About
Christopher Ratté is a Classical archaeologist, specializing in the archaeology of western Turkey. He was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote a PhD dissertation on Lydian architecture. He taught at Florida State, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty of the University of Michigan in 2006. He is currently Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Departments of Classical Studies and the History of Art. He served as Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology from 2009-2013, and as Director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology from 2013-2017. In 2019-20, was a Whitehead Distinguished Scholar at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (the picture on the right was taken on Skolio Peak on Mount Olympus in June 2020). He will begin a new term as IPCAA director in Fall 2020.
Ratté is author, coauthor, or editor of five books and more than 40 articles and excavation reports on the archaeology of western Turkey. His research focuses on the role played by the built environment, from individual monuments to regional settlement patterns, in the articulation of social and cultural identity, especially in regions on the peripheries of the Greek and Roman worlds. He participated in the excavations at Sardis from 1980 to 1992 and at Aphrodisias from 1993 to 2005. His most recent major publication is the final report (coedited with Peter De Staebler) on an archaeological survey of the region around Aphrodisias, which he directed from 2005 to 2009. From 2009 to 2012, he also directed an archaeological survey of the region around Vani in western Colchis (Republic of Georgia). Together with Felipe Rojas (Brown University) and Angela Commito (Union College), he is now (since 2014) directing a new field project at Notion on the Aegean coast of Turkey. This project received an NEH Collaborative Research Grant in 2018 (for the years 2019-21).
At Michigan, Ratté teaches courses in Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture, the archaeology western Turkey and the Black Sea region, and ancient Greek. He curated an exhibition, “Rock, Paper Memory: Wendy Artin’s watercolor paintings of Greek and Roman sculptures,” at the Kelsey Museum in the summer and fall of 2015. In the Fall of 2018, he was lead curator (together with Lisa Nevett, Nicola Terrenato, and Kathy Velkov) of another exhibition at the Kelsey, entitled "Urban Biographies, Ancient and Modern," which compared the ancient cities of Notion, Olynthos, and Gabii with contemporary Detroit.
Field(s) of Study
- Classical Archaeology
- Greek and Roman art
- Archaeology of Asia Minor
