Dr. Catherine Kearns

Catherine Kearns is a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. Her research examines the intersections between social and environmental change in Mediterranean landscapes during the Iron Age period. In her first book project, The Rural Landscapes of Archaic Cyprus: An Archaeology of Environmental and Social Change (Cambridge, 2022) she analyzes the emergence of Iron Age communities on the island of Cyprus through their land-use practices, rural economies, and experiences with changing climates. She is particularly interested in the political and social dimensions of landscape change and how modern conversations on human-environment relationships can engage with historical evidence. In addition to her work in landscape archaeology, she also studies environmental history, urbanism and ruralism, and concepts of space, place, and geography in antiquity. In recent years she has co-directed fieldwork on Cyprus through the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments Project, using geophysics, field survey, excavation and geospatial analysis to identify Iron Age rural settlements, for which she has been awarded ACLS, Loeb Classical Library Foundation and university grants.