Kimberly Bowes Named Director of American Academy in Rome

Associate Professor of Classical Studies Kimberly Bowes has been named the 22nd director of the American Academy in Rome (AAR). Founded in 1894, the AAR awards the Rome Prize every year to a select group of artists and scholars who are invited to the city to pursue their work as part of a dynamic international community. 

Bowes studies the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, specializing in domestic and religious architecture and the archaeology of the Roman economy. Her current interests focus on the archaeology of poverty during the Roman Empire. She is part of The Peasant Project, an archaeological campaign in Tuscany to explore the lifestyle, diet, and habits of the rural poor of the ancient Roman world.

Interviewed by Wanted in Rome about her research, Bowes said, “We didn't know at all what to expect [in Tuscany] and there were plenty of surprises. We uncovered remains of all kinds of constructions, like farm buildings, animal outhouses, oil presses, drainage systems, and so on, as well as a lot of objects. We hadn't expected poor people to have access to the same consumer goods as rich people. But they did. The only difference was that they had less of them. We also found traces of seeds and pollen that suggests their use of crop rotation.”

Her publications include Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire and Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University and was a visiting fellow at Harvard. Bowes was an AAR fellow herself in 2006, and for the past two years has served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Charge of the School of Classical Studies, the humanities arm of the Academy.