Gary Radke

Gary Radke served as Dean's Professor of the Humanities and professor of art history in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. Upon joining the faculty in 1980, he promptly took over the Florence Graduate Program in Italian Renaissance Art and has since helped elevate it- and the department of Art & Music Histories in general- to international prominence. Radke is one of the world's leading experts on Italian Medieval and Renaissance art and architecture, with a special interest in 15th-century Florentine sculpture. Since 2001, Radke has served as a guest curator at Atlanta's High Museum of Art, where he organized a series of high-profile shows-and their respective exhibition catalogs- featuring works by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Ghiberti, Verrocchio, and other Italian Renaissance masters. Radke is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Janet Duncan Jones

Janet Duncan Jones, Professor Emerita of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Bucknell University, is an archaeologist with over 40 years‘ experience in the field. She has participated in excavation projects in Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Jordan. Her experience as a glassblower out of college ignited a career long research interest in preindustrial technologies and the lives of early craft workers. While living in villages in the Middle East she became interested in the impacts of preindustrial technologies on the ancient environment and the evolution of cultural landscapes. Her publications include studies of the ancient glass from sites in Turkey and Jordan, and synthetic considerations of the landscape of ancient ruins and of the messages and impacts of ancient mega-engineering projects. Recently she has focused her work on the impact of the Moors in southern Spain on urbanism, architecture, technology, and intellectual history.

Janet has lived in Turkey and Greece, and has traveled widely with an eye toward the messages that landscapes send us about the values and concerns of past peoples. She holds degrees from the College of William and Mary and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also acquired a devotion to ACC basketball. She lives in the mountains of central Pennsylvania with her geographer husband and hounds descended from those she originally imported from the Euphrates Valley in southeastern Turkey. 

Stephen Clancy

Stephen Clancy is an art and architectural historian with special expertise in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance art and architecture. A popular Smithsonian Journeys Expert, he has led more than 20 tours and cruises through the Mediterranean region and northern Europe.

Stephen Clancy recently retired as Professor of Art History at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, where he taught for twenty-seven years.  After receiving his Ph.D from Cornell University, Stephen taught the history of Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance art and architecture, as well as courses on visual persuasion and the rhetoric of art.  His research career began with a focus on fifteenth-century French and Flemish illuminated manuscripts, specifically with works connected to the artists Jean Fouquet (about whom he has written a book, a book chapter, and several articles) and Simon Marmion (for which he received a 1995-96 Fulbright Scholarship in Brussels, Belgium). In addition he gave conference presentations on the role of ivory carvings within the political and economic spheres of the Byzantine empire.

Stephen also received grants from the Hewlett and Keck foundations in support of a project that investigated how technology can open up new avenues for understanding the architecture of the distant past. This culminated in his work with a team of students and faculty from the University of Melbourne in Australia on an interactive web-based undertaking entitled “Virtual Chartres Cathedral.”

In an effort to create a more inclusive curriculum, Stephen traveled to a number of medieval Jewish cultural sites in Spain, Germany, and France, where the past is being revived and reinvented in interesting and sometimes controversial ways. Out of this research he developed a course entitled “Jewish Imagery and Images of Jews.”

More recently Stephen refocused his work on interactions during the Middle Ages between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in the Mediterranean basin. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Australia National University in Canberra, investigating the roles that images play in shaping cultural identity, in a project entitled “Visualizing the Self and Others: Muslims, Jews, and Christians in Medieval Iberia.”

The academic pursuit he has enjoyed above all others is teaching and sharing his knowledge of art and architecture. He has served as a lecturer on numerous tours over the past twenty-seven years in the Mediterranean from Turkey to Spain, and in northern Europe from Scandinavia to Russia.

Rafael Chacón

Hipólito Rafael Chacón is Bruce and Suzanne Crocker Director of the Montana Museum of Art and Culture and Professor of Art History and Criticism at the University of Montana-Missoula where he lectures on a broad range of art historical subjects. He received his Ph.D. in art history with honors from the University of Chicago, having been awarded numerous research fellowships to study in Europe and the Mediterranean basin, including an award from the Spanish Ministry of Culture for his dissertation on Michelangelism in renaissance art. He has written on a range of topics related to renaissance and baroque art, both in Europe and in the Americas, most recently focusing on revival style architecture in the U.S. during the late 19th century. He has also been awarded the top national and international prizes for his research in the field of vexillology or flag studies. Rafael has been an expert for many Smithsonian Journeys programs in Cuba, Egypt, Europe, and Russia. He has twice walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route across France and Spain.

John Dobbins

John Dobbins, who holds a PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan is Professor Emeritus of Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Virginia, is a long-time Smithsonian Journeys speaker who enjoys interacting with travelers and sharing their adventures.  John is a field archaeologist who has excavated across the Mediterranean world and beyond: Spain, Greece, Syria, and three locations in Italy – Tuscany, Sicily, and Pompeii where he is director of the Pompeii Forum Project that is rewriting the history of the Pompeii Forum, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, UVA grants, private donors, and considerable (unfunded) professorial research and writing. 

John has been an active member of the Archaeological Institute of America, a professional archaeological organization that welcomes non-professionals as members, and that fosters 100 local “Societies” in the United States and Canada.  It conducts a lecture program that sends professional archaeologists as lecturers to all Societies, 2 or 3 per year.  At its Annual Meeting in 2023, the AIA recognized John’s contributions by awarding him the Joukowsky Distinguished Service Award.  He enjoyed every decade of supporting the mission of the AIA.

John may be a retired professor, but he is not a retired archaeologist or adventurer.

David Price Williams

David Price Williams has a degree in Ancient Near Eastern languages and Classical Greek and a doctorate in Near Eastern archaeology and has spent his working life as an East Mediterranean archaeologist. His first overseas field work was in 1969 as a surveyor at the classical site of Knidos in Turkey. He then worked for the Smithsonian Institution before directing his own field research in the same area through the 1970’s. David has designed and lectured on many cruises to Greece, Turkey and the Near East. He is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and an elected life member of the Society for Old Testament Studies.