC, where she further explored digital cartography and helped to create and publish a new series of seven classroom maps of the ancient world, currently available from Routledge as part of their “Wall Maps for the Ancient World” series.

You can find her program web page here. Her Academia.edu page can be found here.