J. (Janis) Oomen

PhD project: Traditions of the Past, Innovations of the Present. Identity Formation in the Inscribed Funerary Monuments of Roman Sicily

Sicily was at the crossroads of many different foreign powers, cultures and peoples – including Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. This immediately presents the question how people handled this. The formation and anchoring of identity in inscribed (Greek and Latin) funerary monuments, in particular, makes for a gripping research topic, because it allows us to discern how “normal” people dealt with the increasing and decreasing influence of foreign ruling powers. Overall, the main goal of this study is to shed light on how identity was formulated and anchored in Sicily under Roman rule.

This project is part of the national Anchoring Innovation project. For more information on my project, please visit the Anchoring Innovation website.

This project makes extensive use of the online epigraphical ISicily corpus (directed by Prof. Dr. Jonathan Prag, University of Oxford).