The American Academy in Rome is pleased to announce that Dr. Margaret L. Laird, an independent scholar whose research focuses on Roman art and archaeology of the imperial period and a 2000 Rome Prize Fellow, has been appointed to a three-year term as editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Published since 1915, the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome is an annual volume, which publishes articles on topics related to the areas supported by the Rome Prize Fellowships: the history, literature, and material culture in ancient studies, medieval studies, Renaissance and early modern studies, and modern Italian studies.
Peg Laird brings extensive experience to her new role as editor of the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. She is the author of Civic Monuments and the Augustales in Roman Italy (2015) and of articles and essays that examine ancient drawings, commemorative monuments, and architecture and urbanism to understand how “ordinary Romans” deployed images and texts to create identity in their towns. She published her first journal article in volume 45 of the Memoirs in 2001. Peg is coeditor of Walls and Memory: The Abbey of S. Sebastiano at Alatri (Lazio), from Late Roman Monastery to Renaissance Villa and Beyond (2005), a project she began while she was a fellow at AAR. She has served as coeditor of the journal Delaware History and is currently a member of its advisory board.
Peg held the Frank E. and Jacquelin G. Brown/Samuel H. Kress Foundation/Helen M. Woodruff-AIA Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in Classical Studies and Archaeology at AAR from 1998 to 2000. Her research also has been supported by a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Getty Foundation and by grants from the Kress Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Delmas Foundation, and the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
Peg received her BA in classics from Georgetown University in 1990. She earned her MA in 1994 and PhD in 2002 in classical archaeology from the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Program in the Ancient World at Princeton University. She is an alumna of the Summer Program in Italian Archaeology at the American Academy in Rome and of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
After teaching in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago and for the Princeton Writing Program at Princeton University, Peg joined the faculty of the Department of Art History at the University of Washington, where she was associate professor of Roman art and archaeology. While at the University of Washington, Peg served as a curatorial advisor of the Seattle Art Museum and as guest curator for the exhibition Roman Art from the Louvre. Since 2014, she has taught classics and archaeology classes as an adjunct associate professor for the Ancient Greek and Roman Studies Program in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Delaware.