Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow
Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, Department of Classics, Faculty of Arts & Science
The Memory of Battle in Ancient Greece: Warfare, Identity, and Materiality
Juan Sebastian De Vivo is an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the Department of Classics at NYU. His research centers upon the significance of objects, their display, use, contemplation, collection, and representation, and how these then come to constitute narratives of identity, particularly within traumatic and interstitial spaces: battle, emigration, rites of passage. His dissertation, entitled “The Memory of Battle in Ancient Greece: Warfare, Identity, and Materiality,” focuses upon the experience of warfare in Archaic and Classical Greece, asking how the material culture of battle—particularly armor—shaped the experience, representation, and commemoration of warfare during a critical transitional period in Greek history. Other interests include Greek epic, Roman portraits, the anthropology of diaspora and transnationalism, border studies, the history of collecting and display, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. He received his PhD in Classical Archaeology from Stanford University, an MA from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University, and his BA in Liberal Studies and Classics from California State University, Los Angeles. For the academic year 2009-10, he was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute.