Professor of Art History Thomas Noble Howe co-published a peer-reviewed online monograph with Prof. Joseph C. Williams (Univ. of Maryland), Adan Ramos (UMd), and Gabriel Maslen (UMd and Tecnico di Milano), “The Role of the Field Architect in the Digital Age: Integrating Human and Electronic Recording at the Villa Arianna in Roman Stabiae”, The Journal for Field Archaeology, Received 17 Apr 2023, Accepted 04 Sep 2023, Published online: 11 Oct 2023. Howe is the overall director of the project and began to develop the technique of using conventional digital survey commands in the then-nascent digital laser EMD (Electronic Measuring Distance) surveying instruments to develop an efficient means of using surveying line commands to create a precise 3D “line wire cage drawing” to guide the completion of on-site hand drawings. He was the chief field architect and associate director of the American Academy in Rome Palatine Excavation project (1988-1994) and has been the director general of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae project since 1998.

—October 2023

Two chapters published by Professor of Art and Architecture Thomas Noble Howe in Jan. 2020 for the 21st Edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture (see Jan. 2020, by Royal Institute of British Architects, Bloomsbury Press, Jan. 2020): “Hellenistic Architecture” (17,000 words) and “The Christian Roman Empire, A.D. 306-c. A.D. 500,” (11,000 words), pp. 284-331; 409-43 was awarded the prestigious Colvin Prize for 2020 by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. It was recently awarded the Special Prize in the 2023 Architectural Book of the Year Awards at the World Architecture Festival (WAF), which was open to all books published over the last three years. Bloomsbury tells us that the book’s online version is currently licensed by 253 institutions worldwide. Altogether, this amounts to an astonishingly high level of online readership for the new Banister Fletcher, which far surpasses the previous book-based editions. The 21st Edition seems easily to exceed the readership figures for any previous global architectural history survey. Altogether, this amounts to an astonishingly high level of online readership for the new Banister Fletcher, which far surpasses the book-based previous editions (for comparison’s sake, the print-only 20th Edition managed to sell 25,000 hard copies over the 25-year period following its 1996 publication).

—July 2023

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe was invited to attend the opening of a major new exhibition of Roman painting at the San Antonio Museum of Art, “Roman Landscapes: Visions of Nature and Myth from Rome and Pompeii,” on February 23. Howe was part of the technical advisory committee for the exhibit, and several frescoes from his archaeological site of the Roman villas of Stabiae were included in the exhibit. The exhibit will be open until May 21, 2023. Howe will be lecturing in San Antonio on recent discoveries from his site in April.

—February 2023

On February 8-10, Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe was invited to do a department review of an undergraduate interdisciplinary architecture major at Birmingham Southern College in Birmingham, AL, of a program introduced five years ago largely based on the Architecture Minor which Howe introduced at Southwestern in 1985.

—February 2023

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe recently reviewed two books for the American Journal of Archaeology: Oplontis: Villa A (“of Poppaea”) at Torre Annunziata, Italy, Volume 2: The Decorations: Painting, Stucco, Pavements, Sculpturesedited by John R. Clarke and Nayla K. Muntasser, and Archaeological Exploration of Sardis Report 7: The Temple of Artemis at Sardis by Fikret K. Yegül (review to be published in January 2023). The two books represent two radically different approaches to current high-quality archaeological publication. The first is completely digital and lavishly illustrated beyond the normal means of hard-copy publication, while the second is a very traditional hard copy with plates, also lavishly illustrated with line drawings by the author. Clarke and Howe currently lead the excavations of the two largest villas in the Bay of Naples (Stabiae and Oplontis), and Clarke and Muntasser have both lectured at Southwestern. Howe began his archaeological career in 1980 at Sardis and made a few short contributions that Yegül generously credits with having clarified the controversial issue of the chronology of the Artemis temple.

—August 2022

For the first time in three years, Professor of Art History Thomas Noble Howe conducted a field season at the ancient Roman villas of Stabiae. Small teams from the University of Maryland, the University of Akron, and Cornell University joined Howe and Southwestern student Oliver Johnson ’23 in digitally recording the architecture of one of the villas (Villa Airanna). Software engineer Sean Cahall began work with Howe and others to establish a GIS database, perhaps to be maintained by another university in a full field season next year. Howe is working on a major restructuring of the managing scientific committee involving some dozen European and American universities. 

