Biography

Anne Hunnell Chen studies the art and architecture of the Roman Empire, with a particular focus on Late Antique intercultural exchange with the Persian Sasanid Empire. She received her Ph.D. in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University in May 2014. Her dissertation, From the Seed of the Gods: Art, Ideology and Cultural Exchange with the Persian Court under the Roman Tetrarchs, 284-324 CE, demonstrates how Roman emperors of the late 3rd and early 4th centuries selectively imported, adapted, and repackaged aspects of Sasanian ideology and court culture—including elements of palatial design, performative ceremony, and specific iconographies. 

She has excavated at the Roman Baths in Iesso (Spain), and since 2010, at the Roman palace at Felix Romuliana (Serbia), a UNESCO World Heritage site. In 2013-14, she spent a year as a fellow in the Department of the Ancient Near East at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where she worked on the international loan exhibition Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age.  Currently, Dr. Chen heads a digital documentation project aimed at creating an integrative, networked database and teaching resource for Roman archaeological sites throughout the Balkan region. 

Her B.A. degree was earned from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fields of Art History and Classical Studies.