Dr Jessica Venner

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Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
jessica.venner@arch.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests: 

Urban agriculture; horticulture; non-elite communities; resilience; community identity; memory; urbanism; early imperial Rome; archaeobotany; epigraphy; spatial analysis; Pompeii; Tyrrhenian Italy

Geographic regions: 

Bay of Naples; Italy

 

Research Profile

My research focuses on urban agriculture and horticultural labour in the early imperial Roman world, with particular emphasis on non-elite community resilience and identity within cities. To investigate the socio-economic role of urban agriculture, I combine archaeobotanical, spatial, and epigraphic approaches. A central strand of my work has examined productive green space in Pompeii, with particular interest in post-disaster rebuilding and adaptive reuse prior to the AD 79 eruption, and I am now extending this research to a broader comparative study across Tyrrhenian Italy. I am especially interested in how memory, embedded in cultivation and shared urban space, facilitated belonging, identity, and resilience within non-elite communities and community groups.

Research activities

Cultivating Cohesion: Urban Agriculture in the Towns of Roman Tyrrhenian Italy (Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, University of Oxford)

Gardens of the Roman Empire Project. Project website available here.

 

Research awards

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2025-28)

Rome Award, British School at Rome (2025-26)

Early Career Research Award, Royal Historical Society (2025)

Associate Fellowship (elected 2024)

Early Career Research Associateship, Institute of Classical Studies, SAS, University of London (2023-26)

Open Doctoral Award, AHRC-M3C Doctoral Training Programme (2018-22)

Classical Associations Award (2020)

Publications
Selected Publications

Venner, J. (forthcoming). Commerce and crisis: adaptive reuse of commercial spaces in post-AD 62 Pompeii. In A. Van Oyen and A. Hoffelinck (eds), Failure in the Roman World between Republic and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Venner, J. (2026). The Lost Voices of Pompeii. London: HarperCollins (UK, Commonwealth, North America and Japan).

Venner, J. (forthcoming, February 2026). Excavating experience: methodological shifts in the study of Pompeii’s urban fabric. Antiquity.

Venner, J. (forthcoming, Q1 2026). Rise and vine: the rapid growth of Pompeii’s opportunistic gardens in Regions I and II, AD 62–79. Journal of Roman Archaeology.

Venner, J. (2024). The artialisation of Roman landscape in the elite villa. Review of M. Zarmakoupi (2024), Shaping Roman Landscape: Ecocritical Approaches to Architecture and Wall Painting in Early Imperial Italy. The Classical Review, 74 (2), 598–600.

Venner, J. (2024). Planes, frames, and pictorial relief. Review of M. Koortbojian (2024), The Representation of Space in Graeco-Roman Art: Relief Sculpture, Problems of Form and Modern Historiography. The Classical Review, 74(2), 587–589.

Venner, J. (2021–2024). Vesuvian sites. The Gardens of the Roman Empire Project (online corpus). Available at: https://roman-gardens.github.io/

Venner, J. (2021). Rus “becomes” urbs: hard and soft landscape elements in the gardens of Pompeii. New Classicists Journal, 4, 13–40.

 

In preparation

Venner, J. Pompeii’s Urban Agricultural Gardens: Cultivating Resilience in the Early Empire. London: Bloomsbury, Ancient Environments series.