Rachel Patt

Biography

Rachel Catherine Patt is a historian of ancient Mediterranean and Late Antique art and visual culture. Her scholarship aims to reveal the real historiographic stakes of studying art history in today’s rapidly technologizing society by asserting that art, as a distinctly human endeavor, can illuminate how we understand ourselves and our world, concerns at the heart of humanistic inquiry. Patt’s first book project, Intimate Encounters: Memory, Pothos, and Portraiture in the Premodern Mediterranean, recasts Roman portraiture and the emergence of the Byzantine icon tradition by positioning pothos, the longing desire for an absent beloved, as a heuristic tool for illuminating those genres. While decentering the public, imperial, and sculpted portraits that have typically dominated the scholarly discourse on Roman portraiture, she explores how certain types of private, intimate images both instantiated and subverted the binaries that these labels imply. Ultimately, Intimate Encounters argues for more than just an alternative history of Roman portraiture and Byzantine icons: it offers a new history of the very idea of representation grounded in absence and desire.

Patt is presently developing a second book project provisionally titled Vanquished Nature: An Ecological Ethics of Roman Luxury that takes up a line of inquiry latent in her first monograph: the costs of Roman art on both the environment and its human makers. It considers material expressions of luxury not just as crafted commodities but as parts of ecosystems. Both book projects testify to Patt’s investment in exploring the manifold ways in which art shapes expressions of personhood while animating connections among individuals, communities, and places. Vanquished Nature reveals how the pursuit of visually-arresting luxuries shaped the identities of ancient Rome’s power brokers, tastemakers, and elites, a phenomenon that by no means disappeared with the end of the Roman Empire. In examining Roman luxury vis-à-vis ecological devastation and imperial exploitation, Patt asserts that crises of resource exhaustion and environmental destruction fundamentally relate to the way Western civilization structures identity formulation through displays of the rare, the exotic, and the precious.

Prior to her appointment at Notre Dame, Patt was a Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University. Her scholarship has also been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the International Catacomb Society, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition to her research activities, Patt holds a strong interest in the curation of ancient Mediterranean art and the ethics of collecting and displaying cultural property. She has contributed to curatorial projects, catalogues, and exhibitions at museums such as the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.