Whether it’s expertise on Roman chariot racing and spectacle of the circus in ancient Rome, serving as research director on an archaeological dig in Italy, conducting research into race, representation and social practice on Romans in antiquity, or bringing his knowledge of Greek, Etruscan and Roman art, architecture and archaeology and experiences in the field to his students at NIU, Sinclair Bell is a man with a foot in the firmly in both the present and past.
“Sinclair Bell is consistently analyzing societies with a bottom-up perspective. For him, chariot races are not, as for earlier scholars, a mass spectacle organized by the elite to delight and control the people, but a social institution that was shaped by ordinary people, citizens and non-citizens alike,” said Professor Christian Mann, chair of ancient history at the University of Mannheim in Germany. “He also includes the tombs of ‘normal’ Romans in his investigations, which drew on the imagery of the circus. Instead of asking how the games functioned from the perspective of the spectators, he focuses on the reasons for their appeal to the wider public.”
Bell, professor of art history in the NIU School of Art and Design has been named a 2026 Presidential Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professor, NIU’s highest recognition for outstanding research or artistry. The honor includes special financial support of the recipient’s research for four years, after which they earn the title of Distinguished Research Professor.
Bell was named an NIU Presidential Teaching Professor in 2021. He is an archaeologist and art historian who specializes in the study of ancient Italy, especially the Roman world. His field requires proficiency in classical philology, ancient history, ancient art history and fieldwork in classical archaeology. He jokes that his interdisciplinary training began when his mother “unofficially” enrolled him in an undergraduate classical mythology course at a local university when he was 11 years old.
Eve D’Ambra, the Agnes Rindge Claflin Professor of Art History at Vassar College says that Bell’s current research, Aethiopians in Roman Art and Society: Race, Representation, and Social Practice, is both important and timely.
“Not only does it relate contemporary concerns to those of the antiquity, it undertakes a necessary revision of the scholarship on race in antiquity,” D’Ambra says, “The earlier view of Imperial Rome as a society without color prejudice has drawn criticism, and the time is right for a comprehensive analysis of Roman attitudes based on the evidence of art and archaeology. The field has advanced in two directions of significance for this project: the study of slavery in ancient Rome has moved beyond legal categories to analysis of various social relationships within the slave society, and within the social history of art, interpretation has become much more nuanced and refined, particularly in regard to social attitudes.”
D’Ambra also describes Bell’s extensive research into the Romans “obsession “with circus and chariot racing, as “deeply engaging, critically influential, and first-rate all around.
“He continues to provide intellectual and academic leadership not only in the field of ancient art and archaeology, but also in the wider realm of art history and visual culture on issues that resonate today.”
Bell says he plans to use the support that comes with the honor to advance his current research with travel to museum, archives and archaeological sites in Europe, seed funding for publications, dedicate more time for writing and to create new research collaborations.