—July 2022

Professor of Art History Thomas Noble Howe was recently invited by Academiato conduct a review of an article about St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv, Ukraine: An Appreciation by Myroslava Hartmond (Halushka).

 

Howe also was invited by the office of Rep. John Carter to be a judge for the Congressional Art Competition on April 27. The winning artwork will be displayed in the U.S. Capitol for one year.

—April 2022

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe was invited to be a reviewer for the Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford University Press) and to be a member of the advisory board of Architectural History, the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Architectural History has been published annually by Cambridge University Press since the journal’s founding in 1958.

—July 2021

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe and his collaborator Professor Ingrid Rowland (Notre Dame) have just published a monograph translation into Chinese of their Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture (originally published by Cambridge  University Press, 1999), 维特鲁维亚 波利奥, 关于建筑的十本书 (Beijing University Press; first edition, November 1, 2017/released 2021).

—June 2021

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe was one of the few authors to contribute two chapters—“Hellenistic” and “Christian Roman Empire”—to the book Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (21st edition, Bloomsbury, 2020), which has just been awarded the prestigious Colvin Prize for 2020 by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

—January 2021

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe contributed four drawings and a short chapter in the recently published book The Artemis Temple at Sardis, by Fikret Yegül (Harvard University Press, 2020). Yegül arrived independently at the same conclusion about the chronology proposed circa 1985 by Howe.

—January 2021

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe recently published two invitational drawings in the celebration of the Tribunal de Contas de Portugal (the Portuguese Court of Auditors) at the 630th anniversary of its first Regulations. The publication is titled “O Número:  A Emblemática Tapeçaria que Almada Negreiros Concebeu para o Tribunal de Contas” (“The Number: The Iconic Tapestry Designed by Almada Negreiros for the Tribunal de Contas”), published in Portuguese. The drawings are from Howe’s publication with Ingrid Rowland, Vitruvius: The Ten Books on Architecture (Cambridge University Press, 1999)—illustrations of the supposedly innate proportions of the Vitruvian “human.” The illustrations are a variation of the famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci but show the ideal human as half male, half female—the first ever revision of the famous image of Leonardo’s male figure, based on the actual meaning of the term humanus, which is not gender specific in Latin.  The illustrations also appeared in a Portuguese translation of Vitruvius.

—January 2020

Professor of Art History Thomas Noble Howe has just published two invitational book chapters, “Hellenistic Architecture” (17,000 words) and “The Christian Roman Empire, A.D. 306–c. A.D. 500” (11,000 words), in the 21st edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’sA History of Architecture (commissioned by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the University of London; published by, Bloomsbury Press,  pp. 284–331 and409–436). The Banister Fletcher is the oldest and arguably most prestigious repeatedly reedited history of architecture, first published in 1893. Howe has been invited to attend the presentation at the Royal Institute of British Architects and Bloomsbury Press in London on January 28. Both chapters are the only currently available one-volume histories of either period of architectural history.

—January 2020

Professor of Art History and Scientific Director of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae (RAS) Foundation Thomas Noble Howe gave a presentation to faculty and administrators at Lyon College, in Batesville, AR, titled “The Synchronous International Classroom: New Directions for Cost Control of Liberal Arts Study-Abroad Programs.” Howe is working with several U.S. small colleges and consortia to establish a U.S.-accredited two-semester study-abroad center at the Vesuvian Institute of the RAS Foundation.

—September 2019

This summer, Professor of Art History Thomas Noble Howe coordinated his 12th field season at the ancient Roman site of Stabiae near Pompeii, Italy, with teams from the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; the Technische Universität München (the Technical University of Munich, excavation and conservation); the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (LiDAR); and the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (conservation). Howe also worked with the Cornell University garden excavation at the House of Regina Carolina in Pompeii, establishing recording techniques that he developed in Rome and Stabiae using a single total station surveying instrument to record all find spots and to do a “wireframe” high-precision surveyed drawing of the architecture.

