Originally from Paris, with Italian roots, Marie-Laure is a graduate of the École normale supérieure in Paris, where she studied Classics, specialising in ancient history and literature as well as in epigraphy (Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic). Focusing on the history of Jewish communities in the Roman Empire, she wrote her master’s thesis on the epitaphs for children in the Jewish catacombs of Rome. As part of her programme at the ENS, she also taught French one year at Pembroke College, Cambridge (2021-2022).

Marie-Laure is currently a PhD student at Aix-Marseille University. Her work deals with textual representations of children in ancient Jewish sources from the Roman period, both literary and epigraphical, investigating mutual influences between Jews, ‘pagans’ and Christians. This year, she also worked as a research assistant at Ben Gurion University on a research project led by Prof. Michal Bar-Asher Siegal. As a visiting scholar of the ERC project ROMANA this year, she took part in its seminars, which had a major influence on her own research, and she had the great pleasure to give a paper on ‘Boys in charge: Jewish children ἄρχοντες and Roman children equites’.