Palmyra 1885: The Wolfe Expedition and the Photographs of John Henry Haynes

Benjamin Anderson is assistant professor of the History of Art at Cornell University. He studies the visual and material cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and adjacent landmasses, with a particular focus on late antique and Byzantine art and architecture. His first book, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (Yale University Press, 2017), is a finalist for the 2018 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award of the College Art Association. The second, The Tragic Image: Fate and Form from Byzantium to the Baroque, will address the "Oracles of Leo the Wise" and related oracular images. He publishes regularly on the history of archaeology and the urban history of Constantinople. Anderson was David E. Finley Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art (2009-12); and has received fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut). He currently serves on the Governing Board of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America; Robert Ousterhout (Ph.D. University of Illinois) has taught in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania since 2007. Previously he was Professor of Architectural History at the University of Illinois, where he taught for more than twenty years. A recognized specialist in Byzantine architecture, his research focuses on the documentation and interpretation of the vanishing architectural heritage of the eastern Mediterranean. His current fieldwork concentrates on Byzantine architecture, monumental art, and urbanism in Constantinople, Cappadocia, and Jerusalem. Since 2011 he has co-directed the “Cappadocia in Context” graduate seminar, a summer field school for Koç University.

• Introduction; The Photographer; The Wolfe Expedition; Palmyra and its Desert Queen; The Topography of Palmyra; Beasts, Men and Stones: Palmyra in Photography and Imagination; The Wolfe Expedition in Palmyra