Josephine M. Harris research papers and photographs

Harris earned a Ph.D. in Latin and Greek at Washington University, St. Louis in 1936. In 1937-1938, she became a fellow in Archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. The following year, as a special fellow at the excavations in ancient Corinth, she published coin finds. Harris was a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Research Library and Collection from 1942-1945. Under the direction of Wilhelm R. W. Koehler, Senior Fellow in charge of Research, Harris began to catalog the architectural sculpture from Oxyrhynchos, Egypt on the basis of published photographs for the Research Archive. In 1953-1954, Harris received a Faculty Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and the Margaret M. Justin Fellowship from the American Association of University Women. For that year, she was granted sabbatical leave from her position as Chair of the Fine Arts Department at Wilson College in Chambersburg, PA in order to study Coptic sculpture in Egypt. Harris photographed and studied the Oxyrhynchos fragments from Evaristo Breccia’s 1927-1931 excavations in the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria, Egypt. In 1959, Harris received additional grant funding from the American Philosophical Society to continue the project. On subsequent trips to Egypt in 1963 and the 1970s, she continued to photograph fragments from Oxyrhynchos that had not previously been published [Evaristo Breccia, Le Musée Gréco-Romain, 1925-1931 (Bergamo, 1932); Evaristo Breccia, Le Musée Gréco-Romain, 1931-1932 (Bergamo, 1933)].