This interactive “talk” takes the form of a studio visit where, rather than display the objects I study, I display the process of making my dissertation. Over the course of four years of dissertation writing, seven years of graduate school, and eleven years of research in my field, I have written hundreds of pages, taken thousands of photographs, built databases, drawn illustrations, graphed networks, catalogued inscriptions, visited archives and museums, learned to paint fresco and chisel marble, and crawled into a lot of tombs, all to tell a story about how manual laborers contribute to cultural change. Where do I take my research from here? Focusing on the methods of research and writing more than on the products, I ask the audience to help me envision new directions for my work on funerary labor in late antiquity.

Jenny Kreiger is the Emeline Hill Richardson/Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Helen M. Woodruff Fellowship of the Archaeological Institute of America Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan.

The shoptalk will be held in English.