Irene was born at Voss, og grew up in a small community, Ålvik, in the Hardangerfjord. She studied Classics, History and Archaeology at the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, and finished her PhD at the University of Gothenburg in 2019. In recent years, she has been a postdoctoral fellow shared between the universities of Gothenburg and Leicester, while teaching and supervising students in Oslo and Gothenburg.
Irene is excited about Late Antiquity particularly because of the significant political, economic and cultural changes taking place in this period. She is interested in how these changes affected the attitudes and practices of different social groups with regard to death, afterlife and funerary practices, with a particular focus on social inequalities.
Her PhD focused on the use and reuse of pagan material culture in the form of statues and temples when urban areas were christened. Her latest research deals with the relation between christianity and changes in funerary practices in Late Antiquity. She enjoys fieldwork and excavations, and has been part of projects in Tegea in Greece, Hadrians Villa outside Rome and Hierapolis in Turkey. At the moment, and in the coming years, she will be contributing to an international excavation project in the etruscan town of Vulci, in the Northern part of Lazio.
Her latest publication will be published later this year: «Archaeological Perspectives on Burial Practices and Societal Change: Death in Transition» (Routledge, Open Access).