Rachel Kousser

Professor of Greek and Roman Art and Archaeology

Rachel Kousser is Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. In her writing and teaching, she focuses on the Greeks' creation, transformation, and destruction of monuments; the representation of gender, sexuality, and power in the classical era; and the place of Greek art within the globally interconnected ancient world.  Her most recent work, The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture:  Interaction, Transformation, Destruction (Cambridge University Press, 2017), received an Archaeological Institute of America Publication Subvention Award and was shortlisted for the Runciman Book Award for a book on Greek history or culture. Professor Kousser is also the author of Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and of articles in Art Bulletin, RES:  Anthropology and Aesthetics, and the American Journal of Archaeology.  She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts. Her current project uses archaeological evidence to illuminate the last years of Alexander the Great; it is forthcoming from Custom House/HarperCollins. 

Books and Articles:

• The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, and Destruction. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Winner: Archaeological Institute of America Publication Subvention Award, 2015. Shortlisted: Runciman Book Award for a work on Greek history or culture, Anglo-Hellenic League.
• “Monument and Memory in Ancient Greece and Rome: A Comparative Perspective.” In Karl Galinsky and Kenneth Lapatin, eds., Cultural Memories in the Roman Empire. Los Angeles: Gettty Publications, 2015, 33-48.
• “Adapting Greek Art.” In Barbara Borg, ed., Blackwell Companion to Roman Art. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Blackwell, 2015, 114-129.
• “The Roman Reception of Greek Art and Architecture.” In Clemente Marconi, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 374-394.
• "The female nude in classical art: Between voyeurism and power." In Aphrodite and the Gods of Love, edited by Christine Kondoleon with Phoebe C. Segal. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2011.
• "Augustan Aphrodites: The allure of Greek art in Roman visual culture." In Brill's Companion to Aphrodite, edited by Amy C. Smith and Sadie Pickup, 287-306. Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2010.
• "A sacred landscape: The creation, maintenance, and destruction of religious space in Roman Germany." Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 27/28 (Spring/Fall 2010): 121-139.
• "Hellenistic and Roman Art, 221 BC-AD 337." In A Companion to Ancient Macedonia, edited by Joseph Roisman and Ian Worthington, 522-542. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
• “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis” Art Bulletin 91, no. 3 (September 2009): 263-282.
• "The historiography of Roman art and the 'modern copy myth.'" Review of The Language of the Muses: The Dialogue Between Roman and Greek Sculpture by Miranda Marvin. Journal of Roman Archaeology 22 (2009): 608-610.
• Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• “Mythological Group Portraits in Antonine Rome: The Performance of Myth.” American Journal of Archaeology 111.4 (2007): 673-691.
• “Conquest and Desire: Roman Victoria in Public and Provincial Sculpture." In Sheila Dillon and Katherine Welch, eds., Representations of War in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 218-243.
• “Creating the past: The Vénus de Milo and the Hellenistic Reception of Classical Greece.” American Journal of Archaeology 109.2 (2005): 227-50.