Profile

Brown University, AB-MA, 1971
Yale University, PhD, 1975

One of this country’s leading scholars of ancient Greek art, Jeffrey M. Hurwit received a combined AB-MA degree in classical languages and literatures from Brown University in 1971 and a PhD in classical art and archaeology from Yale University in 1975. He taught at Yale from 1975 to 1980, when he became assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon. He was promoted to associate professor in 1984, and to full professor in 1990. He has held a co-appointment in the classics department since 1987 and was named to a Philip H. Knight Professorship in 2008.

The recipient of many prestigious awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987-88 and the University of Oregon’s Faculty Excellence Award in 2007, Prof. Hurwit is the author of many works on the art and civilization of Archaic and Classical Greece. Among the more influential of his publications are the articles The Shipwreck of Odysseus: Strong and Weak Imagery in Late Geometric Art [American Journal of Archaeology 115 (2011), 1-18], Reading the Chigi Vase [Hesperia 71 (2002), 1-22] and The Kritios Boy: Discovery, Reconstruction, and Date [American Journal of Archaeology 93 (1989), 41-80]. His books The Art and Culture of Early Greece(Cornell University Press, 1985,) The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present(Cambridge University Press, 1999), and The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles (Cambridge University Press 2004) are generally regarded as standards in their fields. He is also co-editor of (and a contributor to) a collection of essays entitled Periklean Athens and its Legacy(University of Texas Press 2005). His new book, Artists and Signatures in Ancient Greece, will be published by Cambridge in the fall of 2015.

Prof. Hurwit regularly conducts research in Greece and Italy, and has been selected to teach for UO Study Abroad programs five times, most recently Siena in 2014. A popular lecturer, he has spoken widely across the United States and Canada and has also served three times as a study leader for Smithsonian Institution tours of Greece and the Mediterranean. In 2000-2001, he was appointed to the prestigious Martha S. Joukowsky Lectureship for the Archaeological Institute of America, and in 2003 became the inaugural Dorothy Burr Thompson Memorial Lecturer at University of British Columbia. He has also served on the editorial board of the College Art Association’s Art Bulletin and on the Publications Committee of the Getty Research Institute.

His current research focuses on the representation of the sea in early Greek art and the meaning of hand stencils in Palaeolithic art.

Publications

The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Ancient Etruscan and Greek Vases in the Elvehjem Museum of Art, with P. Powell.
Madison, WI: Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2000

The Art and Culture of Early Greece, 1100-480 B.C.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985

The Athenian Acropolis: History, Mythology, and Archaeology from the Neolithic Era to the Present
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999

Periklean Athens and its Legacy: Problems and Perspectives, co-edited with Judith Barringer.
Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000

Selected Courses Taught