—August 2019

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe and Uri Dromi (director of the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Center in Jerusalem, former spokesman of the Rabin and Perez governments, and director of the Jerusalem Press Club) published the proceedings from an international conference they organized in Jerusalem in November 2008. The publication, The Roman Villa in the Mediterranean Basin (Cambridge Press, 2018) is being reviewed by Elaine Gazda (University of Michigan) in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians in September 2019 (vol. 78, no. 3, pp. 347–349). JSAH is the major international scholarly venue for architectural history, and the review characterizes Howe and Dromi’s volume as “monumental.” Howe contributed a lead chapter and invited the contributors.

—August 2019

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe published a review of the book Autour des Machines de Vitruv, l’Ingénierie Romaine: Textes, Archéologie. et Restitution, Actes du Colloque Organizé par ERLIS à Caen (3–4 Jin 2015; eds. Sophie Madelaine and Philippe Fleury, Presses Universitaries de Caen, 2017) for the April 2019 issue of The American Journal of Archaeology (vol. 123, no. 2).

—April 2019

Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History Thomas Noble Howe presented an invitational lecture titled “What Were the First Greek Architects: Designers, Engineers, or Polymaths?” at the conference “Firmitas/Aedificatio”: Die Materiellen, “Körperlichen” Grundlagen der (Gebauten) Architektur, 8. Architekturtheoretisches Kolloquium der Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin in Zusammenarbeit with Dr. Christiane Salge, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Einsiedeln, Switzerland, April 26, 2019. The presentation was in English, with discussion and questions in German, French, Italian, and English. The lecture expands on several recent responses to his dissertation (Harvard, 1985) to propose that monumental Greek architecture was created not by craftsmen from the nascent building professions but rather by polymath intellectuals.

—April 2019

Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History Thomas Noble Howe was invited to give a lecture on Feb. 15 at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Howe lectured on new interpretations of the recent excavations of the Roman villas of Stabiae near Pompeii. Howe is coordinator general of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation excavations. The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee will provide one of the field teams for this upcoming season.

—February 2019

Professor of Art and Art History and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation Thomas Nobel Howe has been invited to give a seminar lecture titled “Les Villas Panoramique de Stabies, Découvertes et Interpretations Récentes” in the seminar series “Décor et Architecture Antiques d’Orient et d’Occident” at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France, Nov. 29, 2018. The session synthesizes his interpretations of his recent and ongoing excavations at Stabiae with his forthcoming chapter on Hellenistic architecture for the 21st edition of SirBanister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture (Royal Institute of British Architects). The lecture will be in French.

—November 2018

Professor of Art and Art History, Chair of Art History, and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation Thomas Noble Howe recently published a book chapter titled “The Social Status of the Villas of Stabiae” in Roman Villas in the Mediterranean Basin: Late Republic to Late Antiquity (eds. G. Métraux and A. Marzano; Cambridge University Press, 2018; pp. 97–119). Howe and Uri Dromi, director general of the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Convention Center in Jerusalem and spokesman of the Rabin and Peres governments (1992–1996), were co-organizers. The publication and conference are the first comprehensive Mediterranean-wide study on the topic involving all national scholarly communities in the Mediterranean. The paper lays out the broad questions of the history of the Stabiae villas in order to guide the research questions at the time of the outset of excavation in 2007.

—October 2018

Professor of Art and Art History and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation in Italy Thomas Noble Howe gave an invitational plenary session keynote lecture, “The Development of Panoramic Sensibilities in Art, Literature, Architecture and Gardens in the Villas in the Bay of Naples in the Late Republic and Early Empire: the Perspective from Stabiae,” at the conference Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art (Актуальные проблемы теории и истории искусства), organized by the Lomonosov Moscow State University, Saint Petersburg State University, State Tretyakov Gallery, and State Hermitage Museum, at the Moscow State University, Moscow on Oct. 2, 2018. The lecture points out that a coincidence of innovations in developing a “panoramic” sensibility and cross-axial views uniting architecture to nature in Roman painting, architecture, landscape design, and poetry all occurred simultaneously between c. 30 B.C and A.D. 30 at the end of the Civil Wars and beginning of the Empire.

