Christopher Hallett (PhD, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, University of California, Berkeley, 1993) is Professor in History of Arts and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Hallett is known as a specialist in Roman sculpture, having published a number of studies on Roman portraiture, including a book-length treatment of nude portraiture - The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BC–AD 300 (Oxford 2005).
He is a practicing field archaeologist, and has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Israel, Turkey, and in Egypt. Since 1991 he has worked at New York University’s excavations at Aphrodisias in southwestern Turkey. His research interests thus include the visual culture of Roman Asia Minor. He is co-author (with R.R.R. Smith, Sheila Dillon, Julia Lenaghan, and Julie van Voorhis) of Roman Portrait Sculpture of Aphrodisias (Mainz am Rhein 2006), and he is currently preparing for publication of the sculpture from the city's Bouleuterion (Council House).
As a graduate student Hallett also trained as an Egyptologist, spending five years studying Egyptian hieroglyphics and all phases of the Egyptian language. In 1989 he worked as an epigrapher on the Giza Mastaba Project under the direction of Dr. A.M. Roth. He occasionally teaches graduate seminars on Egyptian art, and has maintained a research interest in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt—particularly the Roman period mummy portraits, the hard stone portraits of Egyptian priests, and the Pharoanic portrait images of the Ptolemies and Roman emperors.
Dr. Elizabeth A. Murphy (PhD, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University, 2014) is Assistant Professor of Roman Archaeology in the Department of Classics at Florida State University (USA). She is a Roman archaeologist whose research investigates the material culture of everyday ancient working lives, and whose scholarship incorporates perspectives drawn from archaeology, anthropology, and history. The common thread that binds all of her research is a concern for ancient work and labour. This began with an interest in crafts production, materiality, and daily life in workshops, and Murphy maintain technical specializations in pottery analysis, material culture studies, and ancient technology studies. Thus far, this work has culminated in more than a dozen international journal articles and book chapters, and in a manuscript that will soon appear with Cambridge University Press. The CUP monograph investigates the rich and diverse working lives of Roman potters. By focusing on issues like apprenticeship, skill and learning, ritual practices in the workplace, social dynamics of competition among craft neighbors, and local technological choices, the book moves beyond a functionalist interpretation to demonstrate the workshop’s central place in the social lives of everyday Roman workers.
Murphy's time in Aarhus will be critical in preparing and finalizing several publications related to ongoing research projects. However, her main aim will be to complete a monograph, which she began as an invited lecture series at UrbNet at Aarhus in Fall 2021 (in the midst of the pandemic). This book attempts to tease out differences in the socio-economic status and well-being of different urban “middling classes” of crafts and trades people in the Roman world. It will compare workshop evidence of Roman occupations, in terms of their working conditions, workshop placement, funerary commemoration, and contribution to local urban economies. This project intersects with the work of several faculty projects at UrbNet and will benefit enormously from collaboration with its faculty and students.
