Anastasia Dakouri-Hild

Associate Professor, Art History


Curriculum Vitae

 

Anastasia Dakouri-Hild has a combined field (academic and CRM) and curatorial background in ancient art and archaeology. She received her doctoral degree from the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge funded by a merit scholarship at Christ's College. She has been an associate professor in Aegean and Near Eastern art and archaeology at the University of Virginia since 2018, and has taught at the university since 2006. She is the co-editor of the Berghahn International Monographs in Prehistory and serves on the national outreach committee of the Archaeological Institute of America; in the past she also served as assistant director of the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. She has been the recipient of the Michael Ventris Award for Mycenaean Studies (University of London), an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (ACLS), the award for Outstanding Work in Digital Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America), and a Leonard A. Lauder visiting senior fellowship (National Gallery of Art). She specializes in Aegean prehistory (3000-1100 BCE), with broad research interests in value theory and economics, the archaeology of power and the state, ceramic analysis and technology, social aspects of technology and technique, creativity, memory and material culture, emotion and cognition, embodied and multi-sensorial approaches to material culture, the politics of the past, the uses of digital technology in the humanities, and the links between landscape, place and performance. She conducted field work in Thebes in Greece since 1998, where she re-excavated and studied the House of Kadmos site, initially through the Greek Archaeological Service. She has also re-studied the old excavation material from the Theban cemeteries (with Y. Fappas and V. Aravantinos, 2011-2014). From 2019-2023 she has been the PI and co-director (with E. Andrikou and S. Davis) of the four-year Kotroni Archaeological Survey Project (KASP) at the legendary site of Aphidna, Greece. The latter is a multi-specialty team project which deploys a host of conventional field and innovative geospatial techniques in multi-modal landscape analysis. For her research she has received multiple internal awards as well as external ones from the Institute of Aegean Prehistory (Philadelphia), Harvard University, Hexagon Geospatial, Digital Globe, the Archaeological Institute of America, the Mediterranean Archaeological Trust (London), and the 4VA consortium. Dakouri-Hild teaches courses on Aegean prehistory, Egypt, the Near East, the politics of the past, art and cognition, and anthropology/sociology as it relates to the visual (especially antiquity) and popular culture. Recently she has been selected to teach a general course on creativity as an Arts and Sciences College fellow. She has directed undergraduate and graduate independent studies and DMP studies on Aegean and Egyptian archaeology, ethno-archaeology, and feminist theory. She has published four edited volumes (Public Archaeologies of the Ancient Mediterranean, 2017; Staging Death: Funerary Performance, Architecture and Landscape in the Ancient Mediterranean, with M. Boyd, 2016; Beyond Illustration: 2D and 3D Technologies as Tools for Discovery in Archaeology, with B. Frischer, 2008; and Autochthon: Papers Presented to O.T.P.K. Dickinson on the Occasion of his Retirement, with S. Sherratt, 2005). She is currently preparing the publication of the House of Kadmos, the Theban cemeteries, and the results of the KASP survey, while working on an exhibition at the Fralin Museum of Art (2025) on the links between Egypt and Nubia.