Join the Richmond and Charlottesville Societies of the Archaeological Institute of America for a book talk and Q&A with Fiona Greenland (University of Virginia), the author of Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Raiders, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2021). The event will take place over Zoom on 13 May 2021 at 6p EDT.
Fiona Greenland is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Assistant Professor of Anthropology (by courtesy) at the University of Virginia. She studies cultural policy and the politics of national heritage. Her book, Ruling Culture: Art Police, Tomb Robbers, and the Rise of Cultural Power in Italy, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2021. It situates the emergence of national symbols and icons in Italy’s longer historical entanglements of cultural elites, state officials, and tombaroli, or tomb robbers. Her new work examines the relationship between cultural destruction and civilian deaths in the Syrian war. Greenland’s work has been published in Sociological Theory, Qualitative Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, and the International Journal of Cultural Property, among other outlets. She was a classical archaeologist for 10 years before training as a sociologist.