Andrew (Drew) Wilburn

Drew Wilburn continued his work with the third grade classes at Oberlin Elementary School, sharing information about archaeology. For the past 5 years, with a small pandemic break, Professor Wilburn has worked with the third grade team as they explore the IB curriculum, "Who we are in Space and Time." Students participated in the analysis of a "Mystery Cemetery," which helps the third graders analyze a series of "graves" from a fictional culture, based in part on teaching tools from the Archaeological Institute of America.

Professor of Classics Drew Wilburn will be a collaborator on the Books of Karanis Project, for which C. Michael Sampson, University of Manitoba is the Principal Investigator. 

The Books of Karanis was recently awarded a $94,000 Insight Grant from Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council. The Books of Karanis will contextualize seventy-four fragmentary books from the ancient site of Karanis, a Greek, Roman, and Egyptian settlement occupied from around 200 BCE  to 600 CE. The collaborative project brings together the research expertise of papyrologists, literary specialists, and archaeologists to reconstruct ancient Greek literary culture. The research project is investigating who read these texts, how they might have read them, and in what contexts reading took place.

Wilburn will bring archaeological expertise through his work as the principal investigator of the Karanis Housing Project, which has been developing a digital map of the archaeological site and populating the map with all of the finds from the University of Michigan excavations (1924-1935). The Karanis Housing Project includes current student research collaborators Emily Hudson '22, Grace Burns '23, Elliot Diaz '23, Henri Feola '23, and many former Oberlin students. 

Professor of Classics Drew Wilburn was quoted in an article in Atlas Obscura about the recent discovery of ritual objects and amulets at the site of Pompeii.

Associate Professor of Classics Drew Wilburn was awarded a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society to support research in the United Kingdom on his project, "Architectural Magic and Social Space in the Roman Mediterranean." The project analyzes the myriad and overlapping methods that individuals and communities employed to control risk and protect themselves, their children, and property from seen and unseen dangers, including physical barriers, architectural elements, gestures, objects worn on the body, and images built into living spaces. Wilburn will be conducting research at the Wellcome Library, the British Museum, and the Senate House Library.

Drew Wilburn, associate professor of classics, archaeology, and humanities, gave two invited lectures in London during May 2017. At the British Museum, he presented his research on the archaeological findspots of magical papyri in Egypt, entitled "Investigating the Magical Papyri as Artifacts." This work is part of a larger project related to archaeological context and spell manuals that were used by specialists during the late Roman and early Christian periods (3rd-6th centuries CE). He also gave a public lecture at Treadwell's Bookshop, entitled "Archaeology of Spells: A Case Study from Karanis, Egypt." This lecture presented Drew's research on a magical love spell and a cache of more than 80 inscribed bones found during the University of Michigan's excavations at the Roman period site of Karanis.

On October 3, Drew Wilburn, associate professor and chair of classics, chair of archaeological studies, and Irvin E. Houck associate professor in the humanities, presented an invited paper entitled "Ritual Personnel and the Curse Tablets from Cyprus" at the conference From Roman to Early Christian Cyprus, co-sponsored by the Harvard Divinity School, the A. G. Leventis Foundation and Princeton University.