Research Areas

Roman sculpture, Ancient Portraiture, Roman Asia Minor, Aphrodisias Excavations, Roman Egypt.

Biography

Chris Hallett received his education at the University of Bristol, Lincoln College Oxford, and UC Berkeley. From 1993 to 2001 he taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, and from 2001 to 2023 he held a joint-appointment in UC Berkeley’s Departments of History of Art and Classics. He is primarily known as a specialist in Roman sculpture, being the author of The Roman Nude: Heroic Portrait Statuary 200 BC­-AD 300 (Oxford 2005). Hallett is also a practicing field archaeologist, and since 1991 he has worked at New York University’s excavations in Aphrodisias in South-Western Turkey.

Publications

‘“Corinthian Bronzes”: Miniature Masterpieces—Flagrant Forgeries’, in J.N. Hopkins and Scott McGill (eds), Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value, and the Desire for Ancient Rome (Oxford 2023) 44-92.

‘The Wood Comes to the City: Ancient Trees, Sacred Groves, and the “Greening” of Early Augustan Rome’, Religion in the Roman Empire 7 (2021) 221-74.

‘Terracotta, Antiquarianism, and the “Archaic Revival” of Early Augustan Rome’, in C.M. Draycott, R. Raja, K. Welch, and W.T. Wootton (eds), Visual Histories: Visual Remains and Histories of the Classical World: Papers in Honour of R.R.R. Smith (Turnhout 2019) 181-203.

‘Sculpture: statues, busts, and other villa furnishings of bronze and of marble’, in K. Lapatin (ed.), Buried by Vesuvius: the Villa dei Papiri at Herculaneum (Los Angeles 2019) 71-97.

‘Afterword: The Function of Greek Artworks within Roman Visual Culture’, in G. Adornato, I. Bald Romano, G. Cirucci, and A. Poggio (eds), Re-staging Greek Artworks in Roman Times (Pisa 2019) 275-87.

‘Introduction: Roman Decorated Sarcophagi as a Source for the Cultural Historian’, in Flesheaters: An international symposium on Roman Sarcophagi, Sarkophag-Studien, vol. 11 (Wiesbaden 2019) 1-8.

‘Mummies with Painted Portraits from Roman Egypt and Personal Commemoration at the Tomb’, in R. Raja and M. Blömer (eds), Funerary Portraiture in Greater Roman Syria (Tournhout 2019) 197-212.

‘Three Bouleuteria from Roman and Late Antique Aphrodisias’ (co-authored with U. Quatember), in M. Aurenhammer (ed.), Sculpture in Roman Asia Minor: Proceedings of the International Conference at Selçuk, 1st-3rd October 2013 (Vienna 2018) 353-64.

‘The Greek and Roman Statue Habit: The Last Hurrah’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 28 (2017), 879-94.  Review of R.R.R. Smith and B. Ward Perkins (eds), The Last Statues of Antiquity (Oxford 2016).

‘Defining Roman Art’, in B. Borg (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Roman Art (Blackwell 2015) 11-32.

‘Troilus & Achilles: A Monumental Statue Group from Aphrodisias’, (co-authored with R.R.R. Smith) Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015) 124-82.

‘Looking Back: Archaic and Classical Bronzes of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods’, in K. Lapatin and J. Daehner (eds.), Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculptures of the Hellenistic Period (Florence 2015) 126-49.

Review: R. Bol (ed.), ‘Marmorskulpturen der römischen Kaiserzeit aus Milet’. Funde aus Milet, Teil 2.  Milet Band V.2 (Berlin 2011), in Bonner Jahrbücher (2013) 430-33.

‘The Archaic Style in Sculpture in the Eyes of Ancient and Modern Viewers’, in Viccy Coltman (ed.), Making Sense of Greek Art (University of Exeter Press, 2012) pp. 70-100.