Dr. Alison Rittershaus recently joined the Department of Anthropology as Lecturer and Curator of the Anthropology Collections. Rittershaus comes to Anthropology from the Johnson Museum of Art, where she worked as the Lynch Postdoctoral Associate in Curricular Engagement for two years. She earned a PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan in 2022, and her research interests include looking at relationships between humans and the environment (in the ancient past) and relationships between people, institutions, and things (in more recent history and the present).
Dr. Rittershaus has been overlapping work with Dr. Fred Gleach as he prepares to retire December 31, 2024. Together, Rittershaus and Gleach are packing up the Collections and moving it from McGraw Hall to Olin Library.
"I've been enjoying working with Dr. Gleach to get to know the collections this semester--learning about the complex history of teaching collections at Cornell, handling artifacts from across the globe as they are packed up, and broadening my knowledge of places, people, things, and their many meanings," Dr. Rittershaus said. "I look forward to working with faculty and students to increase the accessibility of the anthropology collections in their new home and build collaborative partnerships with the campus and broader communities."
Alison's interests span archaeology, art history, and museum studies–the material culture of the past and its reception over time. As a teacher, she has worked as a museum educator, a middle school history teacher, and a lab instructor on an archaeological site, as well as in traditional college classrooms. "I love opportunities to bring object-based forms of inquiry to a broad range of topics. As curator of the anthropology collections, I am interested in sharing the breadth of material culture across time and geography with students and providing opportunities for them to critically engage with institutional collecting practices in the past and present," Rittershaus said.
Alison's research on the area of the ancient Roman world has focused on relationships between humans and the natural world as expressed through art and architecture, especially where they are most visible at well-preserved sites surrounding the Bay of Naples in Italy. Since 2011, she has worked at the Gabii Project, an excavation and field school near Rome, as a member of the finds lab.
Rittershaus is a member of the advisory council of the Mediterranean Antiquities Provenance Research Alliance, a nonprofit organization geared towards equipping students with the skills and tools to conduct provenance research on the often poorly documented artifacts in university collections. She is interested in forged and fake antiquities, especially small, portable artifacts like ceramic Roman lamps, and what they reveal about the values of collectors who drive these markets.
