Department of Classical Studies

My research focuses on the archaeology of gender, labor, and craft production in the ancient Mediterranean world. My dissertation, entitled Economies of Weaving: Women, Labor, and Textiles at Morgantina from the Bronze Age to the Republican Era, analyzed the remains of over 2,000 textile tools from the archaeological site of Morgantina, Sicily in order to track changes in the economic organization of the household textile industry and foreground the central roles women occupied in the economic systems of antiquity. As an extension of this work, I coauthored an article for the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology on the relationship between craft production and inheritance practices in ancient Greek households. I am also interested in the use of models and proxies in economic history and have published on the subject in Richard Saller’s Pliny’s Roman Economy: Natural History, Innovation, and Growth.

I am currently the Finds Supervisor for the American Excavations at Morgantina: Agora Valley Project. I have also conducted fieldwork at several sites on Crete and worked for the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. My research has been supported by a Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, a Mellon Foundation Fellowship from the Stanford Humanities Center, and a Ric Weiland Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities & Sciences. I have taught a range of classes in archaeology, ancient history, and Latin. In 2018, I won the Department of Classics Graduate Teaching Award at Stanford University.

Courses Taught

Elementary Latin I

Elementary Latin II

Medical Terms from Greek and Latin

Selected Publications

Ennis, K. (2022) “An Excursus from Morgantina: An Archaeological Assessment of the Economic Complexity Index.” In R. Saller (Ed.) Pliny’s Roman Economy: Natural History, Innovation, and Growth (pp. 25–31). Princeton University Press.

Ennis, K., & Peers, M.T.B. (2022). “Industry and Inheritance at Hellenistic Morgantina: A New Assemblage of Loom Weights from the House of the Two Mills.” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 35(2), 198–225. https://doi.org/10.1558/jma.25522