Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2006
Carol
Lawton, professor of art history and the Ottilia Buerger Professor of
Classical Studies, has been named one of 187 national recipients of the prestigious
Guggenheim
Fellowship for 2006.
For the past ten years, she has studied the Greek and Roman votive reliefs
of lesser-known gods and heroes unearthed in excavations of the Agora, the
civic, commercial, and religious center of ancient Athens, and now she will
be able to devote a year of undivided attention to that research and to completing
her book, Popular Greek Religion and the Votive Reliefs from the Athenian Agora.
Since beginning her research, Lawton has studied more than 400 marble reliefs
that have been discovered among the excavations of the Agora. Her research
focuses on understanding the function and role of sculptural art in ancient
Athens.
“These reliefs are dedications created by individuals in request of,
or in thanks for, help from deities and heroes,” says the art historian,
who spends most of her summers in Greece working on the project. “Of
interest primarily for what they tell us about Athenian popular religion, they
were dedicated
not so much to the more familiar Olympian deities, such as Athena and Apollo,
but rather to gods and heroes who were more immediately important and accessible
to the people. They tend to honor healing and fertility gods or the heroes
and gods who were thought to ensure prosperity.”
Lawton joined the Lawrence art department in 1980 and serves as curator of
Lawrence’s Ottilia Buerger Collection of
Ancient and Byzantine Coins. She has previously received research fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the J. Paul Getty Trust and is the author of Attic
Document Reliefs of the Classical and Hellenistic Periods (Oxford University Press,
1995) and Marbleworkers in the Athenian Agora (American School of Classical
Studies at Athens, 2006).
In 2004, Lawton was recognized with Lawrence’s Award for Excellence in
Teaching, becoming the only faculty member to earn all three of the college’s
major teaching awards, including the Young Teacher Award in 1982 and the Freshman
Studies Teaching Award in 1998.
Lawton was selected for the $38,000 grant from among nearly 3,000 artists,
scholars, and scientists. Guggenheim Fellowships are awarded “to men
and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive
scholarship or exceptional creative ability” across a wide range of interests,
from the natural sciences to the creative arts. Fellow selections are based
on the recommendations from hundreds of expert advisors.