Marden Nichols
Assistant Curator of Ancient Art at the Walters Art Museum
Marden Nichols (Ph.D. University of Cambridge) joined the Walters in 2011 as Assistant Curator of Ancient Art. She is a classicist, whose research focuses on the literature, art and culture of the Roman republic and early empire. Her monograph Vitruvius on Display: Domestic Decor and Roman Self-Fashioning at the End of the Republic is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Recent articles discuss ancient Roman domestic decor and the moral discourse of luxury, the authorial personae of Horace and Vitruvius, the satirist Persius, and the reception history of plaster cast replicas of classical art.
Nichols is the curator of two exhibitions that will open in 2013: the international loan exhibition Egypt’s Mysterious Book of the Faiyum and Site Unseen, an installation of contemporary photography of historical artifacts by Gregory Vershbow. She is also at work on an exhibition about the image of Augustus, which will commemorate the 2000th anniversary of his death in 2014.
Nichols 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 participated in archaeological excavations at Monte Polizzo, Sicily; Thwing, Yorkshire; and in the Roman Forum.
With Hérica Valladares, she is currently co-teaching a series of two graduate seminars at Johns Hopkins University on the Roman house. Nichols holds a BA in Classics and MA in Humanities, with a focus in Classical Art and Archaeology, from Stanford University, and an MPhil in Archaeological Heritage and Museums and PhD in Classics from Trinity College, University of Cambridge, where she was a Marshall Scholar.
Publications
In progress
Vitruvius on Display: Domestic Decor and Roman Self-fashioning at the End of the Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forthcoming
"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.
2013
"Persius." In The Blackwell Companion to Neronian Literature and Culture, eds. E. Buckley and M. Dinter. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 258-274.
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.