—October 2018

Professor of Art and Art History and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation Thomas Noble Howe just published an invitational lecture “Прогулка с властью: новый свет на контроль движения и просмотра в элитных римских вилл Стабии” (“Strolling with Power: New Light on Movement and Viewing in the Elite Villas of Stabiae”), originally delivered at the Gasparow Readings: Literature and Politics in Classical Antiquity conference, organized jointly by the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) and by the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), at the RSUH in Moscow, April 1922, 2017, in volume 3, issue 4 of Shagi/Steps(2018; pp. 234–250; in Russian). Howe has been working with a team from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, since 2010 at Stabiae. The article presents interpretations on how guests actually moved around the garden of the Villa Arianna, Stabiae, based on results of recent excavations and publications from 2007 to 2017.

—September 2018

Professor of Art and Art History and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation in Italy Thomas Howe just published an invitational lecture titled “A Most Fragile Art Object: Interpreting and Presenting the Strolling Garden of the Villa Arianna, Stabia,” which he gave at the 7th Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art (Актуальные проблемы теории и истории искусства) international research conference, organized by Saint Petersburg State University, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and the State Hermitage Museum, at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, October 11–15, 2016. The article appears on pages 691–700 of volume 8 of the conference proceedings.

—September 2018

Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History Thomas Noble Howe coordinated about fifty people from several teams on the site of the ancient Roman villas of Stabiae near Pompeii in June and July 2018. They included conservators and excavators from the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia, and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München; conservators from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts; architects from the University of Maryland and other schools (including four from Southwestern: Jake Stagner ’20, Haley Druart ’21, Kyle Leon ’20, and Abigail Jendrusch ’19); LiDAR from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; and coordination with a team of garden archaeologists from Cornell working in Pompeii. This was Howe’s tenth field season, and November will mark the twentieth year since the start of the project and Howe’s initiation of the Master Plan 2001. Howe is scientific director of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation.

—August 2018

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe has been invited to present a lecture titled “The Birth and Death of Modern Architecture in America, 1930–1970” in the conference After and Beyond the Crisis: The USA in the 1930s at the University of Perugia, Italy, on May 15, 2018. The conference is part of the lecture series “American Voices in Italy” sponsored by the American Embassy in Rome.

—May 2018

Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History Thomas Noble Howe just published a conference paper titled “Bold Imitator: Greek ‘Orders,’ the Autodidact Polymath Architect and the Apollonion of Syracuse” in “The Many Faces of Mimesis, Selected Essays from the 2017 Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Western Greece, Siracusa, Sicily, May, 2017,” eds. Heather Reid, Jeremy DeLong, (Parnassos Press, Sioux City, IA, 2018) 1-20. The paper was written from a keynote address he delivered at a conference in Siracusa, Sicily, in May 2017. The paper returns to Howe’s much-referenced dissertation “The Invention of the Doric Order” (Harvard, 1985) and exploits recent scholarship to strengthen his argument that the complex Doric order of architecture was (incredibly) created all at once in one project (the Apollonionthe Apollo Temple), and was nearly complete on its first appearance because it was an adaptive imitation of a type of Egyptian colonnade, by arguing that the first Greek architects were the same type of well-travelled polymaths and masters of rule-and-compass geometry as the first so-called Greek “physiological” philosophers (the ‘Milesians’). The first true ‘liberal arts’-trained (i.e. self-trained) professionals were therefore not philosophers, but architects, who were the first Greeks to write actual prose treatises. Then, as throughout history, what constituted an ‘architect’ was very fluid. The underlying theoretical basis of the paper is that adaptive inheritance is essential to successful innovation and that fluid borders between creative professions are too.

—May 2018

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe has been invited to speak to the University of Texas community and the public about his recent publication of the ten-year project to excavate, study, reconstruct and interpret the 108 m. long garden of the ancient Roman Villa Arianna at Stabiae near Pompeii. The lecture will take place Friday, April 20, at 4:00 p.m. in the Department of Classics on the University of Texas campus. The findings have been presented in the last two years at lectures in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Hong Kong, San Antonio, Seattle, the Pompeii area, Rome, and the Representations series on the SU campus, and other preliminary publications. Howe has been lead excavation director, editor and author.

