Normalizing Loot: A Case Study of a Plundered Imperial Shrine

This talk will discuss a corpus of dozens of life-size bronze statues of Roman emperors and empresses that were looted in the 1960s at Bubon, an unexcavated site in southern Turkey, and ended up in collections across the U.S. What was lost in the process? Why – and how – are some museums resisting efforts to return these statues to Turkey today?

Bio: Elizabeth Marlowe is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Art department Colgate University; she is also the founder and director of the program in Museum Studies. She holds degrees from Smith College, the University of Cambridge, and Columbia University (PhD). Her fields of specialization are ancient art, late antiquity, the city of Rome, Roman imperial monuments, modern uses of the classical past, museum studies, critical museum theory, the art market, cultural property, and antiquities looting and repatriation. Her publications include Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (2013), and “Archaeology and Iconography” in the Oxford Handbook of Roman Imagery and Iconography (Cline and Elkins, eds., 2023). She has written about antiquities, repatriation and museums in venues such as Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and Artnews. She is an AIA Joukowsky Lecturer for the 2024/2025 National Lecture Program season.