Thinking about the Roman Empire with Jacqueline Giz

Hi everyone and welcome back to the Art-O-Log. Today I'm chatting with Jacqueline Giz, a PhD student at the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan. While her academic work explores the interaction between imagery and materiality in the art of the ancient Mediterranean world, she's also interested in considering how museums can make art and history accessible to diverse publics through intentional curation and outreach efforts. She's worked with the collections of the Princeton University Art Museum, the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan's Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. In addition to assisting with curatorial research and writing, jacqueline has completed projects to support digital and physical collection management and public outreach. She also served as a student educator at the Zimmerly Art Museum, welcoming public and university audiences to engage with art from antiquity to the present day. Jacqueline, welcome to the.

Art-O-Log. Hi, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Okay, to kick things off, I have to ask how often do you think about the Roman Empire? I think about the Roman Empire at least once a day, usually probably a dozen times a day, but because it's my job.

So how did you become interested in ancient Rome? I think there's really two parts to that question. There's the part where I became interested as a small child and then in a more academic sense. I grew up in a household where my mother was an art teacher and my father was a Roman history guy, not in a professional, academic way, but just as a hobby. So I grew up in a household where there were books about the Roman Empire and we watched lots of history channel documentaries. So when I finally got to college and I was trying to find my way around, figure out what kind of courses I wanted to take and what research I could do, I got into kind of like the afterlife of the Roman Empire and how it was used and considered in the early modern world, and then from there, just was so interested in the ancient objects themselves, which is why I started working on Roman art. Can you tell me about your research, of course. So I am currently a first-year PhD student, which means my research it's in a very formative phase, so I don't have any super specific kind of theme or a dissertation project yet, but very broadly, I'm interested in looking at how, in our history of Roman art, there are hierarchies of what we consider to be maybe you could say fine art versus objects, versus archaeological objects per se, and I'm interested in seeing how we can look at these less studied objects and use them to, first of all, maybe reevaluate our understandings of more mainstream objects as well as look into kind of the more mundane, boring parts of life for a normal person in their own world.

What made you decide to pursue a PhD? Okay, so that's an interesting question, because the story there really starts with me being very adamant that I was going to be a lawyer. So growing up I was told you would be a great lawyer. You love to argue, you can make good points, you're very talkative. This is clearly the perfect job for you. So I go into undergrad convinced that is what I must do with my life. Nobody told me that I had to. I chose that life for myself, and so I started taking kind of these law theory classes. I very vividly remember a course called Advanced Theory in the Law no 2, where we talked about Supreme Court and I was like something's not right here. This is not what I'm doing for the rest of my life.

At the same time as I was taking that class, I was taking some of my first upper level art history courses, which I was taking quote for fun. But those were the classes where I really found myself engaged in the material and thinking very critically about what I was looking at. I loved going to those classes. It just made me so happy and energetic. So I realized there was maybe something personally that I was really drawn towards in art history.

And then as to why I chose a PhD instead of a more terminal degree, I'm really interested in teaching both in an academic setting and towards a public audience, and I think I realized that because I was a student educator at my university museum, both in an academic setting and for the public audience. And I think I realized that because I was a student educator at my university museum. So I had the opportunity to work with audiences from kindergarten classes to senior center groups and bring them through the museum and engaging them with objects, art from anywhere, from like modern American art to Soviet nonconformist art to unsurprisingly ancient Mediterranean art. Doing that made me realize how much I like teaching and communicating these things with the world, and in order to do that, in most settings, you need a PhD. So it was a practical decision as well as a passion driven. A decision driven by passion, you could say why did you pick the University of Michigan for your PhD?

So when you're looking at PhD programs, there's so many things on the table, whether it's the location of the school, because you're going to live there, especially in the humanities program, for the next five to 10 years. There's your academic advisor or your kind of advisor who's going to direct the course of your academic career at such a foundational phase. There's the resources that an institution provides, whether it's just literally your funding package that you're going to live off of or it's the academic professional resources. And for me, michigan really exceeded in all of these categories. And there are other things you're considering, obviously, but when I was looking at the options that I had, I thought that Michigan provided the best matches for my own goals, which still are unclear.

I'm not sure if I want to go into a curatorial role or an academic teaching position yet, but the school kind of has different resources available for me to practice and train, should I choose either. And we also have a really awesome archaeological museum which is something that, especially in the States, most universities don't have. It's called the Kelsey Museum Huge collection of Roman art and artifacts, which I think was really exciting for me because that kind of opened the door to do curatorial work and object-based research, which are two things I'm very interested in, and funding. We have a really great funding package here, which are two things I'm very interested in, and funding. We have a really great funding package here which includes summer funding and research money and conferences. So it was both a practical decision as far as my lifestyle as well as something that was really based on academically, how this school could provide for my development over time.

