Bio

Kimberly Bowes studies the archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, with specialties in domestic and religious architecture, and the archaeology of the Roman economy.

Kim received her BA (summa cum laude 1992) from Williams College, an MA from the Courtauld Institute (1993), and PhD from Princeton (2002).  She has been a visiting fellow at Harvard and a post-doctoral fellow/lecturer at Yale, Assistant Professor of Art History at Fordham University, and Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cornell University before joining the faculty at Penn.  In 2005 she was a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Post-Doctoral Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

From 2012-2014 Kim served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in Charge of the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome, and from 2014-17 she is serving as Director of the same institution.

Her excavation experience extends from Portugal and Spain to Greece and Italy. She is currently co-directing a major project in Tuscany, funded by the National Science Foundation, excavating and analyzing the lives of the Roman peasantry.

Kim’s publications address a wide range of issues pertaining to Roman domestic architecture, religion and economics, and have appeared in journals ranging from the Journal of Roman Archaeology to Art History. Her first book, Possessing the Holy: Private Worship in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2008), traces the transformation of house-based religion worship from pagan Rome to early Christianity. Her most recent volume, Houses and Society in the Later Roman Empire, examines the relationship between domestic architecture and social history. She has also published on the Roman history of Spain, the history of Christian architecture, the end of the Roman villa, and the rural landscape.