Claudia Inga Robbins Arno

Claudia Inga Robbins Arno, a native of Honolulu, Hawaii, is finishing her fifth year as a doctoral candidate in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor's Interdepartmental Program in Greek and Roman History (IPGRH).  As a graduate student in IPGRH, Claudia is also a student in the University of Michigan's Department of History and Department of Classical Studies.  At Michigan, Claudia is studying a combination of Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology.  Her dissertation, which is tentatively entitled Going Native: How Romans Became "Roman" in an Expanding World, and which she is writing under the dual direction of David Potter and Nicola Terrenato, is on the development of the concept of "Romanness" among both elites in Rome and non-elites in the Roman provinces in the third, second, and first centuries BCE.

After attending high school at Punahou School in Honolulu (the largest private school in the United States and the alma mater of President Barack Obama), Claudia went to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she concentrated in Classics and studied languages, including French, German, Italian, Ancient Greek, and Latin.  At Brown Claudia wrote an honors thesis under the direction of Professor Deborah Boedeker on how classical references to women changed in the medical documents relating to Asclepius, Soranus, and Hippocrates in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE while scientific advances and the advent of dissection were providing doctors and healers with increased anatomical knowledge; the thesis was entitled "Women Are Like That: The Effects of Societal Assumptions and Scientific Knowledge on the Medical Treatment of Women in the Greco-Roman World."  At Brown, she served as a Meiklejohn peer advisor, as a Curricular Advising Program (CAP) Fellow, as a senior staff writer for the Brown University Critical Review of Courses, as an officer of the Brown University Hawaii Club, as recording secretary of Brown's Technology House, and as a member and regular soprano soloist for the Brown University Chorus, with which she toured Costa Rica.  After receiving her A.B. from Brown in May of 2004, Claudia spent the next year in Providence (while her husband was teaching at Brown and working on his dissertation) continuing to develop her language skills, taking graduate courses in Classics and Physical Anthropology at Brown, working at the John Carter Brown Rare Books Library, singing with the Providence Singers, and attending the Portanta Osteology workshop at the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon. 

At Michigan, Claudia has taught numerous courses as a Graduate Student Instructor, including Greek History, Roman History, Great Books, and Classic Civilizations; in the Winter of 2010 she taught her own course, a first-year seminar on family in the ancient world.  At Michigan Claudia has also sung with the Michigan Choral Union and the University of Michigan Women's Glee Club, and has served as an editor of the Michigan Feminist Studies Journal.  While in college, Claudia also studied at Middlebury College in Vermont, the University of Hawaii (Manoa), and the University of Siena in Italy; as a graduate student, she also worked on a dig on the Spanish island of Menorca sponsored by the Ecomuseo de Cap de Cavalleria, and is on staff for the 2009 excavation season with the Gabii Project.  Claudia has given conference papers at Brown University and at Boston University on women and medicine in the ancient world, on soldier-marriage in the Roman world, and on the link between anti-piracy and Roman identity.  She can be reached at carno (insert an "at" sign here) umich.edu.