Anne P. Chapin Acquisitions Fund for Archives
Anne Chapin was the embodiment of the spirit of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Through her mentoring, teaching, research, and publications she enthusiastically worked to bring the importance and beauty of the archaeological and artistic heritage of Greece to all. She valued the School not only as an institution but as a community, honoring its members and cherishing its heritage and traditions. To honor her spirit the Anne P. Chapin Acquisitions Fund for Archives will support the ongoing work of the Archives of the ASCSA to collect, conserve, and make available to the widest possible audience through research and exhibition the living heritage of the many members of the School who have devoted their lives to the study of Greece. The Archives contains the collective memories of those who have been part of the School community and tell the story of the School and its engagement with the Greek world from its beginnings. They are a rich and inexhaustible source of inspiration, the essence of the School spirit of Hellenism. It is fitting that the Anne P. Chapin Fund will help to build and maintain the collections, keeping her name alive for generations to come.
ABOUT ANNE P. CHAPIN
Born in Philadelphia and having grown up gazing at the Manhattan skyline from her Mountainside, NJ home, Anne headed south to Duke University to study the dismal science, economics. Following her junior year, she took a summer program at Oxford, finishing out the course by backpacking across Europe to Crete. On returning to Durham, Anne took a class on Greek Archaeology from John Younger. With those experiences in mind and following another trip to Crete, in 1986 Anne enrolled in the graduate program in Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she had the great fortune to work with Sara Immerwahr. In 1990 she joined Jack Kroll’s ASCSA Summer Session (II). At a chance meeting in the Loring Hall Saloni over tea, she met Robert Bauslaugh, and they were married three years later. Back at Chapel Hill she continued a research path that had started with her MA thesis on Minoan perspective. With an all-star cast of advisors – Sara Immerwahr, Mary Sturgeon, and Maria Shaw – she wrote her PhD dissertation, Landscape and Space in Aegean Bronze Age Art (1995).
In 1998, after teaching stints at Emory and Georgia State, Anne took up a position in the Art Department at Brevard College. There, in rolling, ancient hills of the southern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Anne was The Art History program, teaching four courses per term, everything from Egyptian Art to the present day. She often led study-abroad programs. She brought advanced digital projection facilities to her students, and she won two teaching awards for her efforts.
Her first major project on arriving in Brevard was to assemble and edit the monumental ΧΑΡΙΣ: Essays in honor of Sara A. Immerwahr (2004). Shortly after, she expanded her attention to the mainland with an article on landscape fresco fragments at Pylos in Aegean Wall Painting (2005) honoring the exceptional British scholar of Bronze Age wall painting, Mark Cameron, who died tragically young in 1984. Papers on frescoes from Knossos (co-authored with Maria Shaw) and Thera followed through the early 2000s.
At the same time Anne began a fruitful collaboration with Louise Hitchcock and Emilia Banou in exploring the area around the famous Vapheio tomb. A steady stream of papers on the Bronze Age topography of Laconia, Vapheio, and a nearby quarry resulted from this scholarly team and their colleagues.
In 2010, Anne joined the Gournia project processing the finds in the workrooms of the INSTAP East Crete Study Center. Even in this work she was never laboring alone. She generously guided students in their work and enlisted their help in hers. By September 2023, Anne and her collaborator, Nikki Pareja, completed the study of the Gournia plaster fragments and the volume is now with the press.
There were other projects, too. Anne and Maria Shaw published the wall paintings from Kommos. Their volume for the Danish Centre for Textile Research, Woven threads. Patterned textiles of the Aegean bronze age (2016), tackled an immense range of topics related to textile production and representation in the Bronze Age. With Nikki Pareja, Anne began to turn her attention to representations of animals. Outside the typical pursuits of the academic, Anne teamed with Suzanne Murray as archaeological consultants, at the request of sponsor David Packard, for the opulent 2011 staging in San Jose of Mozart’s Idomeneo, set in Minoan Crete.
In December 2020, Anne was diagnosed with brain cancer. She returned to teaching in fall 2022 but decided to retire in spring 2023. Despite her failing health, Anne continued to hike the trails and mountain paths around Brevard with her family. In 2021, she and Carol Mattusch and the Stroud family raised funds to name a room in Loring Hall for Sara and Henry Immerwahr.
Anne is survived by her husband, Bob, son Andrew, sister Elizabeth, and step children Ryan Bauslaugh and Erin McIntyre. And there are her teachers, students, and her many fellow explorers of the Aegean Bronze Age, whether contemplating the many puzzles of Bronze Age frescoes, organizing plaster fragments across a table overlooking Pachia Ammos and Mirabello bay, walking amidst the rocky landscapes of Laconia, or just relaxing around a taverna table in the soft summer air.
