In his first semester on the Yale faculty, ancient art historian Alexander Ekserdjian is reveling in the resources at his fingertips. He regularly takes the undergraduates enrolled in his seminar, “Imagining the Invisible in the Roman World,” to the Yale University Art Gallery and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to see firsthand the objects that they’re reading about.
“Teaching with the collections is a massive pleasure,” he said. “It’s the privilege that comes from being at this university and having the wonderful curators who facilitate those visits. The students can see these things up close, and it changes how you understand them.”
Ekserdjian, who was a postdoctoral associate at Yale last year, now has a joint appointment in classics and the history of art in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series that introduces new Yale faculty members to the broader community, Ekserdjian discusses his childhood fascination with the Greek myths, a cult statue named Fortuna, and his escapist reading preferences.
| Title | Assistant professor of classics and of the history of art |
|---|---|
| Research interest | Ancient experiences of sacred art |
| Prior institution | Columbia University |
| Started at Yale | July 1, 2024 |
Tell me about your interest in the ancient sculpture of Italy.
Alexander Ekserdjian: I think it comes from when I was an undergraduate and I discovered while doing an archaeology degree that you could write history with objects. The material record from the ancient world might give you a picture that was equally as rich as the textual sources that I knew much better at that point. But the picture you get is very different. That is where the intellectual interest of it lies for me. You are recreating someone’s world — or the world of a million someones — but you’re doing it in ways that encourage you to think about experience, about things in their sensuous, tactile, multi-faceted dimensions.
Are you particularly interested in how they relate to religion?
Ekserdjian: Sculpture from sacred places is my main research interest, and that is partly from this idea that these were objects that were invested with a huge amount of societal, social, personal, and emotional importance. So rather than studying the equivalent of someone’s paper clip, you are studying something they might have prayed to or something they might have used to communicate with the divine.
Is there a sculpture or style of sculpture that is of particular interest to you?
Ekserdjian: There is a category of sculptures that were the cult statues in the temples. And in my period of study, as Rome is becoming an imperial power and extending beyond Italy, these start to be made, in part, of marble. There is one example of the goddess Fortuna, which means good fortune. Just her head is about my height, a little under two meters high. And if you extrapolate that into the full statue, which no longer survives, she would have been eight meters high! Imagine the experience of encountering this figure within a temple with the sunlight streaming in.
Her face is interesting in that it’s somewhat distant. It reads, to us at least, quite coldly. She looks straight out. She’d have gazed above you, but she would have probably offered forward a horn of plenty, a so-called cornucopia, symbol of abundance. So she’s promising riches and wealth, but you do not necessarily mean all that much to her.
What drew you to the classics?
Ekserdjian: The tongue-in-cheek answer is the tape of the Greek myths that I had when I was about five years old and listened to on loop. But there is also something serious in that answer in that we have such a rich repertoire of stories and their retellings that have echoed through time. As a historian, there’s something very tantalizing about a period and a geography about which, on some levels, we know a huge amount. There’s a long tradition of scholarship that has elucidated all these interesting things and brought such richness to our consideration of that period.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
Ekserdjian: I like to spend as much time as I can outside, cycling or walking around. I like reading novels, anything that takes me to a different world. I love George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and Jane Austen’s social worlds, which are relatively close historically but feel so incredibly different. And I don’t mind a bit of speculative fiction or sci-fi for the same reasons. It’s giving you an experience of something that you don’t know much about that allows you to test and compare our experience of the world with that of other people. I tell my students that empathy is an important part of being a historian.
