Susan I. Rotroff, longtime ASCSA Managing Committee member and Agora staff member, has been awarded the Archaeological Institute of America’s most prestigious award, The Gold Medal. Susan, who was a regular student member of the School in 1968, got her undergraduate degree from Bryn Mawr College and the MA and PhD from Princeton University. She excavated at the Agora, Lefkandi, Samothrace, and Corinth. Following the lead of Dorothy Burr Thompson, and encouraged by Homer Thompson, she turned her attention to the Hellenistic period, especially the pottery.
Susan is among the most productive of ASCSA scholars. She is the author of three large volumes in the Agora series (Agora XXII, XXIX, and XXXIII), which cover all the Hellenistic pottery from the site. Expanding her chronological range, she also wrote (with John Oakley) a Hesperia supplement (XXV) on a large deposit of 5th century pottery. She has served as a pottery consultant on several other sites in the eastern Mediterranean. This expertise and experience with a wide array of pottery has led her to the heart of some major issues, such as the occupant of the great tomb at Vergina, the date of the third phase of the Pnyx, and the date of the beginning of red-figured pottery.
After teaching at Mount Allison University in Canada, Hunter College in New York, and Cornell, Susan is now the Jarvis Thurston and Mona Van Duyn Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in Saint Louis. In addition to her academic pursuits, Susan and her husband, Robert Lamberton (also a long-time ASCSA member), have traveled the world in pursuit of their shared interests in birdwatching (Agora Picture Book 22, Birds of the Athenian Agora) and diving.
Susan will be presented with the Gold Medal award at the Annual Meeting of the AIA/APA in San Antonio in January 2011, at which time a colloquium in her honor will also be held. The American School salutes and congratulates Susan on this outstanding achievement!
