Jana Nedelkoska (North Macedonia/Australia)
Jana is currently reading for an MSt in Classical Archaeology at Lincoln College. Having grown up in North Macedonia and Australia, she completed the IB Diploma at UWC Adriatic in Italy. She graduated with a BA in Classics from Merton College, Oxford, for which she received the Gibbs Prize and W. M. Edwards Prize in Classics. Her undergraduate degree was fully funded by the Oxford Reach Scholarship.
Her research focuses on pregnancy as a trans-historical female experience that occupies a contested place within society as a response to recent restrictions on reproductive rights and increased governance over the female body. She uses evidence of material objects and religious spaces to investigate the embodied experiences of pregnancy and fertility in the lives of ancient Greek women. Her work investigates women’s experiences in the ancient Mediterranean, including menstruation, fertility cults, parturition, abortion, and contraception, focusing on female agency and embodiment and challenging andro-centric explorations of ancient history and archaeology.
Her undergraduate thesis ‘Classical Attic Funerary Monuments as a Model for Motherhood and Female Citizenship’ focused on grave stelai and lekythoi to explore how the death of the pregnant woman created a rift in Athenian society, representing her failure to successfully fulfil her civic duty. She presented this research at the Graduate Archaeology at Oxford Conference in 2025 and it is now awaiting publication with BAR in the upcoming year.
She reads Classical Greek and Latin, as well as six further modern languages at varying levels. For several years she has participated in excavations in Sicily and North Macedonia and volunteers at both the British Museum and Ashmolean Museum. Outside of academia, she is the Vice-President of the Oxford Balkan Society, an avid reader and interested in all things museums, heritage and archaeology.
She is grateful to the Ertegun Scholarship Programme in the Humanities for providing her with the opportunity to undertake this research at Oxford and to explore aspects of women’s history which have so far been neglected.
