Tuesday, May 20th, 2025, at 19:30 CET (doors open at 19:00) at the National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden
Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Marlowe
Normalizing Loot: A Case Study of a Plundered Imperial Shrine
This talk discusses 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 this site originally? What was lost in the process of their looting? Why – and how – are some museums resisting efforts to return these statues to Turkey today?
Download the print version of the lecture
Elizabeth Marlowe studied Art History and Classics as an undergraduate and earned her Ph.D in ancient art history at Columbia University. She is the author of several articles about Constantinian monuments in the city of Rome and Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship, and the History of Roman Art (2013). Her most recent publications offer critical perspectives on museum labels, the ‘Elgin Marbles’, and a group of statues looted from Turkey and their display in American museums. She teaches at Colgate University (New York), where she is the Chair of the Art Department as well as the founder and director of the Program in Museum Studies.
Moderator: Dr. Benjamin Rous (University of Amsterdam).