—April 2018

Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History Thomas Noble Howe will lead the formal public presentation of the recent publication of the volume “Excavation and Study of the Garden of the Great Peristyle of the Villa Arianna at Stabiae, 2007-2012,” Quaderni di Studi Pompeiani, VII 1916 (1917) at the Centro di Studi Americani, Palazzo Mattei di Giove, Via Michelangelo Caetani 32, Roma, on March 12, 2018. The event is co-sponsored by the American Embassy in Rome, the American Academy in Rome and the Fondazione Restoring Ancient Stabiae, of which Howe is Scientific Director. The principal lecture, “Strolling with Power: Recent Discoveries at the Garden of the Villa Arianna, Stabiae,” to be given by Howe, will be either in English or Italian.

—March 2018

Professor of Art and Art History and Chair of Art History Thomas Noble Howein December published an article on the recently published Roman Garden at Stabiae in the journal of the national garden club of Italy, “Un giardino romano a pasesaggio (“A Roman Strolling Garden”) Garden Club, Organo uffficiale dell’ugai – Storia, Scienza, Arte e Mito delle piante e dei fiori, (47, novembre, 2017) 14-16.

—January 2018

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe gave lectures at the preliminary presentation of the publication of the excavation of the garden of the Great Peristyle of the Villa Arianna (‘Ariadne’) at Stabiae (Quaderni di Studi Pompeiani, VII) at the local Rotary of Castellammare di Stabia and the national convention of the Garden Club of Italy on Oct. 13–14. The lectures were in Italian.

—November 2017

Professor of Art and Art History and chair of Art History Thomas Noble Howe published Excavation and Study of the Garden of the Great Peristyle of the Villa Arianna, Stabiae, 2007-2010 (Quaderni  di Studi Pompeiani, VII, [Associazione Internazionale di Amici di Pompei/Editrice Longobardi, Castellammare di Pompei/Fondazione Restoring Ancient Stabiae, 2016 (2017)]. Howe is lead author/editor and excavation director of the project, 2007–13 and along with Kathryn Gleason (Cornell), Michele Palmer, and Ian Sutherland (Middlebury). The publication is supported by subventions from the von Bothmer Fund of the Archaeological Institute of America, Associazione Internationale Amici di Pompei, School of Architecture Preservation and Planning, University of Maryland, Joyce and Erik Young. The major significance of this excavation of this enormous excellently preserved garden (c. 108 x 35 m.) is that it is the first actual archaeological evidence of the existence of the type of garden seen in the famous garden fresco of the Villa of the empress Livia at Prima Porta, formerly thought to be a “fantasy” painting. Howe and Gleason have since developed and published further theses on how this discovery clarifies exactly how elite inhabitants and guests used this garden and ambient architecture to move through spaces and interact in an intensely political environment. At one point Howe lead field seasons of as many as 110 people from twelve institutions and seven countries.

—August 2017

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Noble Howe will deliver the opening plenary lecture: “Bold Imitator: The Arrival of the Greek Monumental ‘Orders,’ the Autodidact Polymath Architect and the Apollonion of Syracuse” at the conference Fonte Aretusa  Πηγὴ Ἀρέθουσα, Third Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Heritage of Western Greece, with special emphasis on: Μίμησις – Μimēsis: imitation, emulation, representation, reenactment, at the Sicily Center for International Education in Syracuse, Sicily, May 25–28, 2017. The invitation is the third in the last year which relates to recent interest in his dissertation “The Invention of the Doric Order” (Harvard 1985) on what is arguably the most controversial topic in architectural history, the creation of the Greek architectural “orders” (column types). The lecture proposes that the methodology which is generally used in architectural design classes, such as his own architecture studios, should be applied to questions of architectural history. Howe also will be chairing a session. The lecture will be in English, the chaired session in Italian. The lecture reprises a topic presented recently: that the profession of architect did not rise from the profession of builders.

—May 2017

Professor of Art and Art History, Chair of Art History, and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation Thomas Howe will give an invited lecture, “Strolling with Power: New Light on Movement and Viewing in the Elite Villas of Stabiae,” at the conference “Gasparow Readings: Literature and Politics in Classical Antiquity” on Apr. 21. The conference is jointly organized by Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH) and by Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA). It will be held at the RANEPA premises in the south-west of Moscow. Howe was invited to chair one of the sessions. The lecture will be in English with Russian translation.

