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My classes on ancient art (Caves to Cathedrals and Roman Art) draw on my training as a historian of the art of ancient Rome. I published three articles based on my dissertation on the Emperor Constantine’s monuments in the city of Rome (one of which won the Art Bulletin’s Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize). Since then, my scholarship considers how we know what we think we know about ancient art, starting with my 2013 book Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (Bloomsbury). Most of Roman art history's canonical objects such as the Barberini Togatus and the Fonseca bust of a Flavian Woman are “ungrounded,” meaning we have no information about their archaeological context. The uniqueness of many of the field's ungrounded "masterpieces" and their appeal to modern taste makes me worry about their authenticity. I argued that recently excavated works provide a firmer foundation for understanding Roman art history, even though those pieces are usually a lot less beautiful. They are also often harder to see because they are housed today in small, regional museums around the Mediterranean, rather than in big museums in European and American capitals. 

I've also explored the epistemological differences between grounded and ungrounded Roman artworks in some articles, including a long review of a museum exhibition of (mostly ungrounded) 3^rd-century portraits as well as a chapter called “Archaeology and Iconography” in the Oxford Handbook of Roman Imagery and Iconography. A 2016 study explored the various types of information that get lumped into the term “provenance” and what is valuable about each. This article was a critique of an influential paper by Christopher Chippindale and David Gill. It appeared in a special volume of the International Journal of Cultural Property which included a response by them and by two other scholars, as well as final comments by me. Similarly, in 2020, in an edited volume called Roman Art in Context, ten scholars responded to the concept of "groundedness" and the arguments laid out in Shaky Ground; I contributed the final chapter (“Further Reflections on Groundedness”). I have also shared these arguments with wider audiences in videos published online with Smarthistory.org.

In addition to their epistemological problems, poorly-documented antiquities also raise legal and ethical issues. Many of them were looted and smuggled out of their country of origin in violation of those countries' cultural patrimony laws. For this reason, most U.S. museums have stopped acquiring ancient artworks if there is no paperwork proving they were legally exported. This well-intentioned policy has left hundreds of thousands of antiquities currently in private hands in limbo. What will happen to them when their owners pass away? Since they can no longer be donated to museums, most end up back on the market, where details about their modern ownership histories are often lost. In articles for both scholarly and general audiences, I have argued that university museums should take these pieces in. In an academic setting, poorly-documented antiquities can be used to educate students and the public about the legal, ethical, and epistemological issues they raise. When desired by the country of origin, their repatriation can foster new relationships and new avenues of research and exchange. I've also written about some high-profile repatriation disputes, including the Benin Bronzes and the Elgin Marbles; and have called more broadly for greater transparency and critical self-reflection on the part of museums in an article about the Getty Villa and in a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Postcolonial Theory. These research interests prompted me to develop new teaching fields at Colgate, including a course on Critical Museum Theory and a seminar on Scandals, Controversies, and Debates in the Art World. In 2017, working with colleagues in History, Anthropology and in Colgate's university museums, I created a new academic program in Museum Studies, which I continue to direct.

Currently, I am researching a bizarre investment scheme concocted by a prominent New York antiquities dealer which involved a Detroit-based insurance salesman, dozens of investors, hundreds of antiquities, and seven university museums. Another long-term project concerns a group of bronze statues that were looted from an imperial shrine at Bubon in southwestern Turkey in the 1960s, most of which eventually made their way into U.S. museums. A 2022 essay on these statues, titled “When Will Museums Tell the Whole Truth �������� Their Antiquities?”, got the attention of law enforcement. I have subsequently been involved in legal efforts to repatriate the Bubon bronzes back to Turkey. I hope eventually to write a book about the whole Bubon story from antiquity to the present.