After moving school at 14 and taking Latin almost as a joke I quickly decided that I wanted nothing more than to read Latin and do Classics forever. Amazingly, over a decade later, I am doing exactly that. I arrived in Cambridge in 2011 and spent my undergraduate years constantly slightly awestruck while getting through a very large amount of very varied work. But almost from the beginning it had been classical art that had grabbed me particularly, and that I found I could talk about for the longest! So I completed a Masters here looking at various topics within Roman art, mostly concerned with gender and connections to the art of the 19th and 20th centuries. I am now starting the second year of my PhD which is looking at the representation of the body in the art of Roman Britain. The graduate community here is so supportive, and being surrounded by people who love the same subject but do such different things with it is always fun and interesting. I’ve been here a long time, but I still wander around the Cast Gallery upstairs with the same sense of excitement as when I first visited years ago explaining who all the statues are to my mum. Studying Classics at Cambridge has been an incredible experience, and the opportunities I’ve had along the way- like taking part in archaeological fieldwork in my summers! - have been life-changing.

Hanneke, PhD student