Voices from the Past: Exploring the Humanities Through Ancient Graffiti

The annual award began in 1985 and recognizes a faculty member who demonstrates excellence in class instruction, inspiring students and concern for student welfare.

DiBiasie-Sammons, associate professor of classics and senior faculty fellow of the Luckyday Residential College, teaches and studies Roman archeology and Latin language with a focus on ancient graffiti.

“I’m extremely grateful to receive this, and I owe it all to my department,” she said. “I have an extremely supportive department who has championed and celebrated every one of my research goals and achievements, and especially my chair, Molly Pasco-Pranger who has worked tirelessly to make my research path possible.”

DiBiasie-Sammons will give a lecture at 5 p.m. March 4 in Bryant Hall, Room 209. The lecture, “Voices from the Past: Exploring the Humanities Through Ancient Graffiti,” is free and open to the public.

The Ole Miss professor hopes the discussion guides audiences toward examining similarities between the past and present, how the human condition and human experience largely remain the same more than 2,000 years later.

“While we can’t learn directly from the Romans … we can learn a lot about ourselves from studying ancient peoples,” DiBiasie-Sammons said. “The past can tell us a lot more about the present … by sort of putting a little bit of space between us and them, we can actually look a lot more inward at ourselves in our own world.”

Molly Pasco-Pranger, chair and professor of classics, nominated DiBiasie-Sammons for the honor.

“Her scholarship in this area is outstanding and is garnering attention on an international scale; she won the college’s New Scholar Award in 2020 on the merits of her early work and it has continued apace,” Pasco-Pranger wrote in her nomination letter to the College of Liberal Arts. “She has translated this work into a number of innovative undergraduate courses that make clear the versatility and real-world application of research in the humanities.”

Since joining Ole Miss in 2017, DiBiasie-Sammons has sought to provide an incisive and accessible approach to the world of antiquity. Besides serving as field director of the Ancient Graffiti Project, she has inspired students through studying abroad in Italy and by pioneering several digital technologies to preserve and visualize ancient messages.

“It truly invigorates my research, my teaching; to see it through their eyes makes it even more special,” she said

DiBiasie-Sammons’s work has been published in the American Journal of Archaeology, as well as many other professional publications. In 2022, she gave a TedTalk about ancient graffiti and the hidden messages found in Pompeii.

Her current project, which is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, analyzes the aesthetics and materials of ancient Roman graffiti.

“Dr. DiBiasie-Sammons’s award as UM’s Mississippi Humanities Council Teacher of the Year is a fitting recognition of her teaching prowess in the humanities, and her public lecture will bring those skills together with her important research into the graffiti of ancient Pompeii,” said Donald Dyer, associate dean for faculty and academic affairs and distinguished professor of modern languages.

Click here for more information about DiBiasie-Sammons’ work.