Rubina Raja


Rubina Raja is a classical archaeologist educated at University of Copenhagen, La Sapienza University and University of Oxford. She is professor of classical archaeology at Aarhus University and centre director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions. She specialises in the cultural, social and religious archaeology and history of past societies. Research foci include urban development and network studies, architecture and urban planning, the materiality of religion as well as iconography from the Hellenistic to Early Medieval periods. Her publications include articles, edited volumes and monographs on historiography, ancient portraiture and urban archaeology as well as themes in the intersecting fields between humanities and natural sciences. Rubina Raja received her DPhil degree from the University of Oxford in 2005 with a thesis on urban development and regional identities in the eastern Roman provinces under the supervision of Professors R.R.R. Smith and Margareta Steinby. Thereafter, she held a post-doctoral position at Hamburg University, Germany, before she in 2007 moved to a second post-doctoral position at Aarhus University, Denmark.

Career

Rubina Raja has since 2007 been the principal investigator and director of several research projects, many of them interdisciplinary. Since 2015, she directs Centre for Urban Network Evolutions based at Aarhus University, which is the largest research initiative within the humanities in Denmark. The centre has pioneered work on urban development, high definition archaeology and network studies of societies from the late Hellenistic into the Medieval periods geographically covering regions from Northern Europe, across the Mediterranean to the East Coast of Africa.
Rubina Raja directs two fieldwork projects together with international colleagues. Since 2011 she has directed the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project together with professor Dr. Achim Lichtenberger from Münster University and since 2017 she directs the Danish-Italian Caesar’s Forum Project in Rome together with Dr. Jan Kindberg Jacobsen and Dr. Claudio Presecce Parisi.
Rubina Raja is the primary investigator and director of the Palmyra Portrait Project that compiles a corpus of the funerary portraiture from Palmyra. Since 2012, the project has collected and catalogued more than 4000 pieces, which will be the basis for the research carried out within two new research projects, Archive Archaeology and Circular Economy and Urban Sustainability in Antiquity. The Case of Palmyra.
Rubina Raja’s research has earned several national and international distinctions within and outside her field. She has received the silver medal for outstanding research within the humanities from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters as well as the Elite Research Prize and the National Research Prize for outstanding research within the humanities and social sciences awarded by Dansk Magisterforening. She has also received international acclaims from the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the American Institute for Archaeology.
Rubina Raja engages actively in outreach initiatives and in communicating her research within the humanities and about the importance of humanities widely to the general public and policy makers in publications, radio-interviews and programmes, podcasts, television and documentaries, as well as online lectures. She has curated several exhibitions, among others Harald Ingholt og Palmyra and Jerash – et dansk-tysk udgravningsprojekt at the Museum of Ancient Art, and The Road to Palmyra at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. Rubina Raja also acted as one of the head consultants on the featured exhibition Palmyra – Loss and Remembrance at the Getty Villa.
Rubina Raja studied Classical Archaeology, Italian language, Cultural Communication and Journalism at the University of Copenhagen in from 1995 to 1999. She spent the academic year 1997-1998 as an exchange student at the Universitá di Roma, La Sapienza. She continued her studies at the University of Oxford, where she gained her M.St. in Classical Archaeology. In 2005, she received her D.Phil. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation was entitled Urban development and regional identity in the eastern Roman provinces, 50 BC – AD 250: Aphrodisias, Ephesos, Athens, Gerasa and was supervised by R.R.R. Smith and Margareta Steinby. It was published as a monograph in 2012. As further education within the fields of research and management organisation Rubina Raja studied for a Diploma of Management and joined an Executive Research Management Course. She is committed to furthering professional leadership in the university world as well as dedicated to furthering the careers of female scholars and academics in particular.

Research projects

Current funded research projects

Full list of publications available at Aarhus University, .

Monographs