About
Allison Grenda is a PhD candidate studying Late Antique and Byzantine architecture, urbanism, and material culture. Her research centers on urban crisis and its aftermaths, the formation and display of civic identity, and the archaeology of memory. She is also interested in the reception of Byzantine monuments in modern city-making.
In 2020, Allison earned a Master's degree in Art History from UC Davis, where her thesis reconstructed the urban layout of Athens in the 7th century C.E. Prior to this, she graduated with her Bachelor's degree summa cum laude from UCLA. Her undergraduate honors thesis on the Byzantine resettlement of the Athenian Agora was awarded the UCLA Undergraduate Research Scholars Award and published in Aleph, UCLA's undergraduate journal for the humanities and social sciences.
Allison has worked as a research assistant at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and as an intern at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Fowler Museum at UCLA. She has undertaken archaeological fieldwork in Italy and California, as well as legacy data research at the Agora in Athens, Greece. Prior to coming to Michigan, Allison served as Lecturer of Roman Art and Architecture at UC Davis. In 2022, her essay "A Byzantine Gnadenstuhl: The Reception of a Western Iconography in Rural Venetian Crete" won First Prize in the International Center of Medieval Art Graduate Student Essay Award.
