Overview
Mary C. Danisi is the John S. Knight Institute Visiting Lecturer for Writing in the Disciplines for the Classics Department. Her research specializes in issues of materiality and aesthetics in Greek and Roman art, literature, and religion. Her current projects address the generative interrelations between ancient visual and verbal media, as well as theoretical models of representation in antiquity. Her research has been supported by the Cornell Institute for Archaeological and Material Studies (CIAMS), Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Society for the Humanities, Lemmermann Foundation, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. In 2024, she was the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Mary has taught courses in classical languages and literature, as well as on the art and archaeology of the premodern Mediterranean. She has fulfilled internships at the Institute for Classical Architecture and Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Frick Collection. Her archaeological fieldwork has included supervisory roles for the excavations at ancient Corinth by the American School of Classical Studies and for The Onchestos Excavation Project.
Research Focus
Mary’s first book in progress, Fillets and the Craft of Value in Greco-Roman Antiquity,explores pictorial impiety with sacred textile bands in images and texts from the 7th century BCE through the 4th century CE. Derived from the Latin filum for “thread,” the fillet was a highly coveted prize that conferred value and distinction upon the humans, animals, and objects it adorned, and whose awarding and possession were fiercely controlled by sacred laws. While the fillet’s authority as an emblem of consecration in ancient religion has remained relatively uncontested, Mary argues that the commodification and devaluation of the fillet were perennial anxieties as handlers of the artifact manipulated the bands to personal advantage. The monograph thus exposes the artful distortions of fillets in the material, visual, and verbal media of devotion. By calling attention to the deliberate misinterpretations and misrepresentations of this specialized costume during ritual performance, Mary develops a history of counterfeit cult in the classical world, in which failures of fashion unraveled the limits of literary and artistic styles to authenticate religious experience.