Biography

Ashley Jones received her B.A. from Grinnell College and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the David E. Finley Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and a fellowship from the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Florence, Italy.

Dr. Jones’s research focuses on Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Her work investigates the material, iconographic, and ideological traces of Rome in the late-Classical and early Medieval and Byzantine periods. She is particularly interested in portraiture, imperial art and its reception, and questions of the body. Her current book project investigates the practice of mounting coins in jewelry in Late Antiquity, and the corresponding use of the numismatic imperial portrait as a powerful, protective, or amuletic image. The project also interrogates the relation of jewelry to the body in the Classical and Late Antique world, questioning the relationships not only between adornment and eroticism, but also between tactility and magical thinking. 

New work examines the representation of gemstones and jewelry in text and image in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the material foundations of salvation and wonder.