Geeking Out With...Anna Roche
January 5, 2026
Abigail Arnold
Geeking Out With…is a feature in which we talk to graduate students about their passions. You can check out past installments here.
Anna Roche is a second-year student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and will be graduating with her master’s next month. Her research focuses on ancient economies and how textile production tools can be used to study them; she studies sites that are seemingly without a central organization to discover how they actually did organize themselves to be successful in trade. In the process, she looks at textile production from feminist and economic perspectives. She joined Geeking Out With… to talk about her work with the Classical Studies Artifact Research Collection (CLARC), Brandeis’s collection of over 800 ancient Mediterranean artifacts.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
How did you get involved with CLARC? Had you done any similar work before?
Our program is very proud of CLARC. Our graduate students are told about the opportunity to work there, so I emailed Dr. Alexandra Ratzlaff, who oversees the collection, and was able to apply for the role of graduate supervisor. In this role, I supervised undergraduate interns and also did my own research. I had worked in an art museum before coming to Brandeis, so I handled modern objects there. But this was my first time handling ancient objects, which was really exciting.
What kind of work typically goes on at CLARC?
Students usually work individually on projects with objects from the collection, but there are also some bigger group projects. We just got a big donation of Roman glass, so students are working on cataloguing and appraising it. We also do community outreach and are open for parents’ and alum weekends. We have objects that come out for classes – for example, if there’s a Greek history class, we could put together a box of related objects for that. We also have a cart set up that can go to local middle and high schools with an attached lesson plan. Recently, we moved into a bigger space, so that involved work as well.
What might surprise people about CLARC?
The amount of touching you can do with the artifacts is usually shocking to people, especially during parents’ weekend when we’re open for people to visit. Since it’s a teaching and learning collection, the objects are meant to be studied. We still follow proper guidelines – you have to wear gloves when touching metal objects, for example – but you can pick up and handle most things in the collection, which people don’t expect.
Do you have a favorite object in the CLARC collection?
My favorite object is a bust figurine of Artemis of Ephesus. She’s kind of a unique goddess because she has many ornaments on her chest, and there’s debate over whether they’re breasts or a chest plate. Our specific bust is three or four inches high and a pretty unique object. I wrote a paper on Artemis of Ephesus for a Queer Anthropology class, in which I reframe the debate about whether the things on her chest are breasts and analyze the implications of them eventually becoming understood as such by Christian and biblical scholars. She comes up in a passage in the Bible, and a lot of debates about her chest are religiously charged. So for the paper, I wrote about non-normative bodies and how deities with those are talked about in different contexts. I was looking at several different goddess figurines we have in CLARC, but my project became focused on this specific one; however, it was more of an analysis of the affect of the object than a physical analysis.
Your own thesis research involves textile production tools. Do you have many of these in CLARC?
We don’t have a lot of textile tools, which is perhaps unexpected because they are commonly found on digs. However, a lot of our collection comes from donations, and I think these tools tend to kind of get overlooked and be seen as boring by collectors.
Have you been on a dig yourself?
Yes! This summer, I went on a dig with Professor Eoin O’Donohue to Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily. We dug at a sanctuary, which was a religious site first occupied by North Africans in the Punic period and later by Romans. We investigated deposits of votives and analyzed the architecture and religious aspects of the site.
Do you plan to continue doing work with ancient artifacts in the future?
I’m applying for PhDs right now, so we’ll see how that goes! I am also currently working with the Trustees of Reservations, a land and nature conservancy nonprofit in Massachusetts. I work at two of their historic house sites, the Old Manse in Concord and Fruitlands in Harvard, so while this is not archaeology, I do get to work with historic objects. I do hope to continue working with archaeology either in museums or a historical context.
What people or resources at Brandeis have helped you in your work?
Dr. Ratzlaff in CLARC has been one of my biggest resources. Dr. Natalie Sussman in the Digital Scholarship Lab has been helping me recently with 3-D scanning and is a big resource for people working in CLARC. The former GSAS was really helpful with getting conference funding to present my research, and all the faculty in the Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies Department have been great.
When you’re not doing your research or working in CLARC, what else do you like to do?
I really like to read, so that’s something I’ve been doing more recently, including in my downtime at the museums. I crochet, and I love cooking and trying new recipes and different cuisines.
What advice do you have for other students exploring their passions?
Even if it seems like your passion is something you can’t make a career out of or make money with, it’s still worth exploring and can go in directions or to places you don’t expect. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still fulfilling, and that’s an important part of your life too.