Astrid Van Oyen is an archaeologist whose research grapples with one of the most fundamental aspects of being human: how people in the past imagined the future and dealt with uncertainties. She has been a pioneer in developing approaches that see objects not just as traces but as active human agents that make a difference to the course of history. Van Oyen sets to work this new, object-oriented lens in the pursuit of telling different stories about the Roman past, stories that center the underbelly of society and its unheard voices – the actions and experiences of those people who have left little textual or material trace. Through her fieldwork with the Marzuolo Archaeological Project excavating a small, rural service center, Van Oyen also generates new data in pursuit of a more complex history of the past’s silent majority. At the Academy, she will work on completing the final publication of this collaborative fieldwork project, with Rhodora G. Vennarucci and Gijs W. Tol, as well as developing new research regarding Roman failures. 

Van Oyen is the author of How Things Make History: The Roman Empire and its Terra Sigillata Pottery (2016, Amsterdam University Press), The Socio-Economics of Roman Storage: Agriculture, Trade, and Family (2020, Cambridge University Press), and Living Precariously in the Roman World: A Social Archaeology of Inequality (2026, Cambridge University Press). She has held a Junior Research Fellowship at Homerton College, Cambridge, has been a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.