Tom Rasmussen

Additional Information

Recent research students: Geoffrey Stone, "The Iconography and Socio-political Background of the Athena Parthenos" ( MPhil 2001); Wim Regter (co-supervised with Prof. Herman Brijder), "Tradition and Innovation: Early Etruscan Bucchero Pottery" (PhD University of Amsterdam, 2001). [Published as a monograph (same title) by Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam (2004)]; David Walsh, "Gods and Heroes Travestied: Burlesque and Irreverent Images in Greek Art" (PhD 2004). [Walsh was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Medal - Postgraduate Student of the Year 2005, and his work was published as "Distorted Ideals in Greek Vase-Painting" (CUP 2009)]

Tom Rasmussen has been Senior Lecturer and Head of Art History. He took his first degree in Classics, specialising in Classical Archaeology and Greek Philosophy, at Cambridge University, where he later completed his PhD under Robert Cook which was published as "Bucchero Pottery from Southern Etruria", 1979, and in 2006 re-issued as a CUP paperback. Later, in tribute to Cook, he contributed to and co-edited with Nigel Spivey the book "Looking at Greek Vases" (CUP 1991, Greek transl. 1997). He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He has travelled widely in Turkey and the Levant, with a focus on the Phrygian, Hittite and Urartian highlands; and before going to Manchester was a Fellow at the Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. He was instrumental in setting up the Art and Archaeology of the Ancient World degree programme.

He has published widely on the material culture of early Italy, especially Etruria and archaic Rome, and on Greek painted pottery. He has written two reports on Etruria for Archaeological Reports (1985 and 1995). He was the editor of, and contributed to, the Etruscan and Italic sections of the multi-volume Macmillan Dictionary of Art (1996) - now the Grove Dictionary, which can be consulted on-line -- and also contributed to the section on Greek vase-painting. He is a member of the International Committee of the Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum (Etruscan mirrors) and co-edited the Cambridge fascicle of engraved mirrors (by R. Nicholls, 1993) as well as the Oxford fascicule (by N. de Grummond, 2007). He has taken part in excavations of Roman date or earlier in Italy, France, and England, and his interest in survey archaeology began under John Ward-Perkins' influence at the British School at Rome. In the period 1986-91 he co-directed (with Graeme Barker and Annie Grant) the Tuscania Project of survey and excavation in central Italy, which is now in an advanced state of preparation for publication.