Rebecca Schindler

Rebecca Schindler earned her PhD in Classical Art and Architecture at the University of Michigan in 1998, with a dissertation on “The Cult of Aphrodite in the Greek West.” She studied at Wellesley, at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, and at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and has taught at Stanford and the University of Cincinnati and been a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. For the past three years she has been Assistant Field Director of the Hacimusalar Excavation and Survey Project in Southwest Turkey (earlier she did fieldwork at Carthage and other sites on Cyprus and in Tunisia). She teaches a range of Art and Archaeology courses as well as Classical Mythology, first-year Latin, and first year seminars on such topics as Alexander the Great; she has published and spoken on Cult worship, and has many projects in the pipeline. Her current research examines cults of female deities (particularly Aphrodite and Hera) in South Italy and Sicily and the role that those cults played in establishing regional Greek identity during the period of colonization (ca. 800 – 480 BC). She uses a GIS (Geographic Information System) as a means of visualizing the relationships between cult sites in the ancient landscape. Rebecca is also very involved on campus with encouraging undergraduate research and with information technology, and she serves on the Task Force on the Status of Women as well as the Women’s Studies Committee.