Jennifer Stager

Jennifer Stager specializes in the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives. She received her PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley and her MSt. in Classical Archaeology from Lincoln College, Oxford. Her areas of focus include theories of color, materiality, and vision in the ancient Mediterranean world, the afterlives of antiquity, and the intersections of gender, race, and class in the production and study of art and architecture. Stager’s first book, Seeing Ancient Mediterranean Color (in progress), investigates the role of color in shaping the art of the ancient Mediterranean from the 6th-3rd centuries BCE.
At the CHS, she will continue researching and writing her second book, Deliverance from Pain: The Visual Arts of Early Medicine. This book analyzes how a range of media worked in conjunction with texts to produce a story of western medicine that both proposed new practices and also built on the established visual cues of the religious cult of the healing god Asklepios. The project revises text-focused narratives of early medical history by analyzing tools, healing objects, and representations.