About the Tang Center

Nathan Arrington, chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology, is serving as interim director of the Tang Center during the 2024–25 academic year. He specializes in ancient Greek material culture, from the Early Archaic through the Late Roman periods, with particular interest in the intersections of the disciplines of art history, archaeology, and classics. His first monograph, Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens (Oxford University Press, 2015), examines how monuments, objects, and images, in their ritual and spatial contexts, changed the way that people viewed and remembered military casualties. His second book, Athens at the Margins: Pottery and People in the Early Mediterranean World (Princeton University Press, 2021), advocates for the geographic and social margins as catalysts of cultural change between the Aegean and the East in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE. He is currently working on a third monograph, on haptics, which offers an alternative to histories of Greek art constructed around visual illusion. Treating material characteristics, cultural contexts, and iconography across multiple media, the book examines how Greek art implicates the sense of touch, and it considers the ramifications for power, perception, and subjectivity. Arrington’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Gates Cambridge Trust, the Fulbright Foundation, Princeton’s Humanities Council, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.