WELLESLEY, MASS.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College announced that Dr. Nicole Berlin has been appointed the Assistant Curator of Collections, effective April 1, 2020. As an integral member of the curatorial team, Berlin will develop and maintain an active schedule of collections-based installations and temporary exhibitions, publications, and programs.

“A specialist in ancient Mediterranean art and archaeology, Nicole has developed her curatorial expertise through a wide range of experiences in museums, educational institutions, archaeological excavations, and auction houses,” said Amanda Gilvin, the Davis Museum’s Sonja Novak Koerner ’51 Senior Curator of Collections and Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs. “Her inventive scholarship, digital technological expertise, and fresh curatorial vision make her an ideal fit for the Davis, and we look forward to the ambitious interdisciplinary exhibitions and projects that she will curate at Wellesley.”

Berlin comes to the Davis from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, where she has served as the Zanvyl Krieger Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow. In this capacity, she acted as a primary liaison for the museum’s manuscripts collection, leading and coordinating guided visits from students, scholars, and community members from a wide variety of backgrounds and working on an ongoing project to digitize the collection for the website Walters Ex Libris. In 2019, she organized the exhibition Animal Tales: Hidden Stories in Medieval Manuscripts. Drawing upon the fables and lore of ancient authors such as Aesop and Pliny the Elder, the show explored how representations of animals in manuscripts visually recorded shared cultural knowledge. She previously held curatorial fellowships at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Johns Hopkins University Archaeological Museum in Baltimore, as well as an earlier fellowship at the Walters. She has also worked as an auction coordinator at Christie’s, specializing in ancient art, and has completed extensive archaeological fieldwork as part of the American Excavations at Morgantina, Sicily.

Berlin received her BA from Northwestern University and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Her 2019 dissertation, Old Houses, New Viewers: Domestic Renovation in Roman Sicily, analyzes the role of house renovations in the articulation of local Sicilian identities during the Roman Imperial period. It was supported by two Singleton Graduate Fellowships for Research in Europe from Johns Hopkins, as well as the Elizabeth Cropper Travel Prize in the History of Art, also from Johns Hopkins.