Seminar Directors and Assistants

As co-directors of the seminar Professor D’Ambra, Vassar College, and Eleanor Leach, Indiana University, Bloomington) complement one another precisely. Professor Leach’s principal fields of interest are Roman literature, the Republic and Roman painting; Professor D’Ambra of Roman Sculpture, the Empire and Roman Women. Matters of identity and self-representation figure heavily in the publications and current research projects of each. As a specialist in Roman portrait and relief sculpture Eve D’Ambra has addressed her investigations especially to questions of identity and self representation in a variety of contexts from freedman’s funerary iconography to second century philosophers’ portrait busts. Alongside many articles her books include Private Lives, Public Virtues, an analysis of the sculptural reliefs in Domitian’s Forum Transitorium, Roman Art (Cambridge, 1998), the anthology Roman Art in Context, and The Art of Citizens, Soldiers and Freedmen in the Roman World: An Illustrated Anthology, co-edited with Guy Metraux. Her most recent book Roman Women has just been issued by Cambridge University Press and her current research concerns standards of beauty in both women’s and men’s portraits of the High Roman Empire.

In her approach to Roman culture, Professor Leach draws upon and often combines both literary and visual texts. Her 2004 book The Social Life of Painting in Ancient Rome and on the Bay of Naple takes up the interior decoration of both public and private spaces as a series of responses to changing politics while considering social codes. Her current literary work centers on the rhetoric of persona in Cicero’s letters and orations and in the letters of the younger Pliny. As a member of the Indiana University faculty of Classical Studies Professor Leach served for two terms as chair and more recently for nine years as Director of Graduate Studies, She has been chair of fourteen dissertation committees and a member of many others in Classical Studies, Art History, Comparative Literature and English.

Each co-director has a long-standing familiarity with Rome and with the Academy. Eleanor Leach was Classical Studies Resident Scholar in 1983-84, and was a leader of a NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers entitled “Roman Art in a Social Context” at the Academy in summers 1986 and 1989. In interim years, she has visited the Academy and has also studied in the library of the German Archaeological Institute. Additionally she has spent many months in Campania and the Naples Museum on behalf of her work in Roman Painting and served as leader of two Vergilian Society summer study tours of Campania in 1990. From 1986-88, Eve D’Ambra was the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize Fellow and served as the Resident in Classical Studies for the spring 2005 semester. In summer 1995, she was a participant in the NEH Summer Seminar, “The Roman Family and Household,” led by Professors Richard Saller (University of Chicago) and John Bodel (Brown University). Professor D’Ambra has worked extensively in the three major museums, gaining entrance to their storerooms, photoarchives and conservation labs.

A third member of the seminar staff will be our student assistant, M. Erin Taylor, a graduate of Earlham College who is now a fourth year graduate student at Indiana University. Erin’s particular interests are in Classical drama and Roman art history. She has spent a semester in Rome and participated in a Vergilian Society study tour of Magna Graecia. Here at Indiana Erin is helping with answers to inquiries and other correspondence, including information for accepted participants. In Rome she will prepare materials for the Seminar, organize the field trips, and coordinate administrative matters.