Milena Melfi is an archaeologist of the ancient Greek world. She received her education in Classics at the University of Pisa and in Classical Archaeology at the University of Messina. Prior to coming to Oxford she was a Fellow of the Italian and British Schools of Archaeology in Athens, of the American Academy in Rome and of the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University. She has worked on surveys and excavations in Greece, Sicily and Albania. Since 2004, she has been curating the collection of casts of Greek and Roman sculptures at the Ashmolean Museum, while teaching Classical archaeology for the Faculty of Classics. Since 2008 she is Lecturer in classical art and archaeology at New College.

Teaching

Milena offers tutorials in Greek and Roman archaeology and organises the instruction in archaeology within the compulsory subject ‘Text and Context’ in the Classics degree. For the Faculty of Classics she lectures and gives classes on Classical and Hellenistic archaeology.

Research Interests

Her current research is mainly directed at the interpretation of the archaeology and history of Greek sanctuaries and cults in Late Hellenistic and Early Roman times. In her recent publications she has mostly attempted a re-definition of the role, functioning and frequentation of Greek religious sites, especially in their later periods of activity.

Since 2008 she has been directing a team from the University of Oxford in the joint Italian–Albanian–UK excavations at Hadrianopolis (Albania) and in 2016 she started a new field project in Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli (Rome).

Selected Publications

• Hellenistic Sanctuaries: between Greece and Rome (with O. Bobou). Oxford OUP 2016.
• I Santuari di Asclepio in Grecia. I (Rome 2007)- Winner of the 2004 “L’Erma” di Bretschneider Award in Archaeology
• Il Santuario di Asclepio a Lebena (Athens 2007)
• ‘Some thoughts on the cult of the Pantheon (‘all the gods’?) in the cities and sanctuaries of Roman Greece’ in E. Muniz Grijalvo, J.M. Cortés Copete, F. Lozano Gomes ed. Empire and Religion, Leiden 2017, pp. 137-148.
• ‘The stele of Polybius and the cities of the Peloponnese in the 2nd century BC’ in I. Berti, K. Bolle, F. Opdenhoff, F. Stroth (eds.) Writing Matters: presenting and perceiving monumental texts in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Berlin, De Gruyter, pp. 191-204.
• ‘Aelius Aristides at the Asklepieion of Pergamon’ in H-G. Nesselrath and M. Trapp eds. Aelius Aristides, Prose Hymns (SAPERE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2016, pp. 89-114.
• ‘Religion and Society in Early Roman Corinth: a forgotten hoard from the Sanctuary of Asklepios’, Hesperia, 83.4 (2014), 747-776.
• ‘Geografia storica della valle del Drino’ (with J. Piccinini), in R. Perna and D. Condi (ed.), Hadrianopolis II (Bari 2012), 37-65
• ‘Ritual spaces and performances in the Asklepieia of Roman Greece’ in Annual of the British School at Athens 105 (2010), 317-338.

https://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-milena-melfi
http://www.ashmolean.org/people/milena-melfi
http://borders.classics.ox.ac.uk/