My research examines how Roman material culture, especially third-century imperial portraiture, functioned not simply as representation but as an active medium for shaping political legitimacy, collective memory, and embodied identity. Focusing on a period often characterized as one of artistic decline and political instability, I argue instead that imperial portraiture emerged as a powerful visual strategy. It leveraged facial expressivity, material experimentation, and spatial display to articulate authority and sustain cultural coherence.
My dissertation, "What’s in a Face? Reframing the Expressive Portraiture of Third-Century Roman Emperors" (Boston University, 2025), offers the first sustained study of the rise of highly expressive imperial portraits. Features such as furrowed brows, tense mouths, and deeply carved musculature have typically been interpreted as symptoms of crisis. I reinterpret them as deliberate mnemonic devices. These works, I argue, operated as “sculptural technologies of memory,” designed to command attention, elicit emotional response, and embed the emperor’s presence within the viewer’s cognitive and cultural landscape.
This project advances an interdisciplinary methodology that brings together art history, archaeology, ancient rhetoric and philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience. By placing Roman theories of vision and memory in dialogue with modern research on perception, affect, and attention, I explore how viewers engaged with imperial images on both intellectual and sensory levels. In this framework, the face emerges as a critical site of meaning, where identity, authority, and emotional resonance converge.
My research is grounded in site-specific case studies, including the Sebasteion at Boubon (Turkey) and the villa at Chiragan (France). These contexts demonstrate how imperial portraits were curated within both civic and domestic environments to structure historical narratives, negotiate dynastic continuity, and shape modes of viewing. In doing so, they reveal the fluid interplay between public and private memory in the Roman world.
As I develop this work into a monograph, I am increasingly focused on questions of materiality. I examine how surface treatments such as polychromy, carving techniques, and variable finishes intensified the immediacy of these portraits and transformed them into multisensory encounters with imperial authority.
Across my work, I foreground the dynamic relationship between form, perception, and ideology. Roman imperial portraits were not passive reflections of power, but active agents in its construction. By examining how these images shaped memory and belief, my research offers a new perspective on how power was made visible and how that visibility was experienced, embodied, and sustained.
Select Conference Presentations
“The Sebasteion at Boubon: Portrait Display and Imperial Dynastic Associations,” Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity XVI: Gender, Identity, and Authority in Late Antiquity, Tulsa, OK, March 20-23, 2025.
“Redefining Roman Imperial Portraiture in the Third Century CE,” College Art Association Annual Meeting, New York City, NY, Feb. 12-15, 2025.
“Recarving, Reuse, and Remembrance: A Case Study into Late Antique Portrait Production,” College Art Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, Feb. 16-19, 2022.
“Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae and the Forging of a Memory of Rome,” Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, St. Louis, MO, June 18-20, 2018.
“From Rome to the Romanesque: The Effect of the Late Antique ‘Decline’ of Style on the Early Medieval Form,” International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK, July 3-6, 2017.
“The Sebasteion at Boubon: Portrait Display and Imperial Dynastic Associations,” Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity XVI: Gender, Identity, and Authority in Late Antiquity, Tulsa, OK, March 20-23, 2025.
“Redefining Roman Imperial Portraiture in the Third Century CE,” College Art Association Annual Meeting, New York City, NY, Feb. 12-15, 2025.
“Recarving, Reuse, and Remembrance: A Case Study into Late Antique Portrait Production,” College Art Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, Feb. 16-19, 2022.
“Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae and the Forging of a Memory of Rome,” Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, St. Louis, MO, June 18-20, 2018.
“From Rome to the Romanesque: The Effect of the Late Antique ‘Decline’ of Style on the Early Medieval Form,” International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK, July 3-6, 2017.