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More information about: The History of Art Department's Faculty Member - Christopher Hallett |
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 Christopher Hallett Professor Roman Art
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| BIO Chris Hallett received his education at the University of Bristol, Lincoln College Oxford, and UC Berkeley. From 1993 to 2001 he taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, and since 2001 he has held a joint-appointment in UC Berkeley¹s Departments of History of Art and Classics. He is primarily known as a specialist in Roman sculpture, being the author of The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BCAD 300 (Oxford 2005). But he has just completed the manuscript of a book on literature and the visual arts in the triumviral and early Augustan period: Art, Poetry and Civil War: Vergil¹s Aeneid as Cultural History (accepted for publication by Oxford University Press). Hallett is also a practicing field archaeologist, and since 1991 he has worked at New York University¹s excavations in Aphrodisias in South-Western Turkey. He is co-author (with R.R.R. Smith, among others) of Roman Portrait Sculpture of Aphrodisisas (Mainz am Rhein 2006). Graduate seminars he has taught since 2005 include: Roman Painting; The Roman Villa; Text and Image in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt; Roman Sarcophagi. | |
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Recent Activities 2010-2011 saw Chris adjusting more fully to his role as Chair, and taking on a number of new roles. In the fall he spoke at a fund-raising evening, organized by the Dean, Janet Broughton, to benefit UC Berkeley’s Division of Arts and Humanities. The event was titled, “Do Fakes Matter: The Forger, the Collector, and the Art Historian”, and was held in Santa Monica at the home of Berkeley art history alumna Corinna Cotsen. The evening’s other speaker was Berkeley alumnus, Ken Lapatin, a graduate of the Berkeley Classics department’s Classical Archaeology Program, now a curator at the Getty Villa in Malibu. Chris also served in the Fall semester as one of the session Chairs for The 2010 Berkeley Ancient Italy Roundtable, organized by his colleague in the Classics Department, Ted Peña. Chris also found time for two research trips this year. In the fall he spent 10 days in Lebanon and Syria, visiting archaeological sites and museums with a group of archaeologists and ancient historians from Oxford University. Sites visited included Faqra, Byblos, Beirut Museum, Baalbek, Damascus Museum, the Umayyad Mosque, Krak des Chevaliers, Hama, Apamea, Mushabbak, San Simeon, Al Bara, Sergilla, Sergiopolis (Resafa), Zenobia (Halebiya), Mari, Dura Europos, Qasr al-Heir al Sharqi, Palmyra, Qasr al-Heir al Gharbi, Philipopolis, and Bosra. And over Spring Break Chris travelled to Rome, where he spent time in the Vatican museums, and visited the exhibition “Le faccie di potere”, organized by Eugenio La Rocca at the Capitoline Museum. A special opportunity presented itself on this trip: Chris was invited by a friend to join a team of Italian speleologists to go down into two Roman acqueducts, the Acqua Marcia and the Acqua Claudia at Vicovaro, some 40 km outside Rome (see photo). This was a fascinating experience, bringing home something of the astonishing engineering achievements of the Romans; these two great tunnels, each ca. 90 km in length, cut through solid rock, for hundreds of years brought cool fresh spring-water, in vast quantities, into the very center of the city. Chris served as a Senior Research Fellow at the Townsend Center throughout the academic year, sharing with the other Townsend Fellows his most recent research on Archaic and Archaizing Greek Art. His essay, ‘The Archaic Style in the Eyes of Ancient and Modern Viewers’, completed in 2010, also this year finally appeared in print: in a volume of essays edited by Viccy Coltman, with the (new) title: Making Sense of Greek Art (University of Exeter Press, 2011). Chris was also named as a 2011 Residential Research Fellow, at the Lepsius Haus of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, in Dahlem in Berlin. He will be resident in Berlin for 6 weeks in the summer, working on editing the publication of the Flesh-Eaters Conference of 2009. He will be joined in Berlin, for part of the time, by his wife Heidi and their daughter Samantha. |
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Selected Publications The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BC–AD 300 (Oxford University Press 2005) Roman Portrait Sculpture of Aphrodisias (Mainz am Rhein, 2006) = APHRODISIAS vol. II, joint author, with R.R.R. Smith (ed.), S. Dillon, J. Lenaghan, J. Van Voorhis. |
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