"From Fauna to Flora: Merging with Plants in Early Imperial Rome" with Sophie Crawford-Brown

This talk will explore the plant imagery so prominent in Roman art of the first centuries BCE and CE.  Focusing on a group of terracotta plaques of the so-called “Campana” type, it will ask what changing modes of representation suggest about attitudes towards the natural world and the place of humans within it.
 

Sophie Crawford-Brown’s research centers on Roman and early Italic art and archaeology, using material culture as a lens for addressing broader historical problems such as colonization processes, cross-cultural interaction, and the transition from Republic to Empire. Dr. Crawford-Brown has excavated at archaeological sites in Cyprus and Italy, and has worked on museum projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 

This lecture is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition Flora et Fauna: Nature in Ancient Mediterranean Art and Culture on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through March 7, 2026.

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