The naked truth
Adrian Staehli’s office is lined floor to ceiling with uniform black and red, two-inch-thick binders, which constitute a self-made, alphabetically ordered library of every document he wanted to take with him when he moved from Zurich. “It’s very Swiss, isn’t it?” he mused. Staehli, the new James Loeb Professor of Classical Archaeology, is hardly as severe as the binders, or as his Swiss-born, German-trained pedigree, suggest. His work, too, seems designed to shake up the sometimes-stuffy study of antiquity. As the Department of the Classics’ newest tenured faculty member, Staehli studies more than just old pottery shards. His work explores the ways that Western cultures — from Renaissance artists in the 15th century to Nazis and Italian fascists in the 20th — have bent ancient Greek culture to their own ends, and how those interpretations shape what we now consider classical art. In the process, he tries to discern from fragmentary evidence how...