Ghosts of Pompeii

Caitlín Eilís (Caitie) Barrett is an archaeologist who studies everyday life and cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. She is a professor of classics at Cornell University. She also co-directs an archaeological excavation at Pompeii: the Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project, which explores the ways that Roman houses and gardens shaped their inhabitants’ lived experiences.
Her areas of specialization include Mediterranean and Egyptian archaeology, household archaeology, the archaeology of religion and ritual and interactions between Egypt and the Greco-Roman world in antiquity. In addition to her current fieldwork at Pompeii, she has also excavated and surveyed a range of Bronze Age through early modern sites in Egypt, Greece and the United States.
Barrett earned her Ph.D. from Yale and her Bachelor of Arts from Harvard. She is the author of two books: "Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion" (Brill, 2011) and "Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens" (Oxford University Press, 2019), as well as numerous scholarly articles. She is the recipient of grants from the National Geographic Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation (two-time recipient), Dumbarton Oaks, the International Catacomb Society, the American Philosophical Society, the Rust Family Foundation, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Archaeological Institute of America and Sigma Xi.
In exploring the material remains of the past, she seeks to better understand some of the most profoundly human aspects of life at Pompeii: the daily experiences, activities and sensations that made up people’s lives.