Kaja的研究兴趣包括古老的花园和景观,环境历史,与古代世界和当代考古实践有关的可持续性和弹性问题。她的中学领域包括十九世纪和二十世纪的城市主义和建筑。
Kaja收到了她的b.a.在古典和近东部考古学和明尼苏达大学(2007)大学的政治学中,一个距离马萨诸塞大学 - 阿默斯特(2012)大学的古代艺术史,以及康奈尔大学古代艺术与考古的博士学位(2020)。她是两位杰出的教学奖,马萨诸塞州 - 阿默斯特杰出的教学奖(2011-2012)和康奈尔大学詹姆斯F. Slevin作业序列写作中心讲师奖(2017年)。Kaja是2017年秋季的敦纳奥克斯的花园和景观研究中的一名初级研究员,2018年春季和2018年秋季是宾夕法尼亚大学地中海世界计划的艺术和考古学的交流学者。她主要在希腊菲尔岛,在那不勒斯湾的古代维苏威镇挖掘出来。目前,她是康奈尔大学大学的助理主任,在庞贝城的Casa Della Regina Carolina山区艺术大学挖掘花园http://blogs.cornell.edu/crcpompeii/)。按照Facebook和Twitter上的项目(#crcpompeii)。
Kaja’s dissertation, “Cultivating Empire in Ancient Roman Gardens: Unearthing the Tangled Relationship between Plants and their Gardeners,” is focused on the rapid blossoming of a new cross-Mediterranean plant trade, burgeoning horticultural innovation, and rise of a new gardener class in the first centuries BCE and CE. Centered on questions of plant agency, her project develops a new plant-centric approach for the study of ancient Roman gardens by identifying and exploring the entangled relationship between ornamental plants and their slave, freed, and free gardeners—a group of non-elites that has largely been ignored. To this end, the project is interdisciplinary, drawing on gardeners’ funerary inscriptions, textual descriptions of gardeners and plants, archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence from excavated gardens and garden representations. Comparative case studies are also utilized, including interviews with contemporary Italian gardeners and designers, and documentation of pre-industrial free and enslaved garden labor in early modern Italian gardens and American Antebellum plantations.