—May 2017

Professor of Art and Art History, Chair of Art History, and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation Thomas Howe has just published an article “Stabiae: A Draught Sustainability Master Plan after the Model of Aerospace” in Atti dei Convegni, no. 306 (Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Roma, 2017) 205-222. This article was first presented in Italian at the conference XXXIII Giornata dell’Ambiente: Resilienza delle città d’arte ai terremoti/Enhancing the Resilience of Historic Sites to Earthquakes, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei Roma on November 3-4, 2015. The Lincei (“Lynxes”) is the oldest and possibly most prestigious scientific academy in Europe; Gallileo was a co-founder in 1602.

—February 2017

Professor of Art and Art History and Coordinator General of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation Thomas Howe has been invited to lecture on his recent work on the Roman Villas of Stabiae, Italy, at the École Française d’Athènes on Feb. 20. The lecture will summarize the fieldwork of thirty-five institutions from over a dozen countries since 2007. The work included major excavation, garden study, conservation and architectural recording. The lecture will be part of the Kyklos series of lectures sponsored in part by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für Klassische Archäologie - Winckelmann-Institut and Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Athens, Greece.

—February 2017

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe will give a lecture to the Georgetown Women’s Club on recent work on the Stabiae project of Roma Villas near Pompeii, Italy on Feb. 8 at the Georgetown Public Library.

—January 2017

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe gave an invited lecture “Further Thoughts on the Arrival of the Greek Monumental Orders and the Autodidact Polymath Architekton” at the conference Ex Ionia Scientia: ‘Knowledge’ in Archaic Greece at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens on Dec. 12, 2016. Howe was also invited to publish this lecture in The Acts of the Conference as well as contribute a book chapter on “How to Build the First Giant Ionic Temples.” Additionally, he was invited back to Athens to lecture at the German Archaeological Institute on Feb. 20, 2016. During his stay in Athens, Howe also visited the director of College Year in Athens with a view to developing collaboration in study abroad with the Vesuvian Institute of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation.

—January 2017

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe has been invited to present the lecture, “Further Thoughts on the Arrival of the Greek Monumental Orders and the Autodidact Polymath Architekton” at the conference Ex Ionia Scientia: ‘Knowledge’ in Archaic Greece at the National and Kapodistrian University in Athens, Greece from Dec. 11-14. The paper is a response to recent interest in his dissertation, The Invention of the Doric Order (Harvard, 1985).

—December 2016

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe lead a series of lecture presentations at the Vesuvian Institute in Castellammare di Stabia on the occasion of the visit of the Undersecretary of the Ministero dei Beni e le Attivita’ di Turismo (Cultural Ministry) of the Republic of Italy, Antimo Cesaro, on Oct. 28, 2016. The lectures summed up ten years of work by the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation on the site of the ancient Roman Villas of Stabiae in the fields of archaeology, education and cultural properties management. Howe is the scientific director and master planner for the site and the Foundation.  

—November 2016

Professor of Art and Art History Thomas Howe was invited to lead “La Villa di Arianna a Stabia: nuove conoscenze,” a session of lectures on recent work by members of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation, which he directs, at the site of Stabiae on Oct. 27, 2016. The session was part of the conference series Incontri con Archeologia (Encounters with Archaeology), at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, in collaboration with the Soprintendenza Pompei, University of Maryland, Cornell University, State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg) and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München

—November 2016

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe gave an invited lecture “A Most Fragile Art Object: Interpreting and Presenting the Strolling Garden of the Villa Arianna, Stabia” at the 7th international research conference “Actual Problems of Theory and History of Art” conference, Актуальные проблемы теории и истории искусства, at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia on Oct. 13, 2016. The conference is sponsored by Saint Petersburg State University, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and State Hermitage Museum.

—October 2016

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe, Professor of Classics Hal Haskell and Instructor of Environmental Studies Anwar Sounny-Slitine participated in a seminar/workshop on adapting GIS technology for teaching and research Aug. 8-9, 2016 at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. The workshop was funded by a joint grant from the Associated Colleges of the South.

