Allison L. C. Emmerson

Allison L. C. Emmerson (2019 Fellow) is associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Classical Studies Department at Tulane University. A Roman archaeologist who specializes in the study of cities, she is particularly interested in the “marginal” aspects of ancient urbanism, not only literal city edges and the activities they attracted, such as waste management and the treatment of the dead, but also the people who have been marginalized both in ancient life and in modern reconstructions of it, including women, the enslaved, and the sub-elite.

Emmerson’s first sole-authored book, Life and Death in the Roman Suburb, published by Oxford University Press in 2020, was awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s James R. Wiseman Book Award in 2022. She was field director of the University of Cincinnati’s excavations at Pompeii and has recently co-authored the first volume of the final publication of that work: The Porta Stabia Neighborhood at Pompeii, Volume I: Structure, Stratigraphy, and Space (Oxford, 2023; written with Kevin D. Dicus and Stephen J. R. Ellis).

At Tulane, Emmerson directed the Pompeii I.14 Project, an international collaboration led by her university and the Parco Archeologico di Pompeii. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2019) and the American Council of Learned Societies (2018), and has been awarded the highest honor in teaching given at Tulane University, the Suzanne and Stephen Weiss Presidential Fellowship for Undergraduate Education (2023). Emmerson earned an MA and PhD from the University of Cincinnati, both in classical archaeology, after receiving a BA from Denison University. In addition to her two books, she has written numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews, published in the American Journal of Archaeology, the Journal of Roman Studies, the Journal of Roman Archaeology, and Rivista di Studi Pompeiani, among others.