I have been interested in the ancient world for as long as I can remember, but my path to earning a degree in Classical Civilization was not a conventional one.

After studying Latin throughout middle and high school, I arrived at Indiana University in the fall of 1999 planning to major in Classics. However, my interests eventually led me in a different direction and I ended up graduating from IU in the spring of 2003 with a BA in English and History.

I went on to earn a Master of Science in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to hold positions as a public librarian and in higher education fundraising. Meanwhile, my husband (a fellow IU grad) and I welcomed first a daughter and then a son into our family.

While both my personal and professional lives were busy and fulfilling, my interest in the distant past never left me.  I read everything about ancient Greece and Rome that I could get my hands on (a task made easier by working in a library!) and was fortunate to be able to travel to Greece on two occasions, first in 2015 and then again in 2018.  The second trip, a two-week guided archaeological tour of Crete, would end up having a profound effect on my life.

Our guide, a native Greek archaeologist based in the UK, led us all across Crete’s dramatic landscape to explore some of the island’s most important archaeological sites.  Crete has a rich history that stretches all the way back to the Paleolithic, but our tour was focused primarily on the island’s Bronze Age culture, the Minoans.  Being guided through the Palaces of Knossos, Malia, and Phaistos and the settlements of Gournia, Palaikastro, and Mochlos by a trained archaeologist who could point out important features and discuss the scholarship on each allowed me to appreciate the sites in a way that simply reading about them never could.  The experience showed me how dynamic history can be.  Archaeology constantly refines our understanding of the past as new techniques are developed and new evidence is uncovered.