WASHINGTON, DC – April 11, 2017 – The Phi Beta Kappa Society is pleased to announce the winner of the 2017 Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship. This fellowship recognizes exceptional scholars in the field of French or Greek language, literature and culture. This year the award goes to a Greek scholar.

 

Katherine Harrington, the 2017 recipient of the Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship in Greek Studies, earned her Ph.D. in archeology from Brown University in 2016 and is currently a Jacob Hirsch Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The Sibley Fellowship carries a stipend of $20,000.

Harrington’s project, “Women’s Labor and the Market in Classical and Hellenistic Greece,” examines the archaeological evidence for women’s labor in the textile industry through the archaeological remains of weaving workshops in mainland Greece and Crete. She states, “Ultimately, I aim to assess how acknowledging the economic importance of this labor changes our understanding of the nature of ancient economy and women’s roles within it.”

A Sibley Selection Panel member praised Harrington’s proposal, stating, “Katherine’s project seeks to excavate the stories of ordinary women living in Ancient Greece…The proposed study is at once theoretical, material, and historical, and its raison d’être is very clearly laid out from the introduction. By focusing on women who work, Katherine proposes to disrupt extant scholarship that has focused on wealthy, elite women whose presence and activities merited mention in texts and depiction in iconography. The challenge of the project is to extract a narrative about ordinary working women from the sites and tools of their crafts (in this case, from a weaving factory and from looms.)”

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