Georgios Koukovasilis

Research topic during fellowship: Honoring the Best: Emotions, Statues, and the Language of Epigraphy in the Imperial Greek City

Georgios Koukovasilis is a classical archaeologist specializing in Greek culture under the Roman Empire. His research interests include, but are not limited to, Hellenistic and Roman-period sculpture, epigraphy, and ancient elite studies. Georgios completed his MPhil in Classics at Cambridge (2018), following a Bachelor's in Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2017). In his Cambridge doctoral thesis, awarded in 2022, he focused on portraiture from Greece as a means of examining local elite politics in the Roman imperial period. He has presented papers at international conferences and workshops. As a Harvard CHS Fellow, Georgios will investigate the close relationship between honorific portrait statues and their inscribed bases. This will be achieved by re-examining the nuanced ways in which claims of public honorific language were substantiated and transmitted by means of portraiture from the Graeco-Roman East.