PETER A. THOMPSON

Assistant Curator of Classical Archaeology

Peter Thompson's staff portrait against a red background

Assistant Lecturer in Classical Archaeology, St John's College

Contact
Email: peter.thompson@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
ORCID: 0000-0002-6515-9712

University of Oxford webpages
St John's College, Oxford
Classics Faculty, Oxford

Biography

Peter A. Thompson is Assistant Curator of Classical Archaeology at the Ashmolean Museum and Assistant Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at St John's College. He is also a Classical Archaeology Fellow and PhD Candidate in Archaeology and the History of Art at New York University. In his role at the Museum, Peter carries out various curatorial and research duties relating to the Museum’s collections of archaeological material from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.

Prior to his appointment at the Ashmolean in 2025, Peter held Regular Membership and a Bert Hodge Hill Fellowship, followed by a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in the Art and Architecture of Antiquity, at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where he undertook research for his doctoral dissertation on archaism in ancient Greek art and architecture. During his doctorate and earlier degrees, he was also engaged in research, collections management, and curatorial projects at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the British School at Athens, and the Brooklyn Museum.

Peter works as a field archaeologist with the New York University–Università degli Studi di Milano excavations at Selinunte, Sicily, and he has previously participated in other excavation projects at ancient Corinth (Greece), Aphrodisias (Turkey), and Mérida (Spain).

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Peter’s research interests gravitate around the perception and construction of the past, in both ancient and modern contexts.

His primary area of archaeological specialization is on ancient Greece during the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods (7th–1st centuries BC), and his doctoral dissertation investigates the phenomenon of artistic archaism (the practice of making images and objects that look conspicuously old-fashioned) in ancient Greece in the period c. 700–480 BC.

Alongside this work, Peter’s research concerns the representation of the ancient world in modern academic and public spheres, particularly through the quintessential modern media of photography and film.

As a College Lecturer at St John’s College, Peter provides undergraduate teaching on the art and archaeology of both the ancient Greek and Roman worlds through the Faculty of Classics. He also supervises undergraduate dissertations (site reports and museum reports) for students in BA Classical Archaeology and Ancient History.

Scholarship, studentship or fellowship

  • 2022 - Jun 2023, Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in the Art and Architecture of Antiquity
  • 2021 - Jun 2022, Bert Hodge Hill Fellowship
  • 2019 - Jun 2026, Classical Art and Archaeology Fellowship (PhD studentship)

archaeology, archives, curation, excavations, museum, archaeological visualisation, newsreels, archaeological photography, archaism, Archaic Greek world, Classical Greek world, history of collections, history of archaeology, history of museums, Greek sculpture, Greek painted pottery, Greek architecture, archaeology on screen, public archaeology, constructions of the past

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