Archeology alumna Sarah Mady (Ph.D. ’23) has joined the Women’s Studies and Early Christianity Program at Harvard University as a Research Associate and Visiting Lecturer for the 2025-2026 academic year.

Her research project is titled “Milk Shrines: Ancient and Modern Healing in the Eastern Mediterranean.”

In small, unassuming spaces often left out of the historical record, women in ancient Lebanon built networks of healing shrines away from a male-dominated society.  In this sacred landscape women today continue to seek healing and an abundance of mother’s milk, and also use shrines as memorials to mothers and children who died prematurely.

Dr. Mady is an interdisciplinary scholar who engages with anthropological and archaeological methods to study the ways in which women have healed each other and their infants in the longue durée of the Eastern Mediterranean. By focusing on socially constructed spaces such as cave shrines, she traces back women’s presence in public spaces and studies their landscape of healing, grief, and memory.