Graduate students spark interdisciplinary conversations at the Yale-Cambridge Workshop on Antiquity and Environment

In late March, graduate students from opposite sides of the globe convened for the second Yale-Cambridge Roman Empire Workshop in Phelps Hall. The three-day conference brought together students and faculty with backgrounds in art history, history, philosophy, classics, archeology, and

Credit: Maria Ma

 more. Students shared their research with peers, heard from field experts, visited the Yale University Art Gallery and Yale Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library, attended a job market workshop, and enjoyed dinners and nights out at classic New Haven spots. This exchange provided unique social, academic, and professional value to its attendants and strengthened relationships between the two institutions.

The event was organized by Cambridge Classics research fellows Bill Freeman and Daniel Hanigan in collaboration with Yale Classics professors Benedek Kruchió and Erika Valdivieso, with the aim of fostering scholarly exchange and providing career development opportunities.

The 2026 theme, "Antiquity and Environment," was chosen for its global and academic relevance. Dr. Freeman and Dr. Hanigan are both involved in research on ecocriticism—specifically, on the study of ancient literature in relation to the environment. This field investigates how human-environment interactions are represented, analyzed, and critiqued in creative works, to promote ecological awareness and sustainable living. The field has experienced significant growth in recent years, likely due in part to the general rising environmental concerns. The organizers felt that many students were already engaged in thematically relevant work, allowing for productive and timely discussions across subfields.

To foster further success, the conference provided a job market workshop and valuable exposure to the respective partner institution.

“There is so much transatlantic movement on the level of jobs,” Dr. Hanigan said. “Once people finish their graduate programs in Cambridge or Yale, they often move between the two worlds without much contact before. Forming these connections while in grad school and seeing the different ways that academic cultures tackle these questions provides a better foundation for approaching the job market.”

These benefits have already become apparent in the year since the first iteration of this conference; last year’s gathering included a workshop on securing postdoctoral funding abroad, and several attendees later achieved this at their target institutions. Many remained in contact with other attendees and conference organizers, exchanging application advice, academic papers, and even collaborating on research projects.

Credit: Maria Ma

To encourage further collaboration, the conference followed a “graduate paper format,” in which students were paired with partners pursuing a roughly similar topic. Each student provided an overview of their academic argument, and their partner provided a prepared response before opening to the audience for a Q&A session. Students from both universities noted the unique intellectual value this opportunity presented; even within their own academic departments, meaningful engagement with one’s own cohort was not always a given—let alone across disciplines, universities, or continents.  

Over the course of the first day alone, students discussed menstrual taboos in Roman agricultural practices, ecocritical approaches to Ovid’s poetry, notions of an emperor’s divine power over natural resources, water usage at Chester’s Roman Fort, and Greek geographic narratives of tuna migration patterns. These discussions revealed broader ancient anxieties about their vulnerability to the natural world, desire to conquer their environment, and social stratification in relation to gender, class, and species.

The students then visited the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library, where they pored over relevant ancient materials from the library’s collection.

The day culminated with a keynote lecture by Professor Joseph Manning, who researches the intersection of Paleoclimatology and the economic history of the premodern world.

Dr. Manning described growing empirical evidence and emerging technologies that can elucidate the extent to which volcanic eruptions and other major natural disasters have impacted major historical shifts across human history. He aimed to close the “gap between the resolution of climate and historical evidence,” describing how growing technologies such as mapping tools, ice core analysis, and climate data can help build increasingly granular causal arguments for the role of climate in generating political instability. While he warned of common traps such as conflating correlation with causation and falling into climate-deterministic lines of thinking, he maintained that this integration of scientific and historical data may be beneficial even beyond academic settings.  

In addition to these scholarly exchanges, students enjoyed pub-style group dinners and explored Yale and New Haven. For many, this conference was their first opportunity to visit the United States. Those in short programs and on tight budgets noted that a chance to travel, network, and engage in relaxed academic dialogue in this way may not have been accessible otherwise.

“I’m excited to see these relationships grow and develop over the next couple of years,” said Dr. Valdivieso. “I can honestly say that at dinner last night, I was so happy to meet people who were not only exceptionally easy to work with, but also a delight to talk to.” 

The conference was funded by the MacMillan Center’s Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, which supports Yale faculty in convening on-campus events that engage international themes in the humanities or social sciences.