Elizabeth Ann Pollard

Elizabeth Ann Pollard (University of Pennsylvania, 2001) is a historian of the ancient world, in particular of Roman and Greek civilizations. Her research interests cross the disciplinary and methodological boundaries between history, religious studies, classics, and women's studies. This boundary crossing corresponds with her interests in women, religion, and the provinces, all topics that have tended to reside on peripheries. She has research experience in papyrology and epigraphy as well as archaeology and worked as a trench supervisor and pottery registrar for the Roman Aila Project in Aqaba, Jordan. She is currently revising her dissertation, Magic Accusations Against Women in the Greco-Roman World from the First to the Fifth Centuries CE, which explores the relationship between the representations and accusations of women's activity as magic and the actual rituals that women conducted. She has published and/or presented papers on women's religious activity in the Apocryphal Acts, the epigraphic habit of women in the Greek novel, women and magic accusations at Rome, Roman-Indian trade in world-historical context, and the impact of world historical thinking on traditional Greek and Roman history. With grants from SDSU, she has pursued research in summer 2003 at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, where she studied a fourth century CE magical handbook in order to aid in the preparation of the dissertation for publication. In summer 2004, she studied inscriptions at archaeological sites in Greece and Turkey, to research women's civic euergetism and women's epigraphic activity. Most recently, in summer 2009, she traveled to libraries in London, Oslo, and Vienna, to study Roman-period magical papyri held in those collections. Her pedagogical interests include the effectiveness of web-based technology and world history in teaching, learning, and writing about ancient history.