Preface and Editors’ Preface

Increasing International Perspectives in Theoretical Roman Archaeology

“…The majority of UK-based delegates is much reduced in comparison with past attendance, giving the conference a much broader, international perspective. Although data is not available for comparison from all previous TRAC and RAC/TRAC conferences, we are able to see that individuals working in 27 different countries attended in 2018, compared to 15 at Amsterdam 2008 (Driessen et al 2009), 15 at Oxford 2010 (Mladenović and Russell 2011), and 17 at Leicester 2015 (Mandich et al 2016). Almost a quarter of the attendees in 2018 came from EU universities while an additional 5% represented EU research institutions and the commercial sector.…”

“…The core of the debate hinges on the necessity of keeping the two conference themes clearly separated or pushing for a higher degree of hybridisation between them (see, e.g. Mladenović and Russell 2011). One of the most striking issues from the overview of the themes discussed is a very high degree of overlap between the topics of RAC and TRAC sessions.…”

“…The percentage of female speakers has decreased since the last conference which reported the speaker's gender. At Oxford 2010, 32 of 49 speakers were female (Mladenović and Russell 2011). It is also worth noting that these figures are based on first names (a method also used in -Eckardt 2019) and so this is an imperfect analysis due to missing data on non-binary researchers and other under-represented groups (Kelly et al 2019).…”