Dr. Laughlin comes to academia as a second career. She spent over 16+ 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 masters and doctoral training are assets to academia.
Dr. Laughlin's career move to academia has provided her with archaeological training, which spans from the Middle Bronze Age through the Roman Imperial Period. Her academic career has a broad scope of experience studying esoteric and polytheistic religions, surveys, excavations, historical archaeology, ancient architecture and drawings, and digital archaeology. Albeit, her research and interests are to compare and analyze ancient Egyptian material culture within the Hellenistic and Roman periods, her on-site research locations have been in Australia, Egypt, Greece, Haiti, Italy (Naples, Pompeii, Rome, Sicily, and Tivoli), South Korea, 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 the middle east. 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 (HILLS) Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Religious Studies at Case Western Reserve University, where she is currently a Visiting Scholar.
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 minor in Early Church History from Andrews University (Berrien Springs, Michigan).