Christopher Ratté

On leave for fall semester 2024

Christopher Ratté is an archaeologist specializing in western Anatolia. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote a PhD dissertation on Lydian architecture. He taught at Florida State, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in 2006. He served as Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology from 2009-2013, 2020-2022, and 2023-2024, and as Director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology from 2013-2017. In 2019-20, was a Whitehead Distinguished Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in Winter 2023.

Ratté is the author, coauthor, or editor of five books and more than 50 articles and excavation reports on the archaeology of western Anatolia. His research focuses on the role played by the built environment, from individual monuments to regional settlement patterns, in the articulation of social and cultural identity, especially in regions on the peripheries of the Greek and Roman worlds. He participated in the excavations at Sardis from 1980 to 1992 and at Aphrodisias from 1993 to 2005. From 2005 to 2021, he directed several archaeological survey projects in the regions around Aphrodisias (2005-2009), Vani in the Republic of Georgia (2009-2012), and Notion on the western coast of Turkey (2014-2021). In 2022, he began a new excavation project at Notion in collaboration with Hazar Kaba (Sinop University), Felipe Rojas (Brown University), and Angela Commito (Union College). This project is supported by an NEH Collaborative Research Grant.

At Michigan, Ratté teaches courses in Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture, the archaeology western Turkey and the Black Sea region, and ancient Greek. He has also curated two exhibitions at the Kelsey Museum: “Rock, Paper Memory: Wendy Artin’s watercolor paintings of Greek and Roman sculptures” (Summer/Fall, 2015), and "Urban Biographies, Ancient and Modern," which compared the ancient cities of Notion, Olynthos, and Gabii with contemporary Detroit (co-curated with Lisa Nevett, Nicola Terrenato, and Kathy Velikov, Fall 2018).

Field(s) of Study

• Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology
• Greek and Roman art
• Archaeology of Anatolia