Rubina Raja is professor of classical art and archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark and director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s centre of excellence Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet, https://urbnet.au.dk/).

Raja’s research focusses on classical art and archaeology in its broadest sense with particular specialisms in iconography and portrait representations in the Roman world (eastern Mediterranean), urban and landscape archaeology, sites and their societies’ multiple networks from the Hellenistic to the medieval periods. While being a classical archaeologist, she also works in fields intersecting traditional archaeology and natural sciences, bringing high-definition studies of the past to the forefront – an approach, which has most prominently been pioneered through the work done within the framework of UrbNet, since 2015.

Raja is actively engaged in discussions on research politics and the role of research, in particular humanities, in modern societies as well as the promotion of a better gender balance in academia. She is the co-founder of the Danish network and prize initiative Women of the Year in Academia and was part of the Empower Talent mentoring scheme at Aarhus University. She holds several further education degrees in research management and management, among these from INSEAD, Paris and Copenhagen Business School.

Rubina Raja is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters as well as the Academia Europaea. She is furthermore an elected corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute. She has received several national and international prizes and awards for her research, among these the EliteForsk Research Prize and the silver medal for outstanding research in the humanities and social sciences awarded by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. She has held visiting professorships and fellowships at several prestigious institutions including Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, Sorbonne University, Paris and the Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt University, Germany.

Raja is the founder of several international book series, among those Mediterranean Studies in Antiquity and Urban Pasts (both with Cambridge University Press) as well as Studies in Classical Archaeology, Archive Archaeology, Studies in Palmyrene Archaeology and History, Women of the Past as well as Journal of Urban Archaeology (https://www.urbanarchaeology.net/), all published by Brepols Publisher.

Raja is an experienced fieldwork archaeologist and co-directs fieldwork projects in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, most prominently the Danish-Italian Caesar’s Forum Project together with Jan Kindberg Jacobsen and Claudio Presicce Parisi (https://cas.au.dk/en/cfp/) as well as the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project with Achim Lichtenberger since 2011 (https://projects.au.dk/internationaljerashexcavation/). Furthermore, she is heading and has headed several collective research projects: Archive Archaeology (https://projects.au.dk/archivearcheology/), the Palmyra Portrait Project (https://projects.au.dk/palmyraportrait/) as well as Circular Economy and Urban Sustainability in Antiquity (https://projects.au.dk/circulareconomy/). Recently the Ceramics in Context project came to an end after four years of research and publications (https://projects.au.dk/ceramics-in-context/). She was co-PI of the ERC Advanced Grant project headed by Jörg Rüpke ‘Lived Ancient Religion’ (2012–2017).

Raja is open to supervising and co-supervising students at all levels within her fields of expertise.