Isabelle Chapman

I’m broadly interested in how people construct categories and hierarchies–whether linguistic, sociological, or architectural–and in the relationship between abstract words and narratives and the tangible things and people that they describe.   

In summer 2025, I worked as a research assistant to Dr. Anna Papafragou in the Language & Cognition Lab, where I developed an experiment investigating how people perceive categories and hierarchies for different verbs of movement.  

My sophomore year, I took an archaeology class with Dr. Kim Bowes, now my research mentor, and became fascinated with the world of objects and its alternately harmonious and antagonistic interaction with the world of words.

In summer 2026, I excavated for the Gabii Project’s field school, where I received instruction in archaeological methods while digging in Area J, comprising complex wall construction and a unique pool structure. I simultaneously immersed myself in ancient Roman texts, interested in how material and literary records diverge, and what they suggest about the lives of people maligned by the social order.

Currently, I’m interested in how the architectural structure of Roman houses aimed to enforce social structure, and how women and enslaved people lived within both. I will continue to explore the tension between archaeological and literary evidence, and the fact that representations of people at the bottom or margins are often controlled by people at the top.