Ketty Iannantuono
Postdoctoral Researcher, Radboud Institute for History & Culture
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Ketty Iannantuono is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Radboud Institute for History & Culture, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands where she is part of the Anchoring Innovation Project (funded by the Dutch Research Council, NWO). Anchoring Innovation is a collaborative research initiative that brings together classicists to study the human factor in successful innovation, focusing on how new ideas gain acceptance by being connected to familiar elements from the past — a process known as anchoring.
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Ketty obtained her PhD from Radboud University (2022) with a dissertation that examined the representation of Roman emperors in provincial monuments and the ideological appropriation of these imperial images in modern times. Her research explored how visual symbols of power were transmitted, reinterpreted, and mobilized across historical contexts for political and cultural purposes.
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Before acquiring her PhD, she earned a BA in Cultural Heritage, and an MA and a Specialization in Classical Archaeology from the University of Bologna. She has participated in numerous international archaeological projects and held teaching appointments at Radboud University, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and the University of Amsterdam. Her teaching portfolio includes courses in Ancient History, Archaeology, Gender and the Arts, as well as supervision of BA and MA theses within the programs Tourism and Culture and EDUMaH (Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Education, Museums and Heritage).
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Her current research focuses on the reception of Classical antiquity in modern and contemporary exhibition culture. In particular, her project Classical Antiquity in Vitrine explores how museum displays of Graeco-Roman artifacts in the 20th and 21st centuries have contributed to the canonization of Classical antiquity as a ‘reference culture’. Drawing on critical museology and postcolonial theory, she examines how exhibitions shape public memory through processes of selection, resemanticization, and visual rhetoric. A key strand of this research investigates how world’s fairs and international expositions have functioned as spaces of cultural performance and as platforms for staging antiquity in order to articulate visions of modernity and nationhood.
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During her postdoctoral fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max Planck Institute) and the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul (2022–2023), she conducted archival research on a 1910 Italian archaeological mission to Ankara. This mission resulted in a full-scale plaster cast of the local Temple of Augustus and Roma which was exhibited at the 1911 Mostra Archeologica — part of Italy’s celebratory world’s fair marking the 50th anniversary of national unification. Her research investigated how archaeology, diplomacy, and exhibition practices intersected in early 20th-century Mediterranean geopolitics.
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In May 2025, she organized the international conference Antiquities in the Modern Laboratory: World Fairs and Anchoring Innovation in Antiquity at Radboud University, which brought together scholars working on the intersection of antiquity, exhibitionary culture, and the politics of historical reception.