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, Sculptures, edited 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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).