A second-year Masters student in Classical Studies, Amy studies Roman art, poetry, and Stoic epistemology. As an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, Amy began studying Greek and Latin, while she majored in the history of art. She went on to Columbia's Department of Art History and Archaeology, where she earned a MA and MPhil. Her ultimate focus was Netherlandish painting and prints, with attention to Rubens' profound engagement with antiquity. Amy was a teaching assistant for an Introduction to Architecture course, taught by Professor Joseph Connors, and she has taught Art Humanities.
Returning to Classical art, with ongoing interests in still life, Beiwerk, impression, and reiteration, Amy is drawn to works and form that may be all-too-familiar, historically dismissed as trite or derivative. Recently, she analyzed a columnar sarcophagus from Dokimeia, which had undergone heavy restoration. Close study of problems addressed by the Renaissance reconstruction revealed remarkable attempts, by the ancient Phrygian workshop, to harmonize narrative and portraiture, which seemed to have taken the limited visibility of the decorated sides into account. She has, moreover, reexamined the knot of Hercules, whose obvious symbolism has been prioritized by scholars; she has considered that the singular persistence of this protective motif might be further understood in terms of schematism, reproducibility, and the reification of ritual. Intrigued by scholarship of agency and cognition, working memory and salience, she explores ways ornament exploits human swiftness to predict, subtly conditioning, and even manipulating, passers-by.
In complement, Amy is also interested in the aesthetics of unfamiliarity and Roman "re-framing." Extending her study to poetry as well as art, she studies intertext and amplification in Seneca, as well as dialectics of fear and uncertainty. She is currently exploring garland sarcophagi, apotropaic ornament, and the rich concept of petrification.