As is the case in every forum I've ever wandered into, this forum needs a spot for us to introduce ourselves when we arrive. So, who are you? I'm Lauren Murphy, PhD candidate at La Trobe University in Melbourne. I work sort-of in reception studies with some crossover with museum studies and the history of collections, but the field of connoisseurship and attribution is pretty fascinating to me too. I'm happy to argue the importance of the individual artist and their body of work with people who think that the context of an object is the only thing that matters. For my thesis, I am researching early collections of Greek and South Italian painted vases that predate the publication of Sir William Hamilton's first collection. I had a lovely time in Europe undertaking research late last year and I hope to get back there when travel is possible once more. Apart from my work with vases, I like to wander off and do research in other areas of Classics and Ancient History where I am absolutely encroaching on the territory of people who actually know what they're doing. I have an article in the inaugural issue of New Classicists where I pretend to be a scholar of Roman and Alexandrian history, because why not? I also paint and draw a lot, that was my first and doomed career. I didn't really embrace this field until I returned to do another degree in my thirties and was won over during a vase handling session in my first semester. That class was just meant to be a filler in my program so I had to overhaul everything to go chasing a new passion. Luckily for me, I'm pretty good at this stuff so I'm still playing with vases whenever possible. One thing which I don't seem to have in common with many classicists or historians is that I have hardly any Latin or Ancient Greek. Basically, my uni only offered the first year of Latin, which I took, and I can read the Greek inscriptions of vases (usually) because they tend to be pretty formulaic. I can muddle my way through Latin texts but it's pretty slow going, so I am lucky that a lot of my work involves looking at pretty pictures. You can find me on twitter as @ouroboros81 Sorry for the waffling, but someone needs to kick this off and without the model of an earlier post, well, I ramble on a lot. Anyway, it's nearly 5am here in Oz, but hopefully when I wake up I can meet some new people. Goodnight/morning.
Thank you for the great suggestion Lauren. I’ve now added an ‘introduction’ category.
Hi Lauren!
Good to see someone though of an introductions section! I'm starting to dig deep into Greek vases myself, have always been interested in them, but haven't dedicated much time to studying them. Very excited to learn more.
I relate to you comment on Greek and Latin, I studied my undergraduate at Auckland University in New Zealand and we were only required to do one year of an ancient language. This definitely pushed me into the pretty picture category too haha! But with an abundance of amazing ancient visual material, I can't exactly complain :D
I look forward to talking more soon.
I still spend a huge chunk of my research time giggling at the 'naughty' vases and the really poorly made drawings, so an afternoon with one of Trendall's catalogues can be great fun. I have a friend who works with the iconography on the vases and we send each other the best/worst images that we come across. There are some shockers. For general information about vase painting I recommend John Boardman's The History of Greek Vases. I went to the ASCS conference in Dunedin earlier this year (right before everything changed) and got to hang out with lots of great people from Auckland University. It seems like the program there is quite strong, they've been well represented at events here in Australia too.