Many of our art history courses offer students the chance to step away from the traditional classroom setting and hop into galleries, studios, and museums to examine collections up close. Prof. Sophie Crawford-Brown led students from her new course, HART 360/550: Inventing Roman Art, earlier in the spring on a class trip to see a large collection of Daunian pottery (from the east coast of Italy, dating between the 7th and 4th centuries BCE) currently held in a private collection in Houston. The students examined and analyzed the pottery at close range, and discussed it in relation to broader questions of identity expression and cross-cultural interaction in ancient Italy.
For those interested in Classical and ancient Greek studies, Prof. Crawford-Brown will be teaching HART 216: Introduction to Greek Art and Archaeology next fall, in addition to leading our popular D1 course, HART 101: Introduction to the History of Western Art I.
Serving as Director of the Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations Program alongside teaching in the Department of Art History, Dr. Crawford-Brown’s research centers on the art and archaeology of Republican and Early Imperial Italy, using material culture as a lens for addressing broader historical problems such as colonization processes, cross-cultural interaction, and the transition from Republic to Empire.
