Margaret M. Andrews

Margaret M. Andrews

Assistant Professor of Classics
Margaret M. Andrews

Margaret M. Andrews is a Classical archaeologist specializing in Roman urban history over the longue durée. Her research focuses on the physical and social transformations that Roman cities experienced from the beginning of Rome through the early Middle Ages (ca. 900 BCE - 900 CE). Meg is primarily interested in sub-elite, residential spaces and in understanding how prevailing social dynamics both shape and are shaped by the construction of urban space at all scales, from the house to the city as a whole. She has recently begun focusing on the concept of the neighborhood as a physical and social unit that bridges top-down urban administrative policies and bottom-up generative processes of urban development.

Meg is the co-director for the Falerii Novi Archaeological Project, an archaeological excavation of the Roman city of Falerii Novi in central Italy, approximately one-hour’s drive north from Rome. The project combines geophysical remote sensing with excavation to clarify the occupation history of the site, which spanned at least 700 years. It privileges non-civic spaces in order to shed much-needed light on diachronic aspects of residential and commercial life within Roman cities.

Much of Meg’s fieldwork has taken place in Rome or central Italy. She played a leading role in the excavations of the Villa Magna Project near Anagni, Italy and co-edited the resulting publication, Villa Magna: An Imperial Estate and its Legacies. Excavations 2006-2010 (British School at Rome). She has also published various fieldwork projects in Rome in the Journal of Roman Archaeology and the American Journal of Archaeology.

Before her arrival at Harvard in 2020, Meg received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University in 2005 and a Ph.D. in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. She was a Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome from 2011-2012.