Research

Margaret M. Andrews received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University in 2005. She received an M.A. in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and a Ph.D. in 2015. Prior to arriving at Harvard, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Joukowsky Institute for the Archaeology of the Ancient World at Brown University from 2015-2018 and an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago from 2018-2020.

Meg's research combines approaches from the fields of ancient history and archaeology. She is particularly interested in ancient urban environments and their diachronic occupation. Her current book project,The Subura: Urban Landscape and Ideology in Rome from ca. 850 BCE to ca. 850 CE, focuses on a neighborhood of ancient Rome known as the Subura. Notorious in ancient literary testimony for its squalid conditions and prostitution, the primarily residential and commercial district of the Subura has never received systematic study. covers the Subura's long history of urban development and occupation, combining archaeological material with ancient written sources to demonstrate how the zone became the locus for an ideological discourse on the ideal role of women in both the Roman and Christian mindsets and how the transformations in its built environment reflect these shifting notions.

Meg has carried out archaeological fieldwork in North Carolina, Athens, Rome, and other Italian locations. From 2007-2010, she served as an area supervisor, masonry specialist, and lead graphical documenter for the Villa Magna Project, the excavation of a Roman imperial villa and medieval monastery and village near Anagni, Italy, approximately 60 km south of Rome. She also co-edited the final publication for the project: Villa Magna: an Imperial Estate and its Legacies: Excavations 2006-10Since 2011, she has been completed numerous field projects of structures within Rome itself, leading to publications in both the American Journal of Archaeology and the Journal of Roman Archaeology. 

She is currently co-directing the international excavations of the Roman town of Falerii Novi in central Italy. https://faleriinoviproject.org/