Dr Claudia Paparella

Dr Claudia Paparella

Associate Lecturer

Researcher profile

Email
cp343@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
S8
Location
Swallowgate
Office hours
Mondays, from 1.45pm to 2.45pm.

 

Biography

I began my studies at Sapienza, University of Rome, where I earned my BA in Classics and my MA in Philology, Literatures, and History of the Ancient World. I then moved to Canada and gained my PhD at the University of Toronto, with a dissertation titled "Languages and Identities in the Making of Roman Italy" (2026). In this work, I used a newly created database of epigraphic evidence to show how Latin interacted with and then took over other Italic languages within different social settings, revealing a fundamental chapter of the impacts of Roman expansion upon identity and daily life in Italy. During my doctorate, I participated in an international doctoral cluster which took me to UCL Institute of Archaeology for a semester and I was awarded the Jacobi Scholarship at the Kommission für Alte Geschichte und Epigraphik (DAI, Munich). I joined the University of St Andrews in 2026, and here I teach across language, history, and archaeology courses while working on my monograph and developing my research on how literary and epigraphic records of environmental phenomena can be leveraged to understand the socio-political history of pre-Roman and Roman Italy.

Research areas

My research spans pre-Roman to Republican Roman history, with a particular focus on the social, political, and economic history of the Italian peninsula investigated through Latin and Italic epigraphy. Recently, my research questions have chiefly engaged with the entanglement between language, writing, and identity construction.
 
I also have a strong interest in environmental studies and archaeology, and in how they can inform historical inquiry. I have taken part in several international excavations and served as Area Supervisor on the Falerii Novi Project since 2023. Alongside this, I have worked on combining historical archives from the Roman Republican period with scientific data to explore human perceptions of environment and climate change in Italy. Building on this work, I am now extending this interest to the relationship between state and private benefactors during food crises in Republican and early Imperial Italy.