Has there been anything that surprised you while you've been researching throughout your academic career so far?

Yes, actually, and it's not necessarily about the research itself but about the people doing research. And this is probably going to sound a little silly, but I think it's really easy to assume that everybody doing research and everybody who reads your research as an academic is somebody who is super knowledgeable, super aware and has very strong opinions about what you're doing. But I realized that's not the case. I think this is part of an imposter syndrome issue, but it's also just maybe a comment on being confident in the academic space. If you're here, if you're in a graduate program, in a PhD program, you're here for a reason and you're so capable of doing that work.

I think it was surprising to me to realize that other people saw me and considered me, not even having known me or known my work, to be somebody who is very capable and very smart, which I was not expecting. I walk into every room at the beginning of the semester like I'm just a first year, I don't know what I'm doing, I shouldn't be speaking and I shouldn't be giving my opinions. I very quickly realized that everybody in the room, whether it was my professors, my peers, saw me as a colleague and equal, to say more so than a new student who doesn't have anything to contribute, and that was really powerful. And I'm not sure if that's an institutional issue. I'm sure it varies in different places and spaces, but so far here in my experience that's been something that surprised me. What's your?

thought process been like for future plans when you finish your PhD. So I will say I am a very long ways away from finishing said PhD. Anywhere from another four to six years could be on the table, depending on what kind of research I need to do with my dissertation. But I think right now that process looks a lot like being very graceful with myself and giving myself kind of space and opportunity to figure out what I want to do, because I know for me a lot of what's going through my head at the moment is just trying to think about what I will enjoy the most, but also being very realistic that the job market isn't fantastic, and I think at the moment I'm leaning very strongly towards preparing for both, so that when I am on the job market I can apply to either position and kind of go where the wind takes me, because the teaching work and the curatorial work respectively that I've done so far I really enjoyed every minute of it. I'm sure, as everybody knows, there are low moments, but overall both of my experiences, or my experiences in both sides, have been so enriching and joyful that I could see myself doing either. At the moment, my thought process is very much very open to whatever comes my way, in that I'm trying to find opportunities, whether it's coursework, internships, research etc. That prepare me to do either. Did you have a sort of light bulb moment that made you transition your master's thesis into your current research? I don't know how much my master's research is going to be relevant in whatever my kind of big foundational project is, but what I think to me makes my master's thesis so impactful? Maybe not the argument and the objects itself that will carry on but more like the methodologies that I use to approach them.

So my master's thesis focused on a group of about 100 early imperial gems from Pompeii, and these objects are really more or less likely belong to not super rich Romans people with the resources to afford semi-precious gems, but not something that was executed by a court master. And they were pretty small, about the size of your thumbnail. And what I did was take a look at these gems, which are usually not studied by art historians, because what's on them is just one image of a god, and there's no context, there's no setting, no background, there's no narrative to it. It's just a gem with a little tiny image of a god that usually looks. If it was on paper you would assume that a kindergartner drew it, but it's incised into a precious stone, which was really hard to do in the first place. And what I did in my thesis was I tried to take these stones and put them into the kind of context of their lived experience.

So what would it have meant for a Roman person to wear these gems and wear these objects? Considering things like what else they saw in the city of Pompeii, what holidays they celebrated, what did their backyard look like? Sounds like a really random question, but there's a whole chapter on it and I think for me that project was really impactful because when we see art today, we usually see it in museums, right, and when you see one of these super tiny gems in a museum, it's first of all behind glass, so you don't get to experience the reflective quality of the gemstone for yourself If you were wearing a gem. Anybody who wears jewelry can probably attest to the fact that when you accidentally put your hand in the light, all of a sudden you're attacked by a flash. I want something reflective like that, but when these objects are in museums and detached from their lived context, we're completely missing all of that information. Museums and detached from their lived context. We're completely missing all of that information. Museums cleanse these objects from that really rich and really interesting experience and I think for me, that's what my research really looks to do is try and maybe fill in those gaps a little bit, and not only fill in the gaps for an academic setting, but think about how we can make that information accessible and obvious for normal people who want to think about how we can make that information accessible and obvious for normal people who want to learn about it. What do you think the role of the museum is in today's age? Okay, that's a really loaded question. So I think there's.

