Kaja Tally-Schumacher PhD ’20 joins Harvard Graduate School of Design as an Assistant Professor of Environmental History.
Her primary area of expertise is the archaeology and analysis of designed landscapes and ancient environments in the ancient Roman world from ca. 2nd c. BCE to 4th c. CE across Western Eurasia and Northern Africa, ranging from urban plantings to suburban and rural gardens. More broadly, her research interests include ancient Mediterranean gardens and landscapes, digital reconstructions and visualization, comparative environmental history, and issues pertaining to sustainability, resiliency, and climate mitigation in cultural heritage sites.
She was awarded the Ellen and Charles Steinmetz Endowment for Archaeology from the Archaeological Institute of America for her work on the gardens at Pompeii, a prestigious early-career award within the field of Classical Archaeology. Tally-Schumacher’s first book project, Gardeners, Plants, and Soils of the Roman World, draws an ambitious but finely detailed transect from antiquity to the Early Modern and Antebellum periods.
Tally-Schumacher earned her PhD in Ancient Art and Archaeology from Cornell University in 2020. At Cornell she was runner-up award for the James F. Slevin Assignment Sequence Award (2017), granted for designing an innovative sequence of assignments in her course on Ancient Pompeii; promoting foundational, transferable skills; and actively addressing different learning styles.
https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/person/kaja-tally-schumacher/
