HUAM names Ebbinghaus new curator of ancient art

The Harvard University Art Museums (HUAM) recently announced the appointment of Susanne Ebbinghaus as the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art. Ebbinghaus has been serving as a curatorial research associate in the Department of Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics at Harvard University Art Museums and recently spent a year at the University of Toronto, investigating cultural exchanges between Greece and the Near East on a fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The appointment will become official in early February.

“I am pleased to announce that Dr. Ebbinghaus will be leading our Department of Ancient Art,” said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of HUAM. “She brings an enormous amount of experience and knowledge to the art museums, and I feel strongly that her presence will begin a new chapter in the important work of this department.”

Ebbinghaus studied classical archaeology, ancient history, and art history at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She received an M.Phil. in classical archaeology in 1993 and a D.Phil. in classical archaeology in 1998 from Oxford University. Upon completion of her studies, Ebbinghaus worked as a member of the academic staff in the editorial office of the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, an encyclopedia of Greek and Roman representations of myth, based in Basel, Switzerland. In 1999, she became a graduate intern in the Antiquities Department at the J. Paul Getty Museum before coming to HUAM in 2000. In her previous role at HUAM, Ebbinghaus was responsible for the publication of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern bronzes, an ongoing project. She has also taught courses on Greek art and archaeology at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

The Harvard University Art Museums, one of the world’s leading arts institutions, encompasses the Arthur M. Sackler, Busch-Reisinger, and Fogg art museums, the Straus Center for Conservation, the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, the HUAM archives, and the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis in Turkey. For more than a century, the Harvard University Art Museums have been the nation’s premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars.