Former VRS Hallie Franks Awarded NEH Fellowship

By mp4071@nyu.edu
04/14/2015

Former VRS and Assistant Professor at NYU Gallatin Hallie Franks was awarded a 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. She will conduct research on her upcoming book project, The Space of the Symposium: Mosaics and Movement in the Greek Andron.

Professor Franks convened the Gallatin Global Faculty Symposium "The Material Archive," in Florence, Italy March 19-21, 2015, at NYU Florence.

Professor Franks was a guest lecturer and leader of a 2013 field trip to Greece through the Archaeological Field School at Heraclea Sintica, a school which she also co-directs.  She and Matt Stanley were awarded a Curriculum Development Grant for “Achilles’ Shield: Mapping the Ancient Cosmos,” a new course that they co-teach in the spring of 2015.

-------

Hallie Franks’s teaching and research interests are in the art and archaeology of Greece, Rome and the ancient Near East, and she is particularly interested in the points of cultural overlap and exchange between the Mediterranean and the East. Her research has taken her to Greece, Italy, Turkey, Egypt and Bulgaria, where she is currently involved in the American Research Center in Sofia's excavations at the ancient Macedonian city of Heraclea Sintica. At Gallatin, her teaching interests focus on the intersection of ancient texts and material culture, and include classes on ancient portraiture, visual narrative, concepts of the outsider and cultural memory. Her first book, titled Hunters, Heroes, Kings, investigates the ways that the ancient kingdom of Macedonia drew from various cultural traditions in the visual expression of its self-identity.

Her project while at ISAW was "Traveling the World, in Theory: Metaphor and Movement in Greek Architecture." Drawing on art historical, archaeological, and sociological theory, this project investigates how movement within and through architectural space, in conjunction with the viewing of architectural decoration, evokes for the visitor the idea of travel and the intellectual transformation that is its ideal result.