Staff profile

Academic Background

MPhil Classics, University of Cambridge, 2018

BA Art History, John Cabot University, 2017

Research Topic

The field site and the photographic archive: Landscape archaeology, photography, and the post-war imagination through the lens of the South Etruria Survey, 1955-1975

‘Monuments Man’ John Ward-Perkins became Director of the British School at Rome in 1946, a time of radical change in the Italian countryside. New agricultural methods were both revealing and damaging previously unknown ancient sites. In response, he instigated a ‘salvage’ project, the South Etruria Survey, thereby pioneering ‘landscape archaeology’ in the Mediterranean. The Survey’s archaeological data has recently been reanalysed (Patterson, Witcher, Di Giuseppe (2020): The changing landscapes of Rome’s Northern Hinterland: the British School at Rome's Tiber Valley Project) but its 7500-strong photo archive remains under researched. My PhD project will use the archive to investigate how photographic methods and archaeological ideas developed amid post-war anxieties about destruction and preservation, shaping the imagination of both ancient and modern Italian landscapes.