Zarmakoupi Named Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Professor of Roman Architecture

Mantha Zarmakoupi has joined Penn as the Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Assistant Professor of Roman Architecture.  Zarmakoupi is a scholar of ancient architecture in the Hellenistic and Roman periods whose research addresses the broader social, economic and cultural conditions underpinning the production of architecture and urbanism. She is the author of Designing for Luxury on the Bay of Naples (c. 100 BCE-79 CE), published by Oxford in 2014.  

Before coming to Penn, Zarmakoupi served as Birmingham Fellow and Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the University of Birmingham and held a lectureship at University College London; a postdoctoral teaching fellowship at Bard College in Berlin; research fellowships at NYU ISAW, Getty and Harvard CHS; and a Humboldt fellowship as well as a Marie Curie Fellowship. She has done work employing digital humanities tools, including construction of a virtual reality model of the Villa of the Papyri. Zarmakoupi co-directs an underwater archeological field project around the island of Delos, co-leads a research project on the appropriation of classical urbanism in the 20th century, and collaborates with colleagues from Europe to create a digital learning environment and MOOC on Ancient Cities.

The Morris Russell and Josephine Chidsey Williams Professorship of Roman Architecture was established in 1988 by Charles K. Williams, GR’78, HON’97, in honor of his parents.