Diana Y. Ng, Ph.D.

Professor of Art History
Diana Ng
College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters
Language, Culture, and the Arts

Teaching Areas:

Art History/Applied Art, Human Centered Engineering Design

Research Areas:

Elite and Civic Identities, Memory and Cognition, Public Architecture and Sculpture

Biography and Education

My research is focused on the public architecture, sculpture, and spectacle in Roman Asia Minor, especially as they relate to civic and elite identities, memory, and secondary interventions. I am interested in elite participation in civic life and the resultant intersections between private elite and civic priorities. I draw on artistic and material cultures, epigraphy, historical, and textual sources to explore the social, legal, and political dynamics conditioning the commission and reception of public monuments and spectacles in Roman Asia Minor. My latest research seeks to understand the Roman period experience of public sculpture and architectural spaces within the frameworks of distributed cognition and historical cognitive science.

Education

Ph.D., Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

B.A., Classics and Classics-Fine Arts, New York University

Selected Publications

(under contract, co-ed. with Molly Swetnam-Burland): Reuse and Renovation in Roman Material Culture: Function, Aesthetics, Interpretations (Cambridge University Press).

2016: “Monuments, Memory, and Status Recognition,” in K. Galinsky, ed., Memory in Ancient Rome and Early Christianity (Oxford University Press), 235-262.

2015: “Commemoration and Elite Benefaction of Buildings and Spectacles in the Roman World,” Journal of Roman Studies 105:1-23. 2015: “Asia Minor,” in E. Friedland, M. Sobocinski, and E. Gazda, eds., Oxford Handbook of Roman Sculpture (Oxford University Press), 538-551.

2011: (co-ed. with Elaine K. Gazda, also co-authors of “Introduction”): Building a New Rome: the Imperial Colony of Pisidian Antioch (25 BC - AD 700).