The Team

The Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference (TRAC) is administered by the TRAC Standing Committee, which is composed of five elected members as well as representatives from the previous and current local organising committees. The TRAC Standing Committee works to ensure that TRAC, its conferences, and publications continue to operate, and that TRAC and its aims are promoted within the wider archaeological community. Each member serves a three-year term with a maximum of two terms served.

Aims of the Standing Committee

Standing committee meetings and oversee the work of Local Organising Committees as well as (other tasks name them). Diverse group with a variety of background, stages of early career and nationalities and genders. The aims of the Standing Committee are:

  1. to promote and further TRAC’s general aims;
  2. to ensure the continuity of TRAC, its annual conferences, and publications;
  3. to promote TRAC within the wider archaeological community and to ensure the participation within TRAC of all interested parties, not just those based in universities;
  4. to ensure that TRAC remains a forum for senior academics and professionals, young scholars, students, and the wider archaeological community;
  5. to represent the interests of TRAC with regards to RAC (the Roman Archaeology Conference), or any other conference partner.

TRAC Standing Committee Members

Current Standing Committee Members:

Dr Anna Walas (She/Her), Chair of TRAC, University of Nottingham, University of Leicester and the Institute of Classical Studies, London

Anna is an archaeologist and ancient historian of Roman frontiers with a focus on North African and Britain. Anna is a member of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire Advisory Group and the MENA subgroup and is working on a monograph on the site of Bu Njem, Libya. She is also the Deputy Director of the Honor Frost Foundation and British Academy funded Ancient Akrotiri Project (Cyprus), a section editor of new discoveries for the journal Britannia as well as a curator of the Nottingham hub of the Being Human Festival of public engagement with humanities. Anna is also a public engagement and impact specialist. She has degrees from the Jagiellonian University, University of Cambridge (MPhil) and a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Leicester. 

Dr Sanja Vucetic (She/Her), Vice Chair, University of Sheffield

Sanja trained as an archaeologist in Australia and the UK (PhD in Archaeology, UCL Institute of Archaeology). Her research focus is sexuality and gender in the Roman Empire, consumption approaches to visual and material culture, and the dynamics of social changes in the Aegean world during the Roman Empire. Sanja has worked on a number of international archaeological projects in Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, the UK, and Australia.

Dr Sarah Scoppie (She/Her), Secretary

Sarah Scoppie is a research associate at the State Office for Cultural Heritage Baden-Württemberg (Landesamt für Denkmalpflege im Regierungspräsidium Stuttgart) within the department for Outreach and World Cultural Heritage. She is responsible for the project to inscribe the Heuneburg as part of the proposed “Celtic centres of power of the Early Iron Age northwest of the Alps” on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Sarah studied Prehistoric and Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Mainz and Tübingen and graduated in 2007 with a Magister thesis on the display of Etruscan tombs in museums. After working in academic publishing and at the State Museum Württemberg, Stuttgart, she moved to the UK in 2014 to complete a PhD on the impact of the Roman conquest on changing identities in north-west Italy at the University of Leicester (Scheffler 2018) and to work in outreach. 

Her research interests include identity studies, especially the impact of modern identities on perceptions of past identities, outreach and heritage management, especially from a sustainable development perspective. Since 2023, Sarah is also a member of the advisory board of AG TidA (Theories in Archaeology).

https://denkmalpflege-bw.academia.edu/SarahScoppie

https://hdl.handle.net/2381/43184

Dr Kelsey Shawn Madden (She/Her), Secretary, Institute of Classical Studies


Kelsey is a Roman archaeologist who manages archaeological excavations in Italy
and the UK and is the current acting fieldwork supervisor for the British School at
Rome on the Falerii Novi Project. She is an Early Career Research Associate at the
Institute of Classical Studies (University of London). She specialises in Roman visual
culture, focusing on depictions of captive ‘barbarian’ women and children from the
1st century BC to the 2nd century AD (PhD in Archaeology, University of Sheffield).
Her interests lie in the trafficking of captives by Rome, wartime sexual violence in
Roman contexts, and their portrayals. Kelsey’s interdisciplinary approach integrates
archaeology, art history, sociology, and feminist methodologies to examine Rome’s
function and impact as an imperial power in the context of gender, sexuality, and the
predatory notion of Roman conquest.

Dragos Mitrofan (He/Him) TRAC2023 Representative and Treasurer, University of Exeter

Dragos has worked as a commercial archaeologist on numerous multi-period sites in the UK and Romania, including several large infrastructure projects.  He is currently undertaking his PhD at the University of Exeter with a thesis focused on mapping, dating, and interpreting ‘plaster burials’ throughout the Empire. Other research interests include probability theory and application modelling for relative dating as well as field methods and excavation practices. 

Tyler (TJ) Kelly (They/Them), Ordinary Member, Royal Holloway University

Tyler graduated from ‘BA Classical Archaeology & Ancient History’ at Royal Holloway University of London. Upon graduating, they were awarded the Longfield-Jones Archaeology Prize by the Classics Department at Royal Holloway. Their dissertation entitled “Ancient ‘Gender-Queer’ Visibility: The Bioarchaeology and Bacchus Iconography of the ‘Harper Road Burial’” won the Roman Society’s BA Roman Archaeology Dissertation Prize 2024, and was previously presented at the Classical Association’s ‘Towards a More Inclusive Classics III’ 2023 conference. They are hopeful to submit their dissertation to TRAJ in the near future. Tyler Kelly is now looking towards taking up an MSc in ‘Archaeological Sciences’ at Oxford University.

David Spiller (He/Him), Ordinary Member, University of Reading

Dave is a PhD student at the University of Reading, researching warlordism, separation of church and state, and contemporary ethnology in late and post-Roman Britain. His research interests also include the place of archaeology in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century British politics. He has dug on a number of sites across the UK, and previously studied at the University of Oxford and the University of York.