Jessica Plant

Ph.D. Student in History of Art

Overview

Jessica studies the art and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean with a focus on Roman and Late Antiquity. Her research interests include the social and cultural dimensions of ornament and craft production; relational approaches to material culture and pre-modern media; the history of archaeology; and the archaeology of religion and domestic space. Her dissertation project is a critical history of stucco in Roman antiquity, broadly construed (ca. 200 BCE – 700 CE), which traces the medium from the ancient Mediterranean to its transformation in Late Antiquity, and accounts for disparate statuses of stucco within subfields of the History of Art. She has participated in archaeological projects in Italy and Turkey, most recently at the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis and the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project.

Jessica earned her BA, summa cum laude, in Classical Civilizations and Near Eastern Studies and Art History from the University of Minnesota in 2015 and her MA in Archaeology from Cornell in 2016, which was awarded the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS) MA thesis award in 2017. She was the Samuel H. Kress Fellow of Art and Architecture of Antiquity (2020-21) at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where she also held the James Rignall Wheeler Fellowship as a member of the School’s Regular program (2019-20), and received the Helena Wylde Swiny and Stuart Swiny Fellowship at the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (2022).

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