Rubina Raja

Rubina Raja is professor of classical archaeology at Aarhus University, and director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s centre of excellence Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet). She heads several further collective research projects: Archive Archaeology, the Palmyra Portrait Project, as well as Circular Economy and Urban Sustainability in Antiquity. Recently, her project Ceramics in Context, came to an end after four years of intense research and publications. She was co-PI of the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ (2012–2017). Raja is an experienced fieldwork archaeologist and co-directs fieldwork projects in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, most prominently the Danish-Italian Caesar’s Forum Project, as well as the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project. Raja’s research focuses on urban and landscape archaeology, on sites and their multiple networks from the Hellenistic to the medieval periods as attested through empirical evidence and sources. She is also an expert on iconography and portrait traditions in the Roman world as well as religious life in Antiquity – all topics on which she has published extensively. While being a classical archaeologist, she also works in the fields intersecting traditional archaeology and natural sciences, bringing high-definition studies of the past to the forefront – an approach, which has most prominently been pioneered through the work done within the framework of UrbNet.