Rate My Professor Megan Daniels

Megan Daniels served as Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, from 2018 to 2020. During her tenure, she taught introductory courses in ancient history, coordinated HUMS508 Master's Thesis in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and served as Research Integrity Advisor. She received the Early Career Researcher Award in 2019 for her pilot project 'Of Temples and Tomes: Analyzing Trends in Votive Deposition and Social Change in the Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean (900-500 BCE).' Daniels earned her Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from Stanford University in 2016, with a dissertation titled 'The Queen of Heaven and a Goddess for All the People: Religion, Cultural Evolution, and Social Development in Iron Age Greece,' advised by Ian Morris. She previously obtained an M.A. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from the University of British Columbia in 2009 and an Honours B.A. in Archaeology from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2005. Her academic training included visiting membership at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 2014 and participation in the Howard Comfort Summer Program in Roman Pottery at the American Academy in Rome in 2011.

Daniels' research specializations encompass religion and cultural evolution in Iron Age Greece, cross-cultural interaction and religious change, migration and mobility in human history, emporia and sacred exchange in the Mediterranean, data science applications in ancient religion and archaeology, Hellenistic pottery, and Neo-Punic and Roman archaeology. Prior to UNE, she held the IEMA Postdoctoral Fellowship at SUNY-Buffalo (2017-2018) and the Lora Bryning Redford Postdoctoral Fellowship in Archaeology at the University of Puget Sound (2016-2017). She has been honored with the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholarship (2012-2015, $160,000), ACLS/Mellon Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2015-2016), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship (2010-2014), and various Stanford and UBC awards. Key publications include 'Aphrodite Pandemos at Naukratis Revisited: The Goddess and Her Civic Function in the Context of an Archaic Emporion' (Journal of Greek Archaeology, 2018), 'Hercules and Symbolic Power in Roman Hispania: Appropriating a Globalized Discourse' (Rome, Empire of Plunder, Cambridge University Press, 2017), 'Evidence for Meat Consumption during the Punic to Roman Colonial Transition at Zita' (International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 2019, co-authored), and 'Sacred Exchange: The Religious Institutions of Emporia in the Mediterranean World of the Later Iron Age' (Brill, 2014). Daniels has edited volumes under revision on data science and ancient gods, and modeling mobility in human history, and serves on the Program Committee for the Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions.