David Kertai (1978) studied architecture at Delft University of Technology, ancient history at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and archaeology at Leiden University. He received his PhD from Heidelberg in 2012 for a study of Assyrian palace architecture and kingship (2015, The Architecture of Late Assyrian Royal Palaces; Oxford University Press). He has worked as a researcher and lecturer at University College London, New York University, Tel Aviv University, Martin Buber Society of Fellows (Jerusalem) and the Freie Universität Berlin and has been active as a field archaeologist in Iraq, Syria and Turkey since 2005.
Gretel Rodríguez specializes in the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancient Roman Empire. Her work investigates the relationship between art and society, exploring issues of viewership, identity, and acculturation in relation to ancient artistic production. Her publications deal with Roman honorific architecture, the iconography of captives on public monuments, painted ceramics in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, and, recently, the architecture and material culture of water sanctuaries throughout the Mediterranean world. Professor Rodríguez’s secondary specialization is in the art and architecture of ancient Mesoamerica. She has conducted research in Rome, the Bay of Naples, Southern France, and in Chiapas, Mexico. Her work has been published in the American Journal of Archaeology, RES Anthropology and Aesthetics, and the Theoretical Roman Archaeology Journal.
Meghan Rubenstein is an art historian who specializes in Maya art and architecture. Her current work focuses on architectural sculpture in the Puuc, Chenes, and Río Bec regions of the Yucatán peninsula. Dr. Rubenstein is also a collaborator on a Maya fiber arts research project and co-manages the Contributions to Mesoamerican Studies website. She has worked as an archaeological illustrator, digital project manager, and website designer. As a visual resources professional, her research extends to digital literacy and information management. Dr. Rubenstein is a Lecturer and Curator of Visual Resources in the Art Department at Colorado College. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2015.
Nancy S. Steinhardt is Professor of East Asian Art and Curator of Chinese Art at the University of Pennsylvania. She has broad research interests in the art and architecture of China and China’s border regions, and on-going field projects in China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia. Steinhardt is author, editor, or translator of fifteen books: Modern Chinese Architecture: 180 Years (ORO, 2024); Yuan: Chinese Architecture in a Mongol Empire (Princeton 2024); The Borders of Chinese Architecture (Harvard 2022); 100 Years of Architecture in China, 1921-2021 (ORO 2021); Chinese Architecture: A History (Princeton 2019), winner of the Hitchcock Award for the best book in Architectural History of 2019; Traditional Chinese Architecture: Twelve Essays (Princeton 2017); China’s Early Mosques (Edinburgh 2015), which received Honourable Mention for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies in 2016; Chinese Architecture in an Age of Turmoil, 200-600 (Hawaii 2014); Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts (Hawaii 2011), which received an International Convention of Asian Scholars Accolade for an edited volume in 2013; Hawai’i Reader of Chinese (Hawaii 2005); Chinese Architecture (Yale 2002); Liao Architecture (Hawaii 1997); Chinese Imperial City Planning (1990); Chinese Traditional Architecture (China Institute 1984); and Early Buddhist Architecture in Japan (Kodansha 1979); with two more, Mongolia: Architecture and Archaeology and Chinese Architecture: A Guidebook, under contract. She also has written more than 125 scholarly articles, catalogue essays, conference papers, or invited essays and eighty-five book reviews. In 2019 she received the Distinguished Teacher of Art History from the College Art Association and the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph. D. Teaching and Mentorship from the University of Pennsylvania.
Laurel Bestock conducts research on the material culture of the Nile Valley and on the methodology of archaeological recording. She is particularly interested in kingship, monumentality, the contexts and audiences for art and architecture, and cultural interactions. She co-directs an excavation at Uronarti, Sudan, where the team is examining a monumental fortress built by the conquering Egyptian kings in the early 2nd millennium BC, the extramural settlement associated with it, and the relations between Nubians and Egyptians in this frontier zone.
Patricia Eunji Kim, PhD is an art historian, curator, and educator based in New York City. Her work examines visual and material culture to consider dynamics of gender, race, power, and memory in antiquity and the present. Her monograph, The Art of Hellenistic Queenship: Bodies of Power (Under Contract, Cambridge University Press) is the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of royal women from the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia, spanning the fourth to second centuries B.C.E.—a corpus of materials central to a show that she is guest-curating at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Dr. Kim also brings her perspectives as an art historian to bear on the most pressing social, cultural, and political issues that we face today. Among others, she has written about environmental temporalities, transnational memory cultures, and cultural heritage. Recent publications include Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), The National Monument Audit (Monument Lab, 2021), and Queens in Antiquity and the Present: Speculative Visions and Critical Histories (Bloomsbury, Forthcoming).
Max Peers received his B.A. in Classics and Archaeology, with distinction, from the University of Toronto in 2016. He earned his M.A. in Classical Archaeology from Humboldt-Universität in 2018. His Master’s thesis was entitled “The Social Logic of Pompeiian Space: Testing the Potential of Space Syntax Analyses in Roman Houses.” From 2015 to 2018, Max worked at American Excavations at Morgantina in central Sicily and most recently has worked at Tharros on Sardinia and with the BUPTAP project near Petra. He has also excavated at the Stabian Baths in Pompeii and at the site of Gournia on Crete and worked at the W.F. Albright Institute in Jerusalem on archival and conservation projects. Max’s research focuses architectural developments in Italy from the Hellenistic period to the Roman Empire, both at the domestic level, looking at perception and movement in houses, and at the scale of cities, such as the environmental impact of infrastructure projects.
Itohan Osayimwese’s research program is built around employing the built environment as a lens through which to analyze the complex historical experiences and effects of colonialism and the globalization of capital.
Her book, Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, considers the effects of colonialism on the development of modern architecture in Germany from the 1850s until the 1930s. Her current book project, From Barbados to Boston, explores the transformative effects of migration on Anglo-Caribbean built environments and societies after Emancipation. Another book project introduces English-speaking scholars to the first German-language survey of African architecture published in 1894, and revises our understanding of the origins of the study of African art.
Professor Osayimwese offers courses in colonial, postcolonial, and global architectural history, which are crosslisted in other departments in order to help students understand how architecture is embedded in larger social, political, economic processes. She has advised undergraduate theses on topics such as the memorialization of slavery, border walls, global gated communities, and Guastavino vaulting; and serves as primary advisor for Ph.D. students working on the history of housing in the Anglo-Caribbean and the afterlife of colonial dwellings in Sri Lanka.
She has served as Director of Graduate Studies in the History of Art & Architecture, is an affiliate faculty in Africana Studies, Urban Studies, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and has held faculty fellowships at the Joukowsky Institute, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and the Haffenreffer Museum.
Professor Osayimwese serves on the boards of the Society of Architectural Historians, the European Architectural History Network, and Thresholds journal.