When I go to museums, I think a lot about why I'm there. For me, as kind of somebody who is an academic, I go to museums, sometimes for research, sometimes I go to museums to educate other people, whether it's formerly in my former role as a student educator, or I took my friends to the museum a few weeks ago and I was answering their miscellaneous questions and look at things. Going to the museum is also an opportunity for me to learn and, with that being said, there is no, in my opinion, monolithic role of a museum, but I guess there is a monolithic role which is to be a space where people can have different experiences and think about visual material culture in different ways, whether it's for fun, which is so valid. If you go to a museum and don't have any kind of academic interest in what you're looking at, I think that's also and should be welcomed in more context than it already is. However, it is also a place where you can go and get a much more I guess you could say academic or historic perspective of the world, and when you go to a museum, if you pay attention, you can really see what that museum is trying to get its visitors to engage, whether it's through the type of labels they provide, the density of historic background information, the order in which they display galleries and their curatorial style. So museums are very aware of the fact that they have this kind of multiplicity of potentialities, but as experiencers as be as visitors, you have the opportunity to maybe sidestep the museum's wishes and to create your own experience, which I think is really special. I think that's a perspective into how I think museums should be functioning in our world, especially where everything around us has become so visual.

It's hard to escape the amount of visual culture and visual media that we're exposed to nowadays. Museums provide a really good opportunity to learn how to look and to learn how to think critically about these things. I'm in a context where looking is the focus right. In our daily lives we're so used to the amount of imagery we see. Like when we're walking to work or you open your phone, it's so normalized that you're not thinking very critically about what you're doing. But when you're in the museum the act of looking is put on a pedestal in a way where you're hyper aware that you're doing it because that's what you're quote supposed to be doing.

Can you tell me a bit more about some curatorial projects that you've done? Yeah, that's a really great question. So I guess I have a curatorial experience maybe in two different kind of spaces, where I did a virtual show of archaeological photographs that kind of spanned the Roman world that were all centering around the theme of entertainment, and then I was also a curatorial intern at the Princeton University Art Museum where I was doing a mix of work, including object-based correcting, database records, writing labels. I've been doing research on these objects, thinking about how we can contextualize them for a public community. I'll talk a little bit more about my Protestant experience since I was working directly with these specific objects.

But I think the main difference when we're thinking about contemporary art and these kind of near archaeological objects might just be the context in which they come from right. Contemporary art it's so grounded in our current moment. It's responding and reflecting to themes that are maybe not universally experienced but can be talked about in a context of lived experience that most people listening in the audience have endured or have seen, whereas these archaeological objects are coming from lived experiences and kind of spaces that are not only geographically distinct for audiences in the States but also chronologically distinct from everyone everywhere. So a lot of the times we see these archaeological objects and we have no idea what we're looking at because they're not necessarily equivalent to things that we see every day, and sometimes they are, which could be cool. But in the museum context, I think part of the role of a curator is maybe to point out some of these differences and to show how these things have changed over time.

On the research end of that, a lot of the times when I was writing my labels I remember I had such a hard time trying to explain in case anybody doesn't know.

When you're writing curatorial labels, you're typically given a super short word count where you have to fit so so much information into so little space, which is, I think, the challenge is only exacerbated when you have to add all this kind of really important historic context. So when you're doing this research and you're writing these labels, there's this challenge to fit as much information about the context of the object itself and then the way the object was used, and then also questions like provenance and collections like where did it come from? Why is this object that should, in theory, be underground somewhere in Italy, behind this piece of glass in a museum in the middle of New Jersey? Luckily, I wasn't really dealing with provenance, because I was working with archaeological collections for which the provenance is very much dug up by the university in this excavation in this year from this specific place. So that kind of allowed me to align to that issue. But still, it's a lot to think about historical context and stuff like that within a label.

I'm thinking to something that you said earlier about how, when the objects that you were studying in your master's thesis were behind glass, and how we miss so much of the very physical or material context of these pieces?

How do you best show people how these things were experienced when they're kept behind glass? How do we get that context of the ancient world?

when they're so removed from their original context. How do we foster an experience?

that basically gives you the best understanding of the object. So I think that question is super central to the work of a lot of curators in contemporary museum settings and the answer to how that's done it really varies across institutions. Some institutions prefer the very old-fashioned way it's in the label. If you don't read the label you don't get the context, which I personally think is a very outdated way to do museums. But I'm thinking right now of the Detroit Institute of Art, which is a museum I now get to visit very often.

They have this really great kind of visual in their ancient art section where they have a bunch of different forms of Greek pottery which were used at the symposium, and in this visual it's this kind of recording of these silhouette figures using the different types of vases in different ways.

