Anne Truetzel Assistant Professor of Classics

I never expected to be a classics professor. As an undergraduate, I was certain that I would go into finance, and indeed, after graduation I worked as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs in New York. But I kept being pulled back to classics again and again. I was first drawn by my lifelong love of languages, grammar, and literature. Yet after studying abroad in Rome and working on an archaeological excavation in Spain, I became absorbed by the art, architecture, and artifacts of the ancient world. I came to see that in pursuing ancient history, I could weave together both textual and material evidence to investigate how ancient people lived their lives, which can simultaneously seem both eerily similar to and utterly different from my own.

As an historian of the Roman republic, I have focused my research thus far on the militarization of women in republican Roman society. I earned my doctorate at Princeton University, where my dissertation, “Roman Women on the Home Front in the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE),” examined the state’s cooptation of Roman women’s bodies and labor to provide material and ideological support for the war effort. I have several publications in progress within this area of research, including an article on the shifting gendered meanings of ritual implements seized by Roman soldiers as booty in war and then domesticated within Roman households, as well as an article that offers a new interpretation of the much-debated lex Oppia.

At the same time, I continue to pursue my archaeological interests through my work at the Greco-Roman site of Morgantina in central Sicily as a co-director of the Contrada Agnese Project (CAP; 2014-2019) and the Agora Valley Project (AVP; 2023-present), both undertaken under the auspices of the American Excavations at Morgantina. As Director of Materials at CAP and AVP, I oversee the documentation and analysis of all excavated materials, from artifacts to archaeobotanical remains. I have co-authored a methodologically focused chapter on our work at CAP in the edited volume Engaging Conservation (2017), as well as an article in the American Journal of Numismatics (2020) on a hoard of bronze coins from Morgantina. Currently, I am collaborating with colleagues to publish the results of CAP’s excavations of a modestly appointed Hellenistic house located on the western edge of the city. Our team’s new project, AVP, centers on a complex in Morgantina’s agora that was constructed and in use during the second and first centuries BCE, the period in which the city was under Roman control. Working with student-volunteers at Morgantina is one of my greatest joys, and I am always excited to bring Davidson students to the site, both to dig in the field and to do research in the lab!

At Davidson, I teach Latin language courses at all levels, as well as ancient history and culture courses on topics ranging from political and military history like ‘Augustus and the Roman Republic’ and ‘Rome and Carthage’, to social and gender history like ‘Families of the Ancient Mediterranean’ and ‘War and Gender in the Ancient World.’ I also offer a seminar on ancient coins in which students handle and research real coins from antiquity! In all my courses, I enjoy sharing my fascination for the ancient Mediterranean while guiding students to cultivate their own sense of curiosity about the world – both past and present – and challenging students to look at their own language and culture from a new perspective after engaging with those of societies far removed in time and space from our own. 

Outside of work, I enjoy knitting, cooking, avidly following the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, and playing with my pup, Issa, whose namesake is a pet dog memorialized in a Latin poem written by Martial in the first century CE!