Pratt Institute

Education

Ph.D. Harvard, Art History

Biography

Amy Gansell is an art historian specializing in ancient Mesopotamian visual and material culture. Her areas of scholarly interest include ancient aesthetics, figural representation, ivory sculpture, costume, and landscape. She has written a number of essays and articles, as well as contributed to museum catalogues and educational publications. She is currently writing a book about female beauty in ancient Mesopotamian royal court during the early first millennium BCE. Gansell began her foray into the ancient world as an undergraduate archaeology major Barnard. She has since participated in archaeology digs in Syria, Turkey, Tunisia, and Greece. After completing her PhD in ancient art history at Harvard, she spent two years working at the US Department of State on a project to help restore the Iraq Museum and the site of Babylon. She has been a fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, and is the recipient of a Digital-Humanities grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities.

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