Susanne Ebbinghaus
Lecturer on the Classics
Bibliography (pdf)
Susanne Ebbinghaus is George M. A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art at the Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Her research focuses on cultural exchanges between Greece and the Near East in the first millennium BCE. Current projects include a study of rhyta and other animal-shaped vessels in the Achaemenid Persian empire and beyond, and an investigation of the Near Eastern impact on the art and society of the Greek island of Samos in the early Archaic period. The latter was supported by a fellowship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation in 2003/04. Other interests include ancient feasting and gift exchange, visual narratives and representations of foreigners, metalworking techniques and sculptural polychromy.
She was born and raised in Germany, where she studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient History, and Early Christian and Byzantine Art at Freiburg University. In 1991, she moved to England and completed her graduate studies in Classical and Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford (M.Phil. 1993, D.Phil. 1998). Since then, she has worked at the editorial office of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, the Antiquities Department of the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics of the Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, and taught courses on Greek art and archaeology at Harvard and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has excavated at several ancient sites in the eastern Mediterranean.