Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Monday, March 4, 2013 in HART, Lectures, VRC.

Barbara Tsakirgis, associate professor of classics and history of art, Vanderbilt University, will deliver the American Institute of Archaeology lecture on Tuesday, March 12, at 7 p.m. at the Nashville Parthenon in Centennial Park. Her lecture is entitled “The Athens of the South: William Bell Dinsmoor and the Design of the Nashville Parthenon.”

Dinsmoor was a professor at Columbia University, where Tsakirgis was first invited to present this lecture in September. Dinsmoor, a long-time professor at the American School in Athens, was the world’s leading authority on the architecture of the ancient Athenian temple. When the Nashville-based architect Russell Hart was designing and building the permanent replica of the Parthenon in Nashville, he invited Dinsmoor to share his deep knowledge of the ancient building.

In her lecture Tsakirgis will explore how the design of the Nashville Parthenon benefited from this scholarly input and how Dinsmoor came to use his experience in the design of the Nashville replica as he thought about and wrote about the original Parthenon.

Tsakirgis, a classical archaeologist who specializes in the study of ancient Greek houses and households, is a long-time member of the excavation and research teams at the Hellenistic city of Morgantina in central Sicily and the Athenian Agora, the city center and marketplace of ancient Athens. She has published widely on the elements of Greek houses and households, including the decorated pavements at Morgantina, and is publishing the remains of the Greek and Roman houses excavated at both sites.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America, the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park, the Vanderbilt History of Art Goldberg Lecture Series, the Department of Classical Studies, and the Holiday Inn at Vanderbilt. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat.