Charles J. Ro

Hello, I'm Charles.

I am a PhD candidate in the Program in Art and Archeology of the Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania. My dissertation explores the Roman conception of color reflected in polychromatic art and its materiality (in both archaeometric and art historical senses), especially pertaining to the political and ecological connotations of pigments drawn from across the Mediterranean. My previous work has included a project on material agency and intermediality in Augustan wall paintings and elegiac poems and the reception of the Homeric statue type after Late Antiquity. I have excavated in Pompeii, Italy with the Pompeian Residential Architecture: Environmental, Digital, Interdisciplinary Archive (PRAEDIA) Project and in Kalavasos-Maroni, Cyprus with the Kalavasos and Maroni Built Environments (KAMBE) Project.

My research has been supported by the Kolb Society.

Before coming to Penn, I received my B.A. in Classical Studies with honors from the University of Chicago in 2020.