Betsey A. Robinson

Associate Professor of History of Art & Architecture

Betsey A. Robinson (Harvard University, A.B., A.L.M.; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D.) teaches courses in the architecture, art, and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world. Her primary research interests include Greek and Roman architecture and art, ancient cities and religious sites, and landscapes--actual, imagined, and as represented in ancient art and literature. Since 1997 she has conducted research at the Corinth Excavations of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, focusing on water supply, infrastructure, architecture, and works of art in context. Her book, Histories of Peirene: A Corinthian Fountain in Three Millennia (Princeton: ASCSA 2011), won a Chancellor’s Research Award and the 2011 PROSE Prize for Archaeology and Anthropology. Her current monograph project, "Divine Prospects: Mounts Helicon and Parnassus in Ancient Experience and Imagination," is a book-length manuscript on Hellenistic and Roman perceptions of, and engagement within, Greek landscapes and sanctuaries. Ongoing research considers relationships and tensions between natural environments and human occupants around the Mediterranean, from antiquity to the present. Additional interests include Roman-era mosaics in Corinth, and the history of archaeological excavation in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Betsey Robinson grew up in Falmouth, Massachusetts. Her career began with deep-sea exploration in the Mediterranean with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and research in paleontology and history of science at Harvard; more recently, she has excavated ancient through modern contexts in Israel, and Italy, and Greece. She has held residential fellowships at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, in Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and as the Oscar Broneer Fellow at the American Academy at Rome, and she has received major research grants from the Kress Foundation, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Solow Foundation. She serves on the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and she is currently an Academic Trustee for the Archaeological Institute of America.