Brief Bio
Bernard Frischer is a leading scholar in the application of digital technologies to humanities research and education. Frischer has overseen many significant projects, including a virtual recreations of sites such as the Roman Forum and Roman Colosseum. The works of Frischer and the Lab have received international acclaim and have been featured on the Discovery Channel, the RAI, German Public Radio, the BBC, in Newsweek, Scientific American, Business Week, the New York Times and many other magazines and newspapers around the world.
Professor Frischer is the author, or co-author, of six printed books, one e-book and many articles on virtual heritage and on the Classical world and its survival. He is also the editor-in-chief of the Digital Roman Forum web site. He received his B.A. in Classics from Wesleyan University in 1971 and his Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Heidelberg in 1975. He taught Classics at UCLA from 1976 to 2004. Since then he has been Professor of Art History and Classics at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). He has been a guest professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1993), the University of Bologna (1994), and held the post of Professor-in-Charge of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (2001-02).
Frischer's research career reflects his interest in interdisciplinary approaches, and has included studies in the literature, philosophy, art history and archeology of Greece and Rome. He is the author of several books, including Shifting Paradigms: New Approaches to Horace's Ars Poetica, and The Sculpted Word: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment. Frischer directed the excavations of Horace's Villa, a project sponsored by the American Academy in Rome and the Archeological Superintendency for Lazio of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The findings of this work was the subject of a two-volume report, Horace’s Villa Project 1997-2003 (Archaeopress, Oxford: 2007), of which Frischer was editor-in-chief.
His current research includes a cooperative project with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation to construct a virtual model of 18th-century Colonial Williamsburg at key moments in its history as the capital of a new British colony and political center during the American Revolution. He is also co-principal investigator of a project undertaken in partnership with UCLA to create a web resource for the study of the medieval plan of St. Gall Monastery, its contemporary context, and its impact on early medieval monastic architecture and culture. He also conceived of SAVE (Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments), a partnership between IATH and the UVA Computer Science Department to create a database of 3D digital models of cultural heritage sites, monuments, and landscapes.
Frischer received his B.A. (Wesleyan University, 1971) and Ph.D. (Heidelberg, 1975) degrees summa cum laude and is a member of Phi Beta Kappa (1970), a Fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows, a Fellow (1974-76) and Resident (1996) of the American Academy in Rome, and he has won research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (1981, 1996) and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (1997). From 1996 to 2003 he directed the excavations of Horace's Villa sponsored by the American Academy in Rome, and from 1996 to 2004 he was founding director of the UCLA Cultural Virtual Reality Laboratory. The lab was one of the first in the world to use 3D computer modeling to reconstruct cultural heritage sites. Frischer has overseen many significant modeling projects, including "Rome Reborn,” the virtual recreation of the entire city of ancient Rome within the Aurelian Walls. In 2005 he was given the Pioneer Award of the International Society for Virtual Systems and Multimedia.