Meet the Museum of Cycladic Art Summer 2026 Intern

For five weeks this past summer, I had the immense privilege of being one of the two American interns at the Museum of Cycladic Art (MCA) in the heart of Athens! The description of the internship on the CHS website was delightfully open-ended, so I did not go in with too much of a preconceived notion of what this internship would be like.

After getting the grand tour of the museum by the incomparable Assistant Curator of Antiquities Metaxia Routsi, I got to work reading through the catalog of the permanent collection, as well as supplemental scholarship, especially on the endlessly fascinating archaeological site on Keros and the (in)famous "Keros Hoard."

After a week of "locking in" and diligently studying the permanent collection catalog, I had the honor of giving the Harvard Summer School students a tour of the first floor of the museum, the floor containing the Cycladic collection.

After this, my fellow intern and I got to act as docents for the temporary exhibition, which featured authentic museum replicas of ten Paleolithic "Venus" figurines in one room and Jeff Koons' ten-foot-tall stainless steel contemporary Venus in the other. In the process, I got to learn a great deal both about figurine-making in Paleolithic Europe and about modern art.

One of the greatest perks of being an intern at a museum like the MCA was the view from behind the scenes, where I got to learn about both what makes museums run day to day in the short term and what makes them thrive in the long term.

In my first week, my fellow intern and I were tasked with conducting a literature review on recent scholarship on museum accessibility and making a museum accessibility proposal based on this review. Overall, this process expanded my personal conception of what it means for a space like a museum to be "accessible," not only with regard to wheelchair ramps and the like but also with regard to cognitive, emotional, and cultural accessibility.

In a similar vein, the museum tasked us with preparing a presentation on how to reach out to young adults of our age bracket as a museum. This gave my fellow intern and me the opportunity to advocate for the often forgotten type of young adult who is maybe not that interested in maximizing debauchery but instead genuinely interested in the arts and the humanities. In other words, we proposed that the museum not treat reaching out to young people like trying to trick a dog into taking a pill covered with cheese, where the pill of ancient art has to be covered with the cheese of corny TikTok videos and dance parties. Instead, we advocated for the substantial subset of young people who genuinely want to go to museums but do not want to be condescended to by older people.

In addition to these assigned projects, our internship supervisors allowed and encouraged us to have one medium-term independent project that pertained to our specific interests. Being a Classics concentrator on the "Languages and Literatures" track, I figured I had to do something about Greco-Roman literature and the Cyclades.

Although we do not have literature from the eras in which Cycladic art originates, the Cyclades pop up all over the place in ancient literature. I ended up writing an 18-page research paper on the literary treatment of the Cyclades (especially Delos) in Thucydides, a topic on which I intend to continue to do research after my internship.

I cannot emphasize enough how transcendentally amazing this experience was for me as an aspiring classicist and Hellenist! If you are reading this and are for some reason considering not applying to this marvelous program, I beg you to reconsider!