Margaret L. Laird is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Latin and Classics at the University of Delaware. She teaches beginning and intermediate Latin and courses on Roman civilization. Her research and publications focus on the intersections of public art, inscriptions, and architecture; the material culture of Latin epigraphy; Ostia, the port of ancient Rome; and art made by ordinary Romans. She is the author of Civic Monuments and the Augustales in Roman Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2015), co-editor of and contributor to Walls and Memory: The Abbey of San Sebastiano (Lazio) from Late Antique Monastery to Renaissance Villa and Beyond (Brepols, 2005), and has published articles and essays on ancient Roman art and culture. She is currently working on a project that examines how art, ritual and space create community identity among the firemen in their barracks at Ostia.

Professor Laird received an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where she was also a member of the interdisciplinary Program in the Ancient World. Her dissertation research was supported by a two-year Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. Her post-doctoral research has been funded by the Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Prior to coming to the University of Delaware, Professor Laird taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Washington, Seattle and served as a curatorial advisor to the Seattle Art Museum. She serves on the Lecture Committee of the Archaeological Institute of America and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.