About

Liana Brent specializes in the material and social histories of the non-elite in the Roman world. Her research interests include Roman burial practices, Latin inscriptions, Greek and Roman sculpture, museum practices, and the history of collecting antiquities. She teaches courses on Roman History, Civilization, Archaeology, Slavery, Death and Burial, as well as Latin at all levels.

Before arriving at Bates College, Liana served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Kenyon College (2020-2023), a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (2019-2020), and she held a two-year pre-doctoral Rome Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2017-2019). Liana received her Ph.D. in Classics with a specialization in Classical Archaeology from Cornell University (2019), as well as a B.A. and M.A. from McMaster University in Canada (2010 and 2012).

Liana is a field archaeologist who excavates a Roman cemetery in southeast Italy. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Proceedings of the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, and in various edited volumes. She is currently working on a monograph, Corporeal Connections in Roman Burial Practices, which explores ongoing interactions between the living and the dead in Roman Italy.

In addition to her scholarly interests, Liana loves hiking, and in 2019 she hiked the Via Appia Antica (an ancient Roman road), which stretched for 350 miles from Rome to Brindisi!