Welcome to postdoc Ines Ferjan!

Ines Ferjan, postdoc. 
Unit for Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology, History and Legacy Datahas. 

Presentation
I'm excited to join the Semper Ardens Advanced Grant project Locally Crafted Empires (LoCiS), headed by Prof Rubina Raja, here at the Aarhus University. My PhD, which I completed in the Department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh, explored the Roman stone trade in the inland Balkans, focusing on quarrying, transport, and carving. I examined locally available and imported stone to observe the distribution patterns within four categories: sarcophagi, stelae, statuary, and architectural elements, and studied the potential transport routes between the quarries and the Roman settlements they supplied. 

These analyses addressed questions related to workshop production, dynamics between clients and producers, and the quarry-to-workshop relationship, and they provided insights into decision-making when commissioning stone products. Building on that work, my postdoctoral research will shift focus to the portrait cultures of Western Asia, roughly from 100 BCE to AD 500, across a wide range of media (stone, mosaics, painting, and wood). 

I look forward to contributing to LoCiS’s analysis of this rich portrait corpus, and to exploring how these individual and regional visual traditions negotiated shifting imperial dynamics across antiquity.

Research summary
Roman economy, stone trade, stone carving, provincial portraiture, Roman art, geospatial network modelling