Anne Hunnell Chen
B.A. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Ph.D. Columbia University
Anne Hunnell Chen specializes in the art and archaeology of the globally connected Late Roman world. She has published on Roman, Persian, and Digital Humanities topics, and taught equally wide-ranging coursework. She is currently at work on a monograph, Tetrarchic Art, Architecture, and Ideology Between East and West (284-325 CE). Taking a transculturally-sensitive, multimedia, and contextual approach, hers is the first book to treat the imperial art of this critical transitional era in its own right, rather than as an accessory in a longue durée narrative. She argues that emperors of this era sensitively adjusted their ideological messaging to address ever-evolving internal and external political pressures—including inordinate pressure from the Persian Sassanid East—and that the stylistic abstraction most commonly associated with the imperial art of the period was not as all-pervasive as generally assumed.
She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and at the Roman imperial palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013-14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age. Currently, Dr. Chen heads a Digital Humanities project aimed at using Linked Open Data (LOD) to create an integrative, networked database and teaching resource for Roman archaeological sites throughout Southeastern Europe, and is an historical consultant for the Virtual Center for Late Antiquity (VCLA).
She earned her B.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies, and her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University. Prior to joining the Yale community, she taught at Brown and Hofstra Universities.