Drawing on both archaeological and textual evidence, Caitlín Barrett's research investigates cultural, religious, and trade connections between Egypt and the rest of the ancient Mediterranean world; the archaeology of religion and ritual; and the material culture of ancient households. Her first monograph, Egyptianizing Figurines from Delos: A Study in Hellenistic Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2011), investigated religious change and cultural hybridization in the household through a study of locally-made "Egyptianizing" terracotta figurines from the Hellenistic trading port of Delos. Her second monograph, Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens (under contract to Oxford University Press; forthcoming in 2018), will be the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery from Roman domestic contexts. She was also a collaborating editor for Figurines grecques en contexte: Presence muette dans le sanctuaire, la tombe et la maison (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Septentrion, 2015), an edited volume on the contextual analysis of Greek terracotta figurines.
Prof. Barrett's work has received national and international grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Research Center in Egypt, and Sigma Xi, among other sources; and at Cornell, her work has been supported by the Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences, the Provost's Special Research Fund, the Classics Department Gift Fund, the Affinito-Stewart Fund, the Midas-Croesus Fund, and the Society for the Humanities. In 2014, she received the Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Award for Excellence in Advising in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. She has excavated and surveyed at a range of Bronze Age through early modern sites in Egypt, Greece, and the United States.
Prof. Barrett teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate courses on topics related to Classical archaeology and culture; ancient Greek religion and ritual; the archaeology of the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean; Egypt in the Greco-Roman world; Greco-Roman receptions of Egyptian culture; Greeks and "others"; and the ancient Egyptian language and hieroglyphic script. She welcomes applications from graduate students in Classics, Archaeology, Anthropology, and Near Eastern Studies.
For further information about Prof. Barrett's research, see also https://cornell.academia.edu/Caitl%C3%ADnEBarrett.