Marden Nichols
Assistant Curator of Ancient Art at the Walters Art Museum
Marden Nichols joined the Walters in 2011 as Assistant Curator of Ancient Art. Her research interests are ancient Roman cultural history, Latin literature, ancient Greek and Roman art and archaeology, and the post-classical reception of classical art. Nichols received both her BA in Classics and her MA in Humanities, with a focus in Classical Art and Archaeology, from Stanford University. She pursued further graduate work in the United Kingdom as a Marshall Scholar at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. There she completed an MPhil in Archaeological Heritage and Museums (2005) and a PhD in Classics (2009). Nichols has participated in archaeological excavations at Monte Polizzo, Sicily; Thwing, Yorkshire; and in the Roman Forum. She has held fellowships at the School for Advanced Studies in Venice, the British School at Rome, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She has contributed to curatorial projects at the Leighton House Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum, among others. In 2009, she collaborated with artists Celia Hempton and Katie Cuddon to create an exhibition and performance at the British School at Rome Gallery, “Second Style: An Odyssey Frieze,” which was inspired by the nineteenth-century reception of ancient Roman wall painting. Recent teaching includes an undergraduate course on Horace’s Satires at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a graduate seminar on “Museums and Academia: Approaches to Image and Text” at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.
Publications
In progress
Vitruvius on Display: Domestic Decor and Roman Self-fashioning at the End of the Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forthcoming, 2012
“The Pompeian Style in America.” In The Collector’s Choice: Art on Display in American Private Collections. The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
“The Genre of Roman Comedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Roman Comedy, ed. M. Dinter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Persius.” In The Blackwell Companion to Neronian Literature and Culture, eds. E. Buckley and M. Dinter. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
2010
“Contemporary Perspectives on Luxury Building in Second-Century BC Rome.” Papers of the British School at Rome 78: 39–61.
2009
“Social Status and the Authorial Personae of Horace and Vitruvius.” In Perceptions of Horace: A Roman Poet and His Readers, eds. L. Houghton and M. Wyke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 109–122.
2007
“Museum Material? An Institution-Based Critique of the Historiography of Plaster Cast Sculpture.” In Material Worlds: Proceedings of the Conference Held at Glasgow University, 2005, eds. R. Moffat and E. de Klerk. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 26–39.
2006
“Plaster Cast Sculpture: A History of Touch.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 21.2: 114–130.