Ancient Plaster

Abbey Ellis is based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, where she has served as a Research Associate in the Krateros Squeeze Digitization Project and as a Visitor in the School of Historical Studies. Her research considers ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, plaster casts ancient and modern, and historic reproductions more generally. In 2021, she was awarded her Ph.D. by the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies. Her Ph.D. project focused on issues of value related to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford’s collection of archaeological plaster casts. In addition to her work at the Institute, she is a Guest Lecturer at the Princeton Academy of Art.

Emma Payne is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Classics, King’s College London, where she also completed a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship (2018–2021), exploring the making of ancient Greek and Roman stone and plaster sculpture. She completed her PhD in 2017 at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, studying the archaeological and historical significances of casts of classical sculpture. She is the author of Casting the Parthenon Sculptures from the Eighteenth Century to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2021). Before her PhD, she trained as a conservator of archaeological and museum objects through which she gained a keen practical awareness of the materiality of objects. She presently works on a number of archaeological conservation projects as a freelance conservator, mainly in the southeast of England.