Elizabeth Simpson

Background

Elizabeth Simpson was born on June 16, 1947, in San Francisco, California, United States. She is the daughter of W. T. and Ann Bruck (Cunningham) Simpson.

Education

Simpson graduated from the Smith College with a bachelor's degree in Mathematics and obtained her master's degree in Art History from the University of Oregon. She then received her doctorate in Classical Archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985.

Career

Simpson holds the position of a professor of ancient art at the Bard Graduate Center, specializing in the history of ancient furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, and metalwork; ancient crafts and technology; and the protection of cultural property. Before coming to the Bard Graduate Center in 1993, she taught at Duke University and Sarah Lawrence College from 1990 to 1993 and was a curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1986 to 1989. As director of the Gordion Furniture Project, she also holds the position of consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia since 1993.

Simpson is best known as a scholar, who specializes in the arts and technology of the ancient world, including the history of furniture, jewellery and metalwork, and ceramics and glass. Her research centres on archaeological detective work and the interpretation of objects that have not been well understood. This includes the reinterpretation of the furniture and wooden artefacts from Gordion, which are now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, as well as the famous Pratt ivories in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She also solved a 100-year-old mystery regarding the identity of the Andokides Painter, the fine red-figure artist who painted a series of bilingual vases in Athens in the late 6th century B.C.

Achievements

• In 1995, Simpson organized a ground-breaking symposium at the Bard Graduate Center, "The Spoils of War—World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property." This led to a reorganization of priorities at museums throughout the world, with an emphasis on provenance research and the ethical acquisition of works of art.
  
  Simpson's major publications include The Gordion Wooden Objects I: The Furniture from Tumulus MM (2010), Gordion Wooden Furniture (1999), and The Spoils of War—World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property (1997).
  
  Simpson is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Geographic Society, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, and the Archaeological Institute of America.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Gordion Wooden Furniture

    (This book details 18 years of research and conservation w...)

    1999
  • Spoils of War by Elizabeth Simpson 1997

Membership

Simpson is a member of the Archaeological Institute of America, American Research Institute in Turkey, Explorers Club and ArtTable.

Connections

Mother:

Ann Bruck (Cunningham) Simpson