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Beatrice Pestarino

Beatrice's research interests are longstanding. At the end of her MA, she developed a special interest in epigraphy from an analysis of bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Phoenician, which developed into her thesis, 'Cyprus in Archaic and Classical periods: the political and social transformations of a multilingual island'. Her current PhD work aims to clarify the Cypriot city-kingdoms' administrative system during the Archaic and Classical periods, trying to understand what the political and social organisation was and how it developed, taking into account the cultural and linguistic differences that existed on the island. The research is based on data obtained from inscriptions written in Cypriot-syllabic Greek, alphabetic Greek, and Phoenician, compared with literary sources and some archaeological records. The goal is to show the emergence of a system, related to each city-kingdom with a court, an administrative structure organised on multiple levels, with a number of officials performing different specific tasks. Beatrice's PhD is funded by the Leventis Foundation.

PhD

Supervisor: Hans van Wees and Paola Ceccarelli
Working title: 'The political-administrative structure in Cyprus during the Archaic and Classical periods'
Expected completion date: 2020

Publications

'"The alphabetic Greek inscriptions from Paphos", review of J-B Cayla's Les inscriptions de Paphos (2018)', in The Classical Review 69.1, forthcoming April 2019.

Conference papers and presentations

  • 'Officials in Ancient Cyprus: rebuilding the Cypriot political-administrative structure during the Classical period', Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies annual conference, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, June 2018
  • 'Rebuilding the Cypriot administrative system during the Iron Age', New Voices in Epigraphy, University of Oxford, April 2018
  • 'Evagoras and the Cypriot kingship in Isocrates' speeches', UCL Lyceum Classics Community seminars, UCL, October 2017
  • 'Kingship in Ancient Cyprus', Ancient Autocracies seminar series, Brasenose College, University of Oxford, June 2016

Conference organisation

  • Convenor of the Postgraduate Work in Progress seminars at the Institute of Classical Studies, London, 2017-18
  • Organisational committee of AMPAH 2018, the Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in Ancient History, UCL and Birkbeck College
  • Organisational committee for the UCL History postgraduate conference Nature's past: Historical perspectives on a contested concept, June 2017

Media and online media

Archaeological fieldwork

Teaching

From March to May 2015 Beatrice was a postgraduate trainee at COASIT (Comitato assistenza scuole italiane), the Italian school board, operators of Italian language and culture courses related to the consular jurisdiction in London (this position was awarded on the basis of academic merit). She organised teaching resources, taught Italian as a foreign language, prepared for the Italian GCSE and A-level exams and tutored students individually on their written work.