This coming February, our competition theme will be “architectural elements.” To help us orient our minds and our cameras toward this topic, our speaker this month comes to us from the faculty of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of the University of Maryland. Our speaker, Professor Robert Lindley Vann, will talk about photography as a way to learn to analyze a structure and its components.

Professor Vann, whose background is in both architecture and archaeology, teaches two survey classes in architectural history as well as advanced lecture courses in Greek, Roman, and Pre-Columbian architecture. Recently, he’s also begun offering seminars that focus on the city in the classical world, the town of Pompeii, and architecture for entertainment in the Roman world.

But teaching in the classroom is only part of Lindley’s activity. He also participates in archaeological field work – for example, at Sardis in Turkey, Carthage in Tunisia, and other sites in Jordan and Sri Lanka. He has even co-directed underwater excavations in the harbor of Herod the Great in Israel and directed a survey of ancient harbors in Turkey. One especially interesting project in Pompeii investigated the role of food and drink in that ancient city. These days, Lindley also involves his students in this field work and research.

Lindley lectures widely, presenting research papers here and abroad. He also publishes in numerous scholarly journals. His own education prepared him perfectly for his professional life: As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, Lindley studied architecture and archaeology and then received his PhD at Cornell.