So you see how Ornokoi was used to pour and how the Kylix was used to sit with two hands and it gives viewers in the museum this really powerful kind of oh, if I were to use that object, I would have held it like this.

I would have grabbed each of the handles with my hands, like lifted it up to my face, which I mean, given the shape of that vessel, that probably was obvious, but there are other examples where, when you're walking, it happened and you're seeing these kind of very anonymous silhouette figures mysteriously use these objects.

It almost allows you to envision yourself in their role. So, in cases where the vessel might not be as like immediately clear how it would have been used, you can still figure that out. And then you can walk up to the case and be like oh, this is the one that we saw being used as a plate and this was the one that was used as a cup. And these types of visuals are so powerful because, like I said, they allow you to take your own lived, embodied experiences of taking a sip from your hydro flask or like picking up your dinner plate and putting it in the sink and connecting it to these experiences that ancient people would have had so long ago with these vessels that are now behind glass, literally glued to these stands and don't get to move.

Yeah, I think that brings me to a really interesting question about what makes the ancient world and I specifically, ancient rome relevant today.

And there's so many different parts to this question where you can get into kind of the politics of it, how a lot of modern empires, modern republic which, speaking of Roman culture as a monolith, is a very, I think, tricky thing to do, because, as much as we like to think of the Roman Empire as a singular entity, it's really not.

It was absolutely broad in geographic scope, encompassed so many different other cultures, and within these cultures there are variations in literally every aspect of their life, some things obviously determined by the different climates that they lived in and the different before the Romans conquered.

Who was ruling them and all that's another issue. So much of it has become this kind of cultural mythos in our modern world, where we have these preconceptions about the Roman Empire, what it was, what it did, what the people did, that we think about all the time. Clearly based on that meme, some people literally think about the Roman Empire all the time, which I found very surprising I'm not going to lie version of Rome that exists in our modern cultural consciousness. I think it's really important for us to maybe problematize that and think about how do we use this kind of historic myth that we've created to justify issues, behaviors, both at kind of these individual levels, more macro, like political levels, and by revisiting what the Roman Empire really was and what the people were doing and how they lived their lives, we have the opportunity to maybe do some introspective reflection about what we allow and what we do in our current world.

Yeah, and I think this idea of cultural mythology is so interesting, because when we have mythology or when we have stories passed down so many misconceptions occur right From the passing down of oral stories. We lose so much. What are some misconceptions that people have about?

ancient Rome that still exist today in our culture. I think, something that I like to think about a lot. It's maybe not necessarily a misconception, but it's more something, an assumption that we have when we think about Rome, we think about the Roman Empire. We immediately think about Roman emperors, the very rich men who wore togas and made decisions, and we, I think, have a tendency to overlook the fact that there were very normal people living in the Roman world, people of diverse kind of socioeconomic classes, of diverse ethnic backgrounds, and in that way, the Roman Empire is maybe a mirror of our world today, in which all these people coexisted and lived together.

Because, again, to bring up the meme, how many times do you think about the roman empire? It was a very, it was in a militaristic context, right, and it was all of these stereotypically men saying, yeah, I think about the roman empire and its military. That was on a daily basis. Sure, the military made up a huge part of the Roman Empire. I do not deny that. I'm not saying that's not true. However, the Roman Empire was also everyday people, people who sold fruit and people who earned their living like sailing across the sea and people who wore their rings with their gods every day and kind of passed down those rings to their children. And there's so much more what I find to be very interesting, very personal information that we can glean from the material and visual evidence that we don't really think about when we think about the Roman Empire, unless you're me and that's what you do for a living yeah, absolutely.

And that leads me into my next question. When we think about Rome, we think about the Colosseum, we think about gladiators, and these stories are so enduring in our cultural context to the point that a second gladiator has been made.

So, as a researcher of antiquity, what do you think?

of a the movie, if you've seen it but about why we're still so drawn to the cultural mythology and these cultural stories that are not entirely based in untruths but have an ahistorical lean to these stories.

Why do you think they're still so enduring? So to start off about my opinions on the movie, so if you're asking Jackie the normal person, I had a great time watching it. I went to go watch it with my dad in the movie theater Lots of fun. I found the shark in the water when they flooded the Coliseum to be the CGI shark Very entertaining. Was it the best movie? No, but it was fun to watch.

