Dr. Penelope Davies

Professor Penelope J. E. Davies was educated at the University of Cambridge and Yale University. Specializing in the architectural history of ancient Rome, she is author of Death and the Emperor (Cambridge University Press 2000, University of Texas Press 2004), winner of the Dallas Museum of Arts’ Vasari Award, and Architecture and Politics in Republican Rome (Cambridge University Press 2017), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, which was supported by grants from the British School at Rome, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as the University of Texas at Austin. She has also published numerous articles and essays in scholarly publications, and collaborated on re-conceptions of Janson’s History of Art (seventh and eight editions, Prentice-Hall 2007 and 2011) and Janson’s A Basic History of Art (eighth and ninth editions, Prentice Hall 2009 and 2013). She is currently working on a new book, Ancient Lives of Roman Buildings, and a co-edited Cambridge Urban History of Europe (3 vols.) She is also Hedda Andersson in Classical Archaeology at Lund University, where she received an honorary doctorate in 2021. Her classes range from ‘Art and Power: A Survey of Art from Prehistory to the Middle Ages’ at the introductory level, to ‘The Art of Dictatorship’ at the graduate level. In 2016, she was recipient of the College of Fine Arts Teaching Award.