The University of Iowa Graduate College honors Erin Peters with the D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize in the humanities and fine arts. Peters, who earned a Ph.D. in art history in 2015, will be honored during a ceremony at the James F. Jakobsen Graduate Conference in March 2016.

Under the first Roman emperor Augustus (27 BCE-14 CE), at least 24 temples in Egypt were newly built or expanded. Peters’s dissertation, “Egypt in Empire: Augustan Temple Art and Architecture at Karnak, Philae, Kalabsha, Dendur, and Alexandria,” challenges the current scholarly tendency to separate art and architecture produced in Egypt under Augustus from that produced in the rest of the Roman Empire.

By advancing an incorporative approach that considers Augustan temples in Egypt as part of the Roman Empire, Peters enriches the current understanding of Roman art. She considers what the decorative and architectural details of temples built in Augustan Egypt can reveal about each monument’s religious and social significance within overlapping contexts and communities.

Peters’ research illustrates that, via the medium of architectural design, Augustus and his advisers were keenly engaged with the religious and aesthetic conventions of the ancient and prestigious culture they witnessed firsthand after Egypt’s annexation into the Roman Empire in 30 BCE. Peters demonstrates how architecture was used as a means to mediate complex and changing political, social, religious, economic, and artistic contexts as Egypt was integrated into the wider Roman world.