Heather is a PhD candidate in the History program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her field of study is the frontier regions of the Roman Empire and the barbarian kingdoms in Late Antiquity. Her dissertation is on the Kingdom of the Gepids, a late antique barbarian kingdom located in what is now modern Hungary, Romania, and Serbia, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between archaeology, numismatics, and textual sources. Like many other groups and peoples from Late Antiquity, the Gepids left no written records of their own, and thus she has a keen interest in the challenges and complexities that arise when utilizing non-textual sources.