Seminar: Alessia Zambon; Travelers & Ancient Monuments in Ottoman Greece

Our Fellows’ seminars are now open to the public! Fascinating topics from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences

This event has in conversation with moderator , Visiting Professor in the Department of History, Columbia University.

Alessia Zambon, of the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ; France) joins the Italian Academy as a Spring semester Fellow; her project is titled "Western travelers, local emissaries and ancient monuments in Ottoman Greece (1784–1834)."

Zambon is senior lecturer in Art History and Cultural Heritage in the History Department of the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (University Paris–⁠Saclay). Her research focuses on the explorations and acquisitions of antiquities by western travelers and local emissaries in Southern Italy, the Ottoman Empire and Greece in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and on the history of collections in Europe.
She is the author of Aux origines de l'archéologie en Grèce: Fauvel et sa méthode (Paris, INHA-CTHS, 2014), a book resulting from her dissertation and focusing on the archaeological work of the painter Louis François Fauvel (1753–⁠1838) in Greece and the Ottoman Empire. She has been scholar associate at the Getty Villa (2024), visiting scholar at Columbia University (2022) and at the École française d'Athènes (2019), associate member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2011–⁠2012), postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (2010–⁠2011), and associate researcher at the Département des Estampes et de la photographie of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (2008–⁠2011). She has participated in several international research projects on the history of archaeology and the constitution of France's ancient heritage. In 2022, she edited with Irini Apostolou the book Du pillage à la conscience patrimoniale en Grèce et dans l’Empire ottoman : le rôle des Français et des autres Occidentaux (XVIIIe–⁠XIXe s.), that questions how the looting of antiquities, carried out by Western countries between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, paved the way to the emergence of a heritage consciousness in Greece and the Ottoman Empire (https://books.openedition.org/ausonius/22244). Her next book, edited with Vincent Puech and Delphine Carrangeot, will be published in 2026 with the title: Les transferts d’antiquites: objets, collections, processus, patrimonialisation (de l’Antiquite au XIXe s.).

More information: https://www.ieci.uvsq.fr/mme-alessia-zambon

Doors open at 3:30pm. Registration does not guarantee a seat; registrants are seated first-come, first served.
This event is in-person only.

Visit to read more about this and other events, and all our initiatives.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher The Italian Academy of Columbia University