BIO

Chris Hallett received his training in Classical Archaeology at Bristol University and Lincoln College, Oxford. He completed his doctorate, in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1993-2001 he taught in the Division of Art History at the University of Washington, Seattle, returning to Berkeley in 2002 to take up a joint appointment in the departments of Classics and History of Art. He is the recipient of a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome (1995-96), and in 1997-98 he was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship to work with Paul Zanker at the Institut für klassische Archäologie in Munich.

Professor Hallett specializes in Roman art, particularly sculpture, and has written a book on Roman portraiture entitled The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 B.C.–300 A.D. His interests include: Hellenistic and Roman Egypt; the collecting of Greek art by the Roman elite; and the role of the luxury villa in Roman culture. He is currently working on a book on the visual culture of the late Republic and the early Empire and its relationship to earlier Greek art. Recent graduate seminars he has taught include: Ancient Portraiture—the Egyptian, Greek and Roman traditions; The Roman Villa; and Roman Sarcophagi. In Spring 2006 he will offer a seminar on Text and Image in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (to be jointly taught with Todd Hickey of the Classics Department).

Hallett has participated in archaeological fieldwork in Israel (at Tel Dor), in Turkey (at Balboura in northern Lycia), and in Egypt (he also trained as an Egyptologist at Berkeley, and in 1989 worked as an epigrapher for the Giza Mastaba Project). Since 1991 he has worked at New York University’s excavations at Aphrodisias in south western Turkey, where he is collaborating with R.R.R. Smith in the publication of all the portrait sculpture from the site, and is publishing the sculpture from the city’s Bouleuterion (Council House).