About

Sarah Beckmann is a Roman archaeologist specializing in domestic art and archaeology. She is currently working on a monograph that re-investigates the villa phenomenon of the late antique period (mid-3rd to 5th century CE), treating the diverse material culture packages of villas in the western provinces as evidence for regional variations on late antique elite culture. Her research also examines villa sites from the bottom up to bring greater attention to non-elite populations traditionally left out of archaeological discussions. Her interests include the sculpture habit of late antiquity, portrait traditions in provincial contexts, representations of women and enslaved children in domestic arts, and the creation of ascetic space in the Levant around the 4th to 5th centuries CE. Beckmann has excavated throughout the Western Mediterranean in Greece, Italy, and France, and works primarily with archival material and legacy data.

Research topics

• History
• Visual arts
• Political Science
• Art
• Art history
• Ancient history
• Intensive care medicine
• Law
• Pediatrics
• Aesthetics
• Internal medicine
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Early postnatal high-dose fat-soluble enteral vitamin A supplementation for moderate or severe bronchopulmonary dysplasia or death in extremely low birthweight infants (NeoVitaA): a multicentre, randomised, parallel-group, double-blind, placebo-controlled, investigator-initiated phase 3 trial

  The Lancet Respiratory Medicine · 2024 · 23 citations

  • Medicine
  • Pediatrics
  • Internal medicine
  PublisherDOI

• Fiber, Art, and Feminism

  ˜The œHopkins review/Hopkins review · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Fiber, Art, and Feminism Sarah Beckmann (bio) If you had looked at ucla's spring 2022 undergraduate course catalog, really looked—beyond the classes that you need to graduate, beyond the classes that your friends swear will deliver an easy A, beyond the marquee courses from luminary professors whose praises are so frequently sung—you just might have stumbled upon an unassuming one-credit course in the classics department with (dare I say it) a provocative and intriguing title: Fiber, Art, and Feminism. This one-credit course—I proudly declared in the blurb posted to the course registrar and on my one-page syllabus—aimed to provide students with several opportunities. Students in Fiber, Art, and Feminism would learn to knit (in an accredited university classroom!), connect with their peers and their professor in meaningful discussion, and use fiber as a heuristic for a more holistic investigation of feminine voices and experiences from Greco-Roman antiquity (ca. 1200 bce-400 ce) into the present era. Writing about this course nearly a year after teaching it, I recognize these learning objectives as overly ambitious—both for a fifty-minute seminar that met only once per week over a ten-week term and for this particular Greco-Roman archaeologist and visual historian, who identifies as a hobby knitter at best. So, was the course successful, or did I fall short of the expectations I had so earnestly set for myself and my students? Yes. Conversations were rich and engaging, and students did, technically, learn to knit. But instructing those students in basic hand-knitting skills (casting on; knitting; binding off) while facilitating lucid discussions of fiber-focused literary excerpts and essays, both ancient and modern? Honestly, I found this quite difficult. A visual is perhaps most instructive as my memory of the course—how it went, what we gained from it—is very much shaped by the material record of our experience together: the colorful, not-so-square, mistake-ridden cotton washcloths that each of us knit over the course of the term. Practical, unique, visibly flawed works of art—these are the archaeological vestiges of Fiber, Art, and Feminism (hereafter faf). With an understanding that we must learn from our mistakes and reap the rewards of the journey itself, I hope to synthesize some of the less tangible takeaways of faf, the more ephemeral equivalents of the aforementioned washcloths. And in tracing my recollections, I hope to [End Page 137] reframe the classroom itself as a space for the construction of a feminist collective in the broadest sense. I want to amplify the myriad voices that emerged in our discussions and grant intellectual space to specific concerns that students shared about the intersections of fiber and feminism through the ages vis-à-vis fiber craft as women's work; the feminist collective; and fiber arts as a vehicle for feminist action, in theory and in practice. What follows is a series of reflections on what we—as educators and as students of the world—stand to gain from having such conversations and where those conversations might take us should we choose to continue them in and beyond university classrooms.1 Fiber Work and Women's Work To set the stage for this course and the more specific dialogues taking place in it, I need to locate us early in the term. With students attempting (some succeeding!) to master a long-tail knit cast-on (while watching me do the same, my fingers, yarn, and needles appearing at ten times their size on the screen behind me), I asked students to process an excerpt they had read in Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years. Early chapters in this book—an anthropological study of textile work from about 20,000 bce to the first millennium bce—interrogate the practical motivations behind the historic characterization of fiber work as women's work. Labor in premodern times, Barber argues, was gendered [End Page 138] by necessity. As mothers, wet nurses, and more general caregivers, women were responsible for minding the young, which required they stay put in a particular location. To pass time in the company of youngsters, and with...

