Dr Ellen Swift, Senior Lecturer from the Department of Classical and Archaeological Studies, has won a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her research project entitled ‘Design for Living: Artefact Function and Everyday Social Practice in the Roman World’.
The project explores the relationship between the design and actual use of objects, bringing in insights from design theory, and investigating how artefact function relates both to behaviour and to wider cultural norms.
Everyday utilitarian objects have been much less researched than more obviously symbolic items, but are essential to our understanding of Roman living, both in a practical sense, as functional artefacts, and also in the construction and performance of culturally specific behaviour. By investigating object design, based on both close examination of the objects themselves, and the new technology of 3-D scanning, we can examine Roman culture in a new way.
For more details of the Leverhulme Trust, please see its website here: www.leverhulme.ac.uk