Dear All, 

I am delighted to share the news that Laure Marest will join the Harvard Art Museums as our new Damarete Associate Curator of Ancient Coins, effective September 18, 2023. 

Laure comes to us from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she is currently the Cornelius and Emily Vermeule Associate Curator of Greek and Roman Art. While at the MFA, she co-curated The Marlborough Gem (2023) and worked with colleagues to renovate and install five new permanent collection galleries featuring the art of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire, which opened in December 2021. She was the lead curator for the Gods and Goddesses Gallery, a major display of large-scale sculptures of ancient Greek and Roman deities—including the MFA’s monumental Juno—and more intimate objects used for religious rituals. She also is author of a forthcoming publication on the collection of ancient Greek and Roman engraved gems at the MFA.

Laure received her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds degrees from California State University, Northridge, and the Sorbonne, Paris. She has participated in excavations in Albania and Italy and was previously involved as a researcher and photographer for the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project and as a gem specialist and photographer for the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia. Her research interests include ancient Greek art, especially coins, engraved gems, and portraiture of the Hellenistic period, as well as the reception of antiquity in the 18th and 19th centuries. She has presented at numerous conferences throughout the United States and has published in the American Journal of Numismatics and contributed to Hellenistic Sealings & Archives: Proceedings of The Edfu Connection, an International Conference (2021) for the Studies in Classical Archaeology series, and to Proceedings of the XV International Numismatic Congress (2017).

We look forward to working with Laure as she rethinks the presentations of our coin collection and related objects and expands our efforts to connect visitors to the peoples and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.