Irene B Romano

Biography

Irene Bald Romano holds a joint appointment as Professor of Art History in the School of Art and Professor of Anthropology in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She also holds affiliated appointments in the Department of Religious Studies and Classics and in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and is the Curator of Mediterranean Archaeology at the Arizona State Museum. She is the co-director of the Graduate Certificate Program in Museum Studies. From 2012 to 2015 she held the administrative appointment of Deputy Director of the Arizona State Museum. 

Dr. Romano earned a Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. from Manhattanville College. She has more than 30 years of experience as a museum professional, holding many positions, including as registrar, curator, researcher, consultant, and coordinator of the collections division at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. Dr. Romano moved to the University of Arizona in 2012 from a position she held for six years as Executive Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

She is the author, co-author, or editor of eight books, as well as numerous articles on ancient Mediterranean collections, Greek and Roman sculpture, pottery, terracotta figurines, Greek cult practice, and marble provenance studies. She has extensive archaeological field experience in Greece, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, and has worked with scholars from many countries on international research and museum projects.

Dr. Romano's two most recent publications are The Fate of Antiquities in the Nazi Era (2023) which she edited and co-authored (https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/rihajournal/issue/view/5439) and Beth Shean Studies: Aspects of Religion, History, Art, and Archaeology in Hellenistic and Roman Nysa-Scythopolis (2024), co-authored with Kyle Mahoney (https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/52023). A co-authored article on a fragment of a Neo-Assyrian relief fragment in the Arizona State Museum will appear in November 2024 in the Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research (BASOR). She is currently working on a publication on a corpus of Late Hellenistic marble statuettes from a Parthian site in Iraqi Kurdistan, and is engaged in a research project on a group of Greek and Roman sculptures collected by Ludwig Pollak, an important connoisseur, dealer, collector, and museum director in Rome in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Degrees

• Ph.D. Classical Archaeology
• University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
• Early Greek Cult Images
• B.A. English Literature
• Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York, United States

Awards

• Morgan-Solomon Grant for Faculty Research
• School of Art, University of Arizona, Summer 2023 (Award Finalist)
• Faculty Professional Development Endowment Award
• School of Art, University of Arizona, Summer 2017
• Benjamin Franklin Research Grant
• American Philosophical Society, Summer 2016
• Faculty Small Grant
• College of Fine Arts and School of Art, University of Arizona, Summer 2016
• Marcia and Oded Borowski Research Fellowship
• Albright Institute of Archaeology, Jerusalem, Summer 2016
• NEH Summer Stipend
• University of Arizona/National Endowment for the Humanities, Spring 2016 (Award Nominee)
• Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Archaeological Institute of America at the German Archaeological Institute, Berlin
• Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI), Berlin, Summer 2015
• College of Fine Arts Faculty Small Grant and School of Art Fund for Excellence
• College of Fine Arts and School of Art, Spring 2015