  PublisherDOI

• Late Roman «villae» and the «rus»: Interrogating Rural Interdependencies in the Ebro River Valley (Navarra, Spain)

  Cuadernos de Arqueología de la Universidad de Navarra · 2023-10-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The last century of archaeological exploration has brought to light many late antique villae (mid-3rd – early-5th centuries CE), and much has been made of the ways these sites visually reinforce the increasingly fraught patron-client relations that characterize the late antique world in scholarship. My paper challenges these assumptions, using material evidence to illustrate a more complex, symbiotic relationship between late antique villae and the rus. The late Roman countryside was stratified, but to presume an especially oppressive relationship between estates and rural populations is to perpetuate synthesis of this period as synonymous with decline, and to disregard more nuanced evidence in the archaeological record. I discuss cult structures on three estates in the Ebro River Valley in ancient Tarraconensis (Spain) to argue that villae courted and catered to sub-elite rural population groups, who were themselves receptive to such offerings. By highlighting these interdependencies, this paper aims to bring greater contour to our understanding of the mechanisms animating the provincial countryside in late antiquity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Portraits and Identity: “Roman” and “Elite” in the Late Antique Villas of Aquitania

  The Art Bulletin · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art
  • Art history

  This article examines late antique marble portraits from three Roman villas in Aquitania (southwestern France). These objects are striking evidence for a vibrant, Theodosian-era (r. 379–95 CE) portrait tradition, which contrasts with the absence of contemporary portraiture elsewhere in the western provinces. This raises questions about the motivations and identities of the patrons, which I investigate by approaching the portrait as a tool for the construction and navigation of “elite” and “Roman” identities. Such claims were politically charged in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, which witnessed the admission of outsiders (the nouveaux riches and “barbarians” like the Visigoths) into high society.

  PublisherDOI

• The Naked Reader: Child Enslavement in the Villa of the Mysteries Fresco

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2022 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • History
  • Visual arts

  This article analyzes the naked boy who appears as a reader in the fresco cycle of the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, ca. 60–40 BCE. Although this fresco and its many figures have received ample attention, few scholars have asked why the reading boy is naked. I mark the boy’s nakedness as proof of his enslavement, using iconographic and epigraphic evidence for child slaves in Roman-era Dionysiac cult. I also consider a Roman audience’s reception of this boy as decoration for the walls of a Late Republican villa. This image, I argue, worked to reinforce social hierarchies and the eroticization of child slaves, thereby perpetuating cultural systems of subjugation that organize the domestic sphere and the empire more broadly. By way of conclusion, however, I mark the painting’s unabashed acknowledgment of the lived experiences of a child slave as a subtle critique of slaveholding strategies, at least among enslaved viewers.1Content warning: Readers are advised that this article discusses evidence for the sexualization and sexual exploitation of minors, especially enslaved minors.

