Congratulations to Cornell History of Art PhD graduate Alice Clinch!
Dissertation title: “Of Earth and Stone: Pigments and their Properties in Classical-Hellenistic Domestic Architecture”
Committee: Verity Platt (chair), Sturt Manning (Classics), and Esra Akcan (Architecture).
Alice studies the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean, integrating scientific approaches to the study of craft practices with a focus on pigment production and painted plaster. Her dissertation provides the first formal analysis and publication of material from three archaeological sites in Greece and Sicily, investigating the use of pigments in domestic decoration from the Classical to Late Hellenistic periods.
She received her MA (Hons) in Classics from the University of Glasgow (2013) and her MA in Ancient Visual and Material Culture from the University of Warwick (2018).
During her PhD, Alice's research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the A.G. Leventis Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the Fitch Laboratory of the British School at Athens, and the Getty Conservation Institute. Alice has conducted fieldwork in Greece, Italy, and Cyprus and is actively involved in several projects in Greece and Italy, specializing in pigments and painted architecture. Her research has been published in the journals Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage, and Archaeological Review from Cambridge, as well as in edited volumes on ancient Greek religion.
In 2024, Alice was an Early Stage Research Fellow at The Cyprus Institute. For 2024-25 Alice is the Research Associate Fellow at the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.
After completing her PhD, Alice will work on the publication of material from the excavations at Giardini Naxos with the support of the Finnish Institute at Athens. Starting in 2026, she will be a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte) in Berlin, in the research department “Artifacts, Action, Knowledge.”
