Amy Smith
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+44 (0) 118 378 6087
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Professor
- Curator, Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology
Office
Room G37, Edith Morley BuildingAreas of interest
Professor Smith is a classical archaeologist, with primary interests in Greek iconography and its many manifestations, especially in politics and religion, as well as ceramics. She is also a curator, with research interests the history of collections, digital museology and pedagogy.
Postgraduate supervision
Professor Smith is currently supervising several PhD students:
- Ilaria Truzzi (from September 2024) on Playing in ancient Iberia: The materiality of games in a multicultural context (c. 800 BCE-800 CE), funded by a University of Reading International Research Studentship
- Adel Ternovacz on Antiquity Revisited: The Re-use of Ancient Gems in Medieval Britain, funded by a University of Reading International Research Studentship
- Summer Courts on The Archaeology of Hidden Identity: The Case of a Female Burial from Lowbury Hill, in collaboration with Exeter University & Oxfordshire Museums Service, funded by the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.
- Nancy Antonellis on Museum Outreach as a Tool to Broaden Diversity in Classical Studies
She has supervised a wide range of postdoctoral and postgraduate students working on the material culture of Greek and Roman antiquity and its reception. Recent PhD theses she saw through to completion include Allan Hiscutt's The Miniature Reliefs of John Henning and Nathalie Choubineh's Female Solo Dance Images on Red-Figure Vases. She welcomes potential PhD students with interests in ancient material culture and its reception to contact her about supervision.
Research projects
https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/Professor Smith collaborates with a wide range of scholars on topics ranging from personifications of political ideas to Greek vases and their reception. Her historiographic article Oligarchia Revisited, written with Luke Madson (Rutgers), was published in Klio 106.1. Her project Testing Beazley: Verifying the existence of early Classical Athenian vase painters, in collaboration with Armand Leroi (Imperial College), is funded by the British Academy. She is also coauthoring a volume on women and festivals in Classical Athens, with Dr Katerina Volioti (University of Roehampton).
Together with Dr Volioti she is contributing a lesson on Aphrodite to Modern Argonauts. A multicultural Educational Programme Preparing Young People for Contemporary Challenges through an Innovative Use of Classical Mythology. ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2023–2025) (https://modernargonauts.al.uw.edu.pl/) (led by Katarzyna Marciniac, University of Warsaw).
As a member of the Winckelmann-Gesellschaft's International Committee, Professor Smith collaborated with Katherine Harloe and others to celebrate the work of J.J. Winckelmann through a series of lectures, workshops and other activities from 2017–2018 and published, in 2021, an edited volume, Under the Greek sky: New approaches to Winckelmann's reception and historiography, in Journal of Art Historiography 25. See also her contribution to H. C. Meyer and A. Petsalis-Diomidis' Picturing the Greek Vase.
She is also a founding member of the Pottery in Context Research Network (ICS, London), the Classical Collections UK (specialist subject network), the International Network of Classical Archaeology University Collections, and a research associate of the Beazley Archive, University of Oxford. She served as R.D. Milns Professor at the University of Queensland in August 2022 and was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University in 2017.
Professor Smith is serving as a Gertrude Smith Professor at ASCSA and thus Co-Director of its Summer Session in 2024 (and was sole director in 2016). She has also taken University of Reading students on study tours of Athens (2023, 2019, 2017 and 2014) and Rome (2022, 2009).
Background
Professor Smith received her degrees from Yale (PhD, MPhil, MA) and Dartmouth (BA), and was also educated at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), the American Academy in Rome, and the American Numismatic Society.
Professor Smith excavated in Greece – at the American School of Classical Studies' excavations in Athens' Agora and Corinth – and in Spain (Pollentia, Alcudia, Majorca). She also worked as an editor (Perseus Project; American Journal of Archaeology) and as curatorial assistant at the Yale University Art Gallery.