My research investigates how Roman material culture—particularly third-century imperial portraiture—functioned not just as a form of representation, but as an active medium for shaping political legitimacy, collective memory, and embodied identity. At a time often dismissed by scholars as artistically incoherent or politically fragmented, I argue that imperial portraiture became a crucial visual strategy: one that used facial expressivity, material innovation, and spatial display to communicate authority and foster cultural resilience.

My dissertation, "What’s in a Face? Reframing the Expressive Portraiture of Third-Century Roman Emperors" (Boston University, 2025), is the first full-length study to analyze the rise of emotive facial features—furrowed brows, clenched jaws, and dynamic musculature—not as aesthetic symptoms of crisis, but as mnemonic devices designed to captivate the viewer, evoke affective responses, and reinforce imperial presence. These portraits, I argue, were sculptural technologies of memory: deliberately crafted to imprint the emperor’s image onto the Roman cultural imagination.

My research draws on an interdisciplinary framework that integrates art history, archaeology, ancient rhetoric, philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience. I am especially interested in how Roman theories of vision and memory—augmented by modern insights into attention, emotion, and material perception—can inform our understanding of imperial imagery. For Romans, the face was more than a likeness; it was a locus of identity, power, and emotional resonance. Third-century sculptors leveraged this belief through intensified facial expression, experimental carving techniques, and innovative use of color, texture, and finish.

To explore how these strategies operated in context, I developed site-based case studies on the sebasteion at Boubon (Turkey) and the villa at Chiragan (France). These sites reveal how expressive portraits were curated in both civic and domestic settings to shape historical narratives, negotiate dynastic continuity, and blur the boundaries between public spectacle and private memory. 

As I expand this work into a monograph, I am increasingly focused on materiality. I examine how surface treatments—such as polychromy, sculpting techniques, and variable polish—amplified the emotional intensity and psychological immediacy of imperial portraits. These material strategies transformed sculpture into a multisensory encounter with imperial authority.

I am also beginning a new project on the translation of these expressive sculptural forms into miniature and mobile media, including gemstones, bronze statuettes, and terracotta lamps. By exploring how imperial imagery was adapted across scale and material, I aim to understand how different audiences experienced—and remembered—the emperor in domestic, military, and devotional contexts. 

Across all my work, I foreground the relationship between form, perception, and ideology. Roman imperial portraits were not static reflections of power; they were active interventions in its construction. By tracing how these images shaped memory, identity, and political imagination, my research offers a new lens on how the Roman world made power visible—and how that visibility was felt, remembered, and believed.