  PublisherDOI

• The Idiom of Urban Display: Architectural Relief Sculpture in the Late Roman Villa of Chiragan (Haute-Garonne)

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2019-12-16 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article presents an analytical study of the Late Antique sculptural relief program at the Roman villa of Chiragan (Martres-Tolosane, Haute-Garonne), which includes a series of mythological panels and a portrait in relief. Although Chiragan's reliefs have long been associated with Aphrodisian workshops, this study marks them as products of a local workshop, based on stylistic traits and recent scientific analyses of the marble. Using comparanda found in a series of Late Antique portraits from Chiragan, I date the reliefs to the later fourth or early fifth century CE. I also consider evidence for an honorific relief portrait at the villa that, together with the program of architectural relief sculpture, makes explicit reference to a distinctly urban visual rhetoric. In conclusion, I argue that Chiragan's reliefs actively court association with the urban sphere, which in turn suggests the increasing importance of the villa as a sociopolitical locus in the Late Roman West.1

  PublisherDOI

• Climate change adaptation and mitigation – a hitherto neglected gender-sensitive public health perspective

  Climate and Development · 2018-10-31 · 21 citations

  article

  Climate change is likely to bring more, hotter and longer lasting heat waves in central Europe over the coming decades. Particularly, vulnerable groups are hit harder by heat waves. A gender-sensitive perspective has not been taken into account sufficiently in scientific studies on climate change and health. This study examined the health impact of extreme heat events from a gender-sensitive perspective and measured gender-specific individual behavioural adaptation and mitigation strategies. A cross-sectional population survey was done in Leipzig, Germany, from July to October 2014. The survey was used to determine the relationship between the influencing factors such as gender, adaptive and mitigation measures and the health burden resulting from extreme heat waves. Gender-specific differences were found for type of income, personal net income and individuals who are strongly affected by persistent heat. A significant gender difference was also found for headaches, cardiovascular diseases, different climate adaptation measures and types of mitigating behaviour. These findings confirm other study results and indicate the need for further studies on gender and diversity aspects which take into account sociodemographic, socioeconomic and climate ecological differences. Taking the public health approach, surveys for adaptation and mitigation measures are needed which explicitly consider gender and target groups’ aspects.

  PublisherDOI

• Psychosocial Impact of Fracking: a Review of the Literature on the Mental Health Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing

  International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction · 2017-07-31 · 92 citations

  review
  PublisherDOI

• Statuary Collections In The Late Roman Villas Of Hispania And Southwestern Gaul

  ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) · 2016-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Excavations in the Roman Southwest, in what is now Portugal, Spain, and southern France, have brought to light a diverse corpus of sculpture that was displayed in late antique villas, ca. 250-450 CE: monumental reliefs, mythological statues and statuettes, and portraits, of both private individuals and imperial personages. Although the production of some statues is roughly contemporaneous with the late antique villa in which they stood, many pieces were antiques, carved centuries earlier. But the diversity within and across these statuary assemblages, and the concentration of such finds in villas of Hispania and Gaul, have not been given a full treatment in modern scholarship. Rather, sculpture is interpreted generically as evidence for the elite status of a villa owner, leading to problematic assumptions that all statuary collections, and late-Roman villas more broadly, evince an indistinguishable class of “elite” Romans. This dissertation invites readers to reconsider the narrow but well-established definitions of the late antique elite, through analysis of the many differences that are readily apparent among villas and their material assemblages. I argue that material culture can and should be interpreted as evidence of the regionalism which played an important role in late antique society, and thus I treat sculpture as a window into the social practices and peer polity negotiations among villa domini.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Mirobriga

  The Encyclopedia of Ancient History · 2016-06-22

  other1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Mirobriga is an archaeological site in Lusitania, which preserves ruins of a Celtic oppidum reestablished as a Roman settlement in the first century ce .

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Sina Rößler

  Max Bergmann Zentrum für Biomaterialien

  4 shared

• Thomas Hanke

  Goethe University Frankfurt

  4 shared

• Christiane Heinemann

  TU Dresden

  4 shared

• Hans‐Peter Wiesmann

  TU Dresden

  4 shared

• Benjamin Kruppke

  4 shared

• Jana Farack

  Max Bergmann Zentrum für Biomaterialien

  4 shared

• Annesuse Schmidt

  München Klinik

  2 shared

• Kristina Glenske

  University of Giessen

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World (IDP)

  University of Pennsylvania

  2016

Awards & honors

• Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize fellow in ancient studies (2022-2…
• AIA’s Archaeology of Portugal Fellowship (2014-15)
• Fulbright scholar in France (2015-16)