Dr. Laughlin comes to academia as a second career. She spent 15+ years as a paralegal where she obtained considerable amounts of business and legal experience. Although she comes to the world of academia as a second career, she believes her life-long learning, business, and legal experiences coupled with her master's and doctoral training are assets to academia.
Dr. Laughlin's academic training provides her with in-depth archaeological and historiography expertise that spans from the Middle Bronze Age through the Roman Imperial Period of West Asia, North Africa, and Mediterranean Lands. Her research hones the socio-political and religious historiography, and material cultural receptions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods east and west of the Mediterranean. She is particularly interested in the wide-spread migration and globalization dynamics of the socio-political and religious transformations of ancient religions that may have been impacted during regional conquests east and west of the Mediterranean.
Her academic career has introduced her to broad scopes of expertise with esoteric and polytheistic religions, surveys, excavations, historical archaeology, ancient architecture and drawings, and digital archaeology. Some of her on-site research and/or excavation locations have included: Australia, Egypt, Greece, Haiti, Italy (Naples, Pompeii, Rome, Sicily, and Tivoli), Southern Levant (Ancient Judea, Palestine, Jordan), and Turkey.
After completing her Ph.D. in 2019, Dr. Laughlin embarked on a two-year Fulbright Postdoctoral Researcher position in West Asia. Although much of her research plans were stifled by the global COVID pandemic, she stayed abroad and sought to understand the implications and cultural changes of the Serapis and Isis cults within the Southern Levant. In 2021, Dr. Laughlin moved back to America and became an Andrew W. Mellon/Humanities in Leadership Learning Series Postdoctoral Scholar at Case Western Reserve University. In the fall of 2023, Dr. Laughlin will begin her tenure-track Assistant Professorship at Wake Forest University in the Department of Classics.
Dr. Laughlin has a B.A. in Business Management and Psychology from DePaul University (Chicago, Illinois), an M.A. in Intercultural Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies with a minor in Biblical Studies from Catholic Theological Union (Chicago, Illinois), and a Ph.D. in Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology and Anthropology with a cognate of Early Church History from Andrews University (Berrien Springs, Michigan).