However, the historian of visual and material culture in me has some more specific qualms with the movie, and it's these ahistorical films. I really like that use of the way you describe the films. They're a double-edged sword in a way, because what they're doing in one way they're generating interest for a new generation. The same way that I was accidentally forced to watch history channel documentaries and all of these different things. Growing up is how I became so interested in this, and I think these movies are one way of doing that, and they really draw in even older audiences, older and younger audiences, into the world of Rome and what was happening there, and these oftentimes seem to be the same people who grow up in their life. Maybe I want to think a little bit more about the Roman Empire, before you know it, are studying gospel, art, history, but at the same time as they're generating interest, they're also perpetuating some of these more mythological understandings. So just to give a few examples, this first one it's, I guess, perhaps a benign misconception in a way, but, like I said, there's that scene where they flood the Colosseum. Very cool, and they did. Indeed, the Colosseum was able to be flooded for about, I believe, the first one to two years after the Flavians constructed it, so they were able to stage naval battles in there during the Flavian dynasty. However, the Flavians also built in this kind of series of underground rooms where they would keep animals and the gladiators before they went on stage, and these rooms were covered by a floor. And once they constructed this space called the Hypodium, you could no longer flood the Colosseum because there were things there where the water was supposed to go. So the flooding of the Colosseum was a very short-lived phenomenon.

The movie then shows happening under the severn dynasty, which was a century and a half, two centuries later. So there's these interesting kind of anachronisms in the film which I find really interesting. And, like I said, at the end of the day, are these anachronisms in a very fictional film doing any harm? No, but there's something fun to point out. However, I think there are maybe some more problematic things going on with the anachronisms of the film. Namely, something that jumped out to me immediately was the kind of casting behind the Severan dynasty.

The Severan dynasty, septimus Severus was a Roman emperor who came from Africa. However, in the movie he's not. He's dead, I believe, by the time the movie starts. But his two sons, gaeta and Caracalla, are these two? They're twins, they're very pale redhead twins and in reality these two emperors, first of all, were not twins and, second of all, did not look like them. So there's issues with also casting and thinking about how are we representing the Roman Empire and the people who lived in it? And, like I mentioned before, it was, despite maybe some of the assumptions and the things we, a lot of people, think about today.

The Roman Empire was socially, culturally, ethnically diverse.

I don't know if the movie really gets to that as much as it could have, and I'm also somebody to always point out, like the lack of color in the statues. If I remember correctly, when you see the Coliseum, the gladiator 2, for the first time, there are all these like white statues in the arches of the Coliseum, but in reality those probably painted again. Maybe that's a smaller, more benign detail, but it gets me every time. And then you also asked about why we're so interested in this mythos, right, and I just think it's because, first of all, the kind of like the main character is like this morally awesome savior right, I'm thinking about what kind of the perfect man is in the Roman world as this maybe emblematic masculine figure for the modern world. So there's definitely this gendered social aspect to it, I think. But also it's just a good story, right. It's something that you go in there to watch and entertains you, even with its bad CGI and historical anachronisms, and helps reinforce these ideas in an entertaining way. So it's this, I think, self-reinforcing cycle.

Yeah, to think about the first Gladiator movie. I think the most famous quote is are you not entertained? And I think that is the basis of these films they are to entertain. They're not necessarily didactic or meant to be representations of what it was, but I think we're so drawn to Rome because we feel like we can pull parallels to our modern world. So, even if it seems totally distinct from the way that we live our lives today, there's still this idea that we're still somehow connected to the history of humanity. What advice would you have to someone wanting to go into research?

Okay, good question. I feel like I would definitely have a lot to say, but it really depends what stage in the journey you're in. If you're still thinking about whether or not you want to do a PhD, I think the first thing you need to do is have a serious conversation with yourself to assess and reflect on what you want and whether or not you're willing to accept giving up X amount of years between five to 10 of your life to be a student again or to continue being a student, because it is definitely a sacrifice. Right. Most of the time, you end up somewhere where you might be far away from your family and your loved ones, and it's fun in a way, but it's also something you need to think of in a more serious way.

But if you're already in graduate school, your master's applying to your PhD programs, and you've already decided that you're going to get your PhD, I think something that I would say, even though it's something I still struggle with. I'm definitely not I've not overcome imposter syndrome, but I do think everybody needs to know that it's a very normal thing that everybody feels you are not incapable. You are so beyond capable and you deserve to be wherever you are. And don't forget that, because I think it's really easy to get lost, right? You're doing so many readings and writing so many papers and reflections and listening to so many brilliant people speak all the time that it's easy to forget that you're just as brilliant as they are, and that's very cheesy, but I think something everybody should keep in mind.

Yeah that's great advice, Jackie. Thank you so much and thank you for being on the Art-O-Log today.

It's been wonderful to chat with you. Yeah, thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun.