Sheila Dillon, professor of art, art history and visual studies, has been named the Anne Murnick Cogan Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History. Dillon is completing her second term as chair of the Department and was Acting Director of the Duke Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab (formerly Wired! Lab) in 2020-21.
Professor Dillon received a Ph.D. in Classical Art and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She teaches courses on Greek and Graeco-Roman art and archaeology. Her research interests focus on portraiture and public sculpture and on reconstructing the statuary landscape of ancient cities and sanctuaries. Her books include The Female Portrait Statue in the Greek World (2010); Ancient Greek Portrait Sculpture: Contexts, Subjects, and Styles (2006), which was awarded the James R. Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America in January 2008; Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias (2006); and an edited volume A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (2012).
Dillon was a member of the Aphrodisias Excavations in Turkey from 1992-2004, has worked at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on the island of Samothrace, and now spends summers doing fieldwork in Athens. Her current research includes a collaborative project to publish the portrait sculpture from the Excavations in the Athenian Agora with a group of current and former students, and a digital mapping project of the history of the archaeological excavations in the Agora, a collaborative endeavor centered in the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab that involves undergraduate and graduate students at Duke. Dillon was also a founding member of the Lab in 2009. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Archaeology from 2013-2016.
The Department congratulates Professor Dillon on her distinguished professorship!
Art, Art History & Visual Studies
