Sanjaya Thakur

Sanjaya Thakur is professor of Classics at Colorado College, where he also holds the Judson Bemis Professorship in the Humanities.  Professor Thakur earned a B.S. from UCLA, double-majoring in Biology and Latin, two Master's degrees (Classical Studies and Classical Art/Archaeology) and a PhD from the University of Michigan.  He has led many study tours through Greece, Italy, and Spain and is an avid traveler.  He has held a number of national leadership positions in the field of Classical Studies, including chairmanship of the Committee on Diversity in the Profession for the Society for Classical Studies.

Professor Thakur has served as the Director of the Classical Summer School at the American Academy in Rome (2021-23) and Elizabeth A. Whitehead Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (2022-23).  He has published numerous articles, primarily on the literature and history of the age of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor. He teaches a wide range of courses on Greek and Roman history, Latin language and literature, ancient athletics, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and Greek and Roman art and archaeology. He has also co-directed and organized an Associated Colleges of the Midwest seminar in advanced interdisciplinary learning (SAIL), entitled Mediterranean Trivium, based in Italy.

Ross King

Dr. Ross King is the best-selling author of books on Italian, French and Canadian art and history. Among his books are Brunelleschi’s Dome (2000), Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling (2002), and Leonardo and The Last Supper (2012). His study of the origins of French Impressionism, The Judgement of Paris, was published in 2006. He has also published a biography of Niccolò Machiavelli and edited a collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s fables, jokes, and riddles. He is the co-author with Anja Grebe of Florence: The Paintings & Frescoes, 1250-1743 (2015), the most comprehensive (and probably the heaviest) book ever undertaken on the art of Florence.

His current project is a two-volume history of Italy, The Shortest History of Ancient Rome and The Shortest History of Italy, covering some 3,000 years of history from Romulus and Remus to the present.

Ross serves on the Council of Academic Advisors for Friends of Florence, the fund-raising charity ensuring the survival of Florence’s art and architectural treasures. He has participated in numerous Friends of Florence study tours throughout Italy, including in Rome, Assisi, and Milan. He is a regular participant in the Italian Renaissance seminars at the Aspen Institute, including programmes on Giotto, St. Francis, and Dante. He has appeared in a number of television documentaries, such as The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance (PBS, 2003), Raphael: A Mortal God (BBC, 2004), The Great Cathedral Mystery (Nova, 2014), and Florence’s Invisible City (BBC, 2016).

He has lectured in many American museums, including the Smithsonian, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frick Collection, and the National Gallery of Art. When not traveling for work or pleasure, he lives near Oxford, in England, with his wife Melanie.

Kimberly Dennis

Kimberly Dennis is Professor of Art History and Director of the Office of External Fellowships and Scholarships at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. She earned her PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill focusing on the architectural and urban history of Rome during the Counter Reformation. Kim’s primary teaching areas are European Renaissance and Baroque art history, with an emphasis on women’s history. She offers seminars on topics ranging from Roman Palaces to the Dutch Golden Age. Kim has been recognized with Rollins’ highest teaching awards, and her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Her research explores the art and architectural patronage of Roman noblewomen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is currently at work on two projects, Donna Olimpia: Papal Politics and the Patronage of Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj, and Ut Pictura Poesis: Ancestry and Lineage in Scenes of the Aeneid in Pietro da Cortona's Galleria in Palazzo Pamphilj (with Gretchen Meyers, PhD, Franklin & Marshall College). 

Luca Zavagno

Luca Zavagno graduated from the University of Venice (2002); he obtained his Ph.D. (2007) at the University of Birmingham with a dissertation on the society, economics and politics of Byzantine cities in the early middle ages. He is Assistant Professor of Byzantine Studies in the Department of History at Bilkent University where is currently working on his third monography entitled Beyond the Periphery. The Byzantine Insular World between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (c.a. 600–c.a. 900) (ARC-Medieval Press).

Dr. Zavagno is the author of many articles on the early Medieval and Byzantine Mediterranean, as well as as well as three monographs including: Cities in Transition: Urbanism in Byzantium Between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (British Archaeological Reports-International Series, 2009), and Cyprus between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. An Island in Transition (Routledge, 2017). He co-authored (with Özlem Caykent) the edited volumes Islands of Eastern Mediterranean. A History of Cross Cultural Encounters (I.B. Tauris, 2014) and People and Goods on the Move. Merchants, Networks and Communication Routes in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean (IMK, 2016).  

He was also twice awarded the Dumbarton Oaks Summer Fellowship (2011 and 2016) as well as the prestigious Stanley Seeger Fellowship of the Hellenic Studies Center at Princeton University (2012).

Allan Langdale

Allan Langdale grew up on Vancouver Island wondering what the rest of the world was like and has spent much of his adult life finding out. Allan is an art and architectural historian, photographer, filmmaker, and travel writer who received his Ph.D. in art history from UC Santa Barbara. He has taught courses in Italian Renaissance art, Greek, Roman, Byzantine (including Georgian and Armenian architecture), and Indian and Islamic art and architecture. He currently teaches art history at UC Santa Cruz as a lecturer.

Along with several articles, Allan wrote the definitive architectural field guide to the little-known region of Turkish Cyprus, In a Contested Realm (2012) and also made the award-winning documentary film The Stones of Famagusta: the Story of a Forgotten City (2008). His travel books include Palermo: Travels in the City of Happiness (2015) and The Hippodrome of Istanbul / Constantinople: An Illustrated Handbook of its History (2019).

A popular Smithsonian Expert, Allan has traveled extensively in the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea region, the Middle East—including Jordan and Egypt—and India.