Sarah Craft earned her Ph.D from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and has worked on archaeological projects around the world, including Turkey, Greece, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. She first came to FSU in 2015 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Classics to pursue her teaching and research interests in landscape archaeology and geospatial analysis with a focus on the late Roman and medieval eastern Mediterranean, which ultimately led to her direction of a landscape project in eastern Serbia exploring the hinterland of Felix Romuliana, the late Roman palace of the emperor Galerius. After a series of adventures that took her to Minnesota (Carleton College) and Abu Dhabi, she gained professional experience in the private sector as a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) specialist in cultural heritage management before returning to FSU to pursue her passion for teaching.
Sarah’s research and publications focus on the distributed landscape contexts of monastic systems in northwest Attika (Greece) and on the travel infrastructure that informs an account of the journeys undertaken by a Sufi saint in medieval Konya (Turkey). As for fieldwork, she currently participates in FSU’s own Landscape Archaeology of Southwest Sardinia (LASS) Project.
When not working on teaching and research, she delights in planning her next travel adventure, exploring Tallahassee on foot and with friends, experimenting in the kitchen, singing in the Tallahassee Community Chorus, and basking in the fascination her cats find in her life.
IDH 3423 History Embodied
The body is an integral part of experiencing and knowing the world(s) we live in, and has been since the earliest stages of human history. In this course, we will explore notions about—and the cultural issues surrounding—the human body in a variety of ancient (broadly) Mediterranean contexts. Our investigations will combine traditional art historical approaches, archaeological methods, finds, and theories, ancient literary sources, and anthropologies of movement to consider not just what the body looks like and what it is made from, but also how we treat it, use it, and learn from it. Drawing on specific case studies to facilitate discussion, we will consider issues like culturally-constructed 'ideal' bodies, concepts of health and cleanliness, and the relationship between the physical body and religious devotion—and how all of these change over time, even within our own world today.
IDH 3422 Food & Drink in the Ancient World
We may all be what we eat, but we are also where, when, why, with whom, and how we eat. In this class, we will explore patterns of food production, preparation, consumption, access, and taboos, examining issues like gender, health, and wealth within the historic and geographic context of the ancient Mediterranean and western Asia. Literary, art historical, anthropological, and archaeological approaches and evidence will be explored in our pursuit of connections between food, drink, and daily life, as we examine how in both the ancient and modern worlds, we ‘are what we eat.’