Bailey Benson
Bailey Benson is an art historian and archaeologist specializing in the material culture of the Roman Empire, with a particular focus on how visual media shaped memory, identity, and political authority. Bailey’s research examines imperial portraiture as an active force in the construction of power, exploring how images functioned not only as representations but also as tools that structured perception, elicited emotional responses, and embedded imperial presence within the cultural imagination.
Bailey completed her PhD in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University in 2025. Her dissertation, “What’s in a Face? Reframing the Expressive Portraiture of Third-Century Roman Emperors,” offers the first sustained study of the highly expressive portrait style that emerged during this period. Drawing on art history, archaeology, ancient philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, she argues that intensified facial features and dynamic carving techniques functioned as mnemonic strategies designed to shape how viewers saw, felt, and remembered the emperor. This research contributes to broader questions about the relationship between visual form, perception, and ideology in the ancient world.
Her research is interdisciplinary and methodologically integrative, bringing together close visual analysis, archaeological context, and theories of vision and memory to investigate how Roman images operated across different environments and audiences. More broadly, she is interested in how ancient societies constructed and sustained memory through material culture and how these practices resonate with ongoing debates about memory, identity, and representation today.
Bailey’s academic work is complemented by extensive experience in museums and field archaeology. She has contributed to exhibitions and collections research at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Tufts University Art Galleries, and the Princeton University Art Museum. As the Stavros Niarchos Fellow in Classical Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bailey worked on the reinstallation of the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine galleries, with a particular focus on the Roman Portrait Gallery. She has also participated in archaeological projects across the Mediterranean, including excavations in Italy, Greece, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, as well as finds processing and ceramics analysis in laboratory settings.
Across her research, teaching, and curatorial work, Bailey is committed to bridging scholarly inquiry and public engagement. She approaches the study of the ancient world as both an intellectual and experiential endeavor, one that invites critical reflection on how the past is constructed, interpreted, and made meaningful in the present.