Susanne Ebbinghaus

Susanne Ebbinghaus is George M. A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art at the Harvard University Art Museums. Her research focuses mainly on the cultural interaction between Greece and the Near East from the so-called Dark Age to the Hellenistic period. She is currently working on a monograph on Rhyta with Animal Foreparts in the Achaemenid Empire and Their Reception in the West, and investigating the Near Eastern impact on the art and society of the Greek island of Samos in the early Archaic period. The latter project was supported by a fellowship of the Gerda Henkel Foundation in 2003/04. Other interests include ancient feasting and gift exchange, visual narratives, and metalworking and painting techniques. Susanne has excavated ancient and medieval sites in Germany, Israel, Turkey and North Africa.

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 Museums, and taught courses on Greek art and archaeology at Harvard and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

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