I am currently writing a history of female portraiture in the Greek world. This book focuses on the life size portrait statues of women that were set up mostly in Greek sanctuaries as votive dedications beginning in the fourth century BCE. This project reframes the history of Greek portraiture by moving away from its exclusive interest in male portraits (and such questions as the development of physiognomic realism) to focus on the portraits of women. While female portrait statues were a major component of Greek sculptural production, particularly in the Hellenistic period, they are mostly missing from our histories of Greek portraiture. The lack of scholarly interest in the female portrait in Greek art may be due to the fact that these images generally avoid any appearance of physiognomic individuality; as a group female portraits tend to look mostly the same. Their ageless, non-specific faces and simple, center-parted hairstyles do not seem to us to look particularly portrait-like, especially in comparison to contemporary male portraiture. In defining their subjects according to normative ideals of beauty rather than notions of corporeal individuality, portraits of women work differently than portraits of men and must be approached with different expectations. The imposition on the ancient material of modern expectations that a portrait resemble its subject - and the more faithful the better - has effectively erased the female portrait from the history of Greek art. This book is under contract with Cambridge University Press, and should appear sometime in 2010.
I have also recently returned to work on the island of Samothrace at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, a site I worked on as a graduate student. This sanctuary was the site of an important mystery cult in the Hellenistic period, and it received many important architectural and sculptural dedications made, for example, by the Hellenistic kings and queens of Ptolemaic Egypt. While Samothrace is well-known for its architecture, and for large scale sculpture like the Nike of Samothrace (now in the Louvre), the bulk of the sculpture from the site has yet to be studied. My project deals with the small scale sculptural dedications made at the site, including both the marble statuary and the terracotta figurines. This research will provide the first systematic exploration and publication of this material.
