Sinead Brennan-McMahon

Hello! I'm Sinead. I'm a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and a PhD candidate in Classics. 

Until now, queer people have been considered archaeologically invisible in the ancient world, and our knowledge of their existence has come from pejorative literary texts. But by studying the the art that museums used to censor and reconstructing their original 'findspots', I have found evidence for a potential queer neighborhood in the ancient city of Pompeii, Italy. I am using spatial Data Science techniques to visualize how this art was distributed in the city, and to match with how ancient Roman people thought about space. 

Why can't I just use Google maps? Back in the 1st century, people didn't think about space in the same way as we do. Instead of a top-down aerial view, they imagined and talked about space as if they were there in person. They also had different ideas about what counted as public space and what was private. Not everyone had access to the same spaces in a city - where you could go depended a lot on your gender, how much money you had, and if you were free or if someone had enslaved you. And so I needed a different way to understand the cultural influence of each piece of art. 

In the Data Science Scholars Program, I am testing different algorithms for viewshed analysis, community detection, influence mapping, and Voronoi tessellations with constraints, which I am adapting to the peculiarities of ancient city design and any known non-traditional living situations (i.e. “chosen family”). This research will help to correct historic queer erasure, and deepen our understanding of queer spaces today.