—September 2016

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe has multiple works previously presented at conferences appearing in publication:

—September 2016

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe published an invitational book chapter titled “The Arrival of the Greek Monumental Orders and the Auto-didact Polymath Architect” in Festschrift for Manolis Korres, on the occasion of the retirement of the Parthenon Restoration architect.Howe also presented a peer-reviewed/invited paper titled “Strolling with Power: New Studies on Movement and Viewing from the Elite Roman Villas of Stabiae” at the conference, Fonte Aretusa: Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Southern Italy in Syracuse, Sicily, May 30-June 2, 2016. A version of the lecture was also presented at the Hong Kong Club in Hong Kong, China, on Sept. 3, 2016. This lecture will also be presented at the Art History Working Papers/“Representations” lecture at Southwestern on Sept. 21, 2016. Additionally, Howe conducted the tenth field season of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation on the site of the Roman villas of Stabiae in June and July of 2016. Southwestern students Chris Hernandez, Class of 2019, Sophia Anthony, Class of 2018, and Brenda Sanchez, Class of 2019, participated in the architectural field team with partial support from the Southwestern competitive faculty development fund.

—September 2016

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe presented a lecture titled “Strolling with Power: New Studies on Movement and Viewing from the Elite Roman Villas of Stabiae” at the Second Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Southern Italy with a special emphasis on “Politics and Performance in Western Greece.” The Symposium was held at the SCIE Center in the Palazzo Borgia in Siracusa, Sicily on Thursday, June 2, 2016. Howe is also the Scientific Director for Master Planning and Archaeology of the Stabiae Project.

—June 2016

Professor of Art History Thomas Howe spoke on Oct. 31 in St. Petersburg, Russia, on master planning a major archaeological park. He was a principal speaker at an international conference hosted by and at the Hermitage State Museums and the University of St. Petersburg. His talk is titled, “Actual Problems of Art History and Theory” and presented the approach which he developed in shaping and executing the Master Plan of the large Stabiae archaeological site near Pompeii, one of the largest planned archaeological projects of modern Europe. His presentation of this active project will be the principle topic of discussion at this conference on the theories of planning and presenting archaeological sites. 

—October 2014

On Oct. 23 and 24 Professor of Art History Thomas Howe gave lectures for the third consecutive year on the Archaeological Institute of America National Lecture Tour to the AIA Societies of Eugene and Portland Oregon. He will again be presenting the results of recent excavations and studies on his site of the large Roman villas of Stabiae near Pompeii. 

—October 2014

In May, Thomas Howe, professor of art history and coordinator general of the Restoring Ancient Stabiae Foundation in Italy, delivered a book-length manuscript of the publication of one of the most important ancient Roman gardens ever found - the Villa Arianna of Stabiae.

Howe assumed personal direction of the excavation from 2007 to 2010 and study afterward, and worked with more than a dozen authors and specialists to produce a model interdisciplinary study of the first garden to provide archaeological proof of the kind of “fictive thicket” garden, long known through the famous garden fresco of the Villa of the Empress Livia at Prima Porta outside Rome (pictured). The volume will be published as a monograph in the Quaderni of the Rivista di Studi Pompeiani, both in Italian and English. 

—October 2014

Thomas Howe, professor of art history, recently delivered the manuscript of an article he contributed to the “Festschrift” (honorary volume) to be delivered upon the retirement of the long-serving restoration architect of the Parthenon in Athens Greece, Monolis Korres, who retired in June 2016.

In the article, Howe makes the bold argument that the first real architects did not rise from the building professions, but were imposed on it from a class of men just like the first philosophers: self-taught “gentlemen” polymaths, who traveled to Egypt and were experienced in politics, war, applied geometry and work-crew management. This was the beginning of the first true “liberal arts” training (called “paideia”) for creative professionals. 

—October 2014

In the summer of 2014 Professor of Art History Thomas Howe, for the fourth year, lead a team of architecture students in developing a system of high-precision 3D recording of upstanding ancient architecture using reflectorless theodolite and CAD. The CAD processing was done by advanced students and alumni of the School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning of the University of Maryland; students from SU participated in 2012 and 2013 (Katy Nave ’15 and Chandler Johnson ’15). 

—October 2014