BERNARD FRISCHER

  Research Professor, University of Virginia

Bernard Frischer is a leading scholar in the application of digital technologies to humanities research and education. Frischer has overseen many significant projects, including virtual recreations of the Roman Colosseum and the Roman Forum, which have received international acclaim and been featured on the Discovery Channel, the RAI, German Public Radio, the BBC, in Newsweek, Scientific American, Business Week, the New York Times and many other magazines and newspapers around the world. He is founder and director of “Rome Reborn,” the recently completed project to create a virtual reality model of the entire city of ancient Rome
within the Aurelian Walls.

Frischer, professor of art history and classics at the University of Virginia and director of its Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, is the author, or co-author, of six books, one e-book and many articles on virtual heritage and on the classical world and its survival. His books include “Shifting Paradigms: New Approaches to Horace’s Ars Poetica” and “The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism
and Philosophical Recruitment.” He is also the editor-in-chief of the Digital Roman Forum Web site — http://dlib.etc.ucla.edu/projects/Forum.

His research career reflects his interest in interdisciplinary approaches and has included studies in the literature, philosophy, art history and archeology of Greece and Rome. Frischer directed the excavations of Horace’s Villa, a project sponsored by the American Academy in Rome and the Archeological Superintendency for Lazio of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The findings of this work was the subject of a two-volume report, “Horace’s Villa Project 1997-2003,” co-edited by Frischer and published by Archaeopress (Oxford) in 2007.

His current research includes a cooperative project with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to construct a virtual model of 18thcentury Colonial Williamsburg at key moments in its history as the capital of a new British colony and central point in the American Revolution. He is also co-principal investigator of a project undertaken in partnership with UCLA to create a web resource for the study of the medieval plan of St. Gall Monastery, its contemporary context, and its impact on early medieval monastic architecture and culture. In addition, he conceived of SAVE (Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments), a partnership between IATH and the
U.Va. Computer Science Department to create a database of 3D digital models of cultural heritage sites, monuments and landscapes.

Frischer received his B.A. (Wesleyan University, 1971) and his Ph.D. (University of Heidelberg, 1975) degrees summa cum laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa (1970). He taught classics at UCLA from 1976 to 2004, where from 1996 to 2004 he was founding director of the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory. The lab was one of the first in the world to use 3D computer modeling to reconstruct cultural heritage sites. He has been a guest professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1993), the University of Bologna (1994) and held the post of Professor-in-Charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classica Studies in Rome (2000-01).