Katy Knortz is a Ph.D. student in classical art & archaeology. Before coming to Princeton, she completed an M.A. in classical studies at Columbia University in 2020, a post-baccalaureate in classical languages at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, and a B.A. from the College of William & Mary in Anthropology and classical archaeology in 2016.
Knortz is an active field archaeologist and currently works as a trench supervisor at the Tharros Archaeological Research Project, under the direction of Steven Ellis and Eric Poehler. She has also excavated with Columbia University at Hadrian’s Villa, the Apolline Project in Pompeii, and Valdosta State University at Carsulae. Knortz is also currently part of an initiative to digitally catalog the Olcott collection of Roman coins at Columbia and works broadly on digital humanities projects with the media centers at both Columbia and Princeton.
Knortz’s research focuses on the ways in which Classical cultures engaged with the material world they inhabited and how they used built environments to forge social identities. She is particularly interested in the intersection of status and domestic architecture and how movement within and around these built environments both informed and reinforced gender and class differences. In her M.A. thesis, Aesthetics of Excess: Challenging the Theory of ‘Elite’ Imitation in Trimalchio’s Home, she approaches a selection of freedmen homes in Pompeii using a bottom-up perspective, arguing that freedmen homes are worthy of study independent of their relation to other types of homes because different social experiences informed it.
Knortz has been awarded research grants from the American Friends of Herculaneum as well as Princeton’s Program in the Ancient World. She consistently presents her work at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America.