Description:

Northwestern University Department of Art History presents the Warnock Lecture Series.

"Substance, surface, and space: looking at Roman relief sculpture with stone-carving processes in mind"

Jennifer Trimble is a professor at Stanford University and works on the visual and material culture of the Roman Empire, with interests in portraits and replication, the visual culture of Roman slavery, comparative urbanism, and ancient mapping. Trimble was co-director of the IRC-Oxford-Stanford excavations in the Roman Forum (now being prepared for publication), which focused on interactions of commercial, religious and monumental space. She co-directed Stanford's Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project, a collaboration between computer scientists and archaeologists to help reassemble a fragmentary ancient map of the city of Rome. Her book on Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2011) was about portrait statues whose bodies are all identical; in it, she explored the role of visual sameness in constructing public identity and in articulating empire and place. Trimble is currently at work on Seeing Roman Slaves, a monograph developed from the Townsend Lectures she gave in 2016 at Cornell University, about intersections of Roman visual culture and Roman slavery.