Dr Diana Rodríguez Pérez (PhD (DocEuro) León; MPhil UAM-Madrid; BA MPhil León)

Teaching and Research Fellow in Greek Art and Archaeology

Biography

Background

Before joining the University of Edinburgh in September 2023, I was the Research Assistant for the Beazley Archive Pottery Database at the Classical Art Research Centre and Project Support Coordinator for ERC projects at the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford. Prior to this, I was the Junior Research Fellow Mougins Museum in Classical Art and Material Culture at Wolfson College and co-director of the Ancient World Research Cluster (2016-2019)

Before moving to Oxford in 2014, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh (2012-2014) funded by the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (FECYT). I received my PhD (Doctor Europaea) from the University of León, Spain, with the dissertation The Snake in the Ancient Greek World: Myth, Rite and Image (2010). I have an MPhil in History of Art from the University of León (2008) and an MPhil in Archaeology and Heritage from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2011). In 2010-2011, I worked as a translator at the European Parliament in Luxemburg, and in 2008-2009 I was an Academic Visitor and DAAD Fellow at the Institut für klassische Archäologie of the University of Heidelberg.

I  was a Tytus Scholar at the Department of Classical Studies of the University of Cincinnati (US) in the summer 2017.

Undergraduate teaching

Greek World 1A

Greek Art and Archaeology

Classical Greek Sculpture 

The City of Athens

 

Postgraduate teaching

Classical Greek Sculpture

Past PhD students supervised

David Vendrell Cabanillas (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid). "El tránsito hacia un nuevo estatus. Las imágenes vasculares de baño femenino en Tyrrhenia/Etruria". Sobresaliente Cum Laude (Madrid, 2023). With Professor Carmen Sanchez (UAM)

Research summary

My research focuses on the art and archaeology of ancient Greece, with an emphasis on vase-painting, animal symbolism, the contextual study of Athenian pottery, and funerary customs from the Archaic to the Late Classical periods. I am most interested in the regions of Attica, Macedonia and Boeotia, and I also work on Greek material from the Iberian Peninsula.

Following my JRF at Wolfson College, Oxford, I am working on a research project about the ‘consumption’ of Athenian pottery in the southeastern region of the Iberian Peninsula in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Very roughly, I want to know why, how, and when the Iberians used Athenian pots, how they integrated them within their own exiting material and visual culture, and which consequences the cultural encounter between them and the Greeks had in the production of the Athenian pottery workshops. Some of the phenomena that I am investigating are pottery repairs, intentional alteration of Athenian pottery in Peninsular contexts (trimmed-down vases, fragmentary pottery in necropolis and settlement contexts), targeted production of pottery, Iberian assimilation of Athenian images...  

My PhD was an exploration of the meaning of the snake in the ancient Greek world through a number of case studies using a wide range of textual and material evidence. My postdoctoral research focused on a class of vases called 'Exaleiptra/Plemochoai' to explore the relationship between 'representation' and 'reality' in archaic and classical Greece; it was successful in showing some specificities of Greek visual language regarding the negotiation of gender identities and contributed to the fundamental question of how to understand Greek imagery.

I have published extensively on various aspects of the art and archaeology of ancient Greece, in particular, pottery, including three books (two of them with Dr Thomas Mannack) and several articles in top international journals, such as Hesperia and the Journal of Hellenic Studies. I have also published on Heritage Conservation.

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