Elaine Gazda

Elaine Gazda (BA Marietta College, MA University of Pennsylvania, PhD Harvard University) is Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology in the Department of the History of Art and Curator of Hellenistic and Roman Collections at the Kelsey Museum. She was Director of the Kelsey Museum from 1986 to 1997, Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology from 2006 to 2009, and head curator for the installation of the Kelsey’s William E. Upjohn Exhibit Wing in 2009.

For eighteen years she served as a Trustee and frequent visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome, where she codirected (with Miranda Marvin) an NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers on the “Roman Art of Emulation,” and she continues to serve on the Trustee’s Publication Committee. She was a staff member of the Harvard-Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis in Turkey and a member of the American Academy in Rome harbor excavation team at Cosa.

She is coauthor of The Roman Port and Fishery at Cosa, a Center of Ancient Trade (1987), editor of Roman Art in the Private Sphere (1991/2nd ed. 2010), The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity (2002), The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: Ancient Ritual, Modern Muse (2000), and Building a New Rome: The Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch (2011). She is author of numerous exhibition catalogues and articles on Roman sculpture, the art of Graeco-Roman Egypt, and Roman construction techniques. Her current research focuses on Roman domestic interiors, Roman villas on the Bay of Naples, and she is preparing an exhibition entitled “Leisure and Luxury in the Age of Nero: The Villas of Oplontis near Pompeii,” scheduled to open in 2016.