Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to announce that PhD candidate in Art History Jordan Dopp was awarded a competitive Graduate School Dean’s Award, a monetary award to cover expenses related to final research projects. This fund assists graduate students with the costs of doing research towards their dissertations.  

Dopp’s funding from the Dean's award centers on her dissertation research at the American Center of Oriental Research, or ACOR, located in Amman, Jordan. ACOR "aims to advance knowledge of Jordan and the interconnected Middle East, past and present." Amongst promoting archaeological work fellowships and excavation opportunities, ACOR, importantly, maintains a singular scholarly library which holds unpublished archaeological field and excavation reports from digs throughout the Near East.  

For her purposes, she is especially interested in the excavation records from Petra, Jordan, as these hold important data on the finds of wall painting fragments hitherto lost to time as well as a flood at the Petra Museum in the 2010s. ACOR happily houses and facilitates the work of scholars with the aim to publish new finds and discovers on the visual culture of the ancient Near East.

Dopp’s dissertation project aims to propose interpretations about the understudied wall paintings from Petra, the capital of the ancient Kingdom of Nabataea. There are many paintings in situ, others in museums and archives, and still others that have been lost to time-- but recorded in archaeological reports. ACOR, truthfully, holds all the answers; it is essential, therefore, for me to conduct research on site--both at ACOR in Amman and in Petra in the ancient city, to move forward with my dissertation project.

Due to the pandemic, Dopp was unable to travel to Jordan this past summer. Dopp has shifted funding among grants she has been awarded to continue her research by completing technical analyses of wall painting fragments at the Georgia’s Electron Microscope lab. While the travel is currently paused, Dopp plans to hopefully be able to complete her travel and research in Jordan before long.  

Jordan Alexis Dopp is a third-year PhD student specializing in ancient art, and currently studying Nabataean wall paintings from Petra, Jordan and its environs. She received her MA in Art History from UGA in May 2018. Her master's thesis addressed the aesthetic relationship between painted "Fayum" portraits and mummy cartonnages from Roman Egypt. With the support of the Dodd's research grants, the Graduate School, and external funding, Jordan has participated in an archaeological excavation in Petra, Jordan (2018), and conducted research throughout Greece as part of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) (2019). Jordan also presented her research on wall painting at the 14th annual international wall painting conference, Association Internationale pour la Peinture Murale Antique (AIPMA) in Naples, Italy (2019) through the Dodd's Andrew Ladis award. While her primary focus is on dissertation research, Jordan was also honored to receive the Outstanding Teaching Assistant award (2020).