Phyllis Pray Bober (1920–2002)

Phyllis Pray Bober was born in Portland, Maine, to parents of French-Canadian ancestry. She attended Cape Elizabeth High School, and went on to Wellesley College, where she received her B.A. degree in Art with a minor in Greek in 1941. In 1943, she received a M.A. degree from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, studying under Karl Lehmann-Hartleben. Also that year, she married Harry Bober, a medievalist classmate at graduate school. They had two sons together before divorcing 1973. In 1946, Phyllis completed her Ph.D. in Archaeology at NYU. Afterwards, she and her husband traveled to Europe for the first time, visiting France, Belgium, and England. She visited the Warburg Institute of the University of London, where librarian-scholar Fritz Saxl suggested she compile a Census of Classical Works of Art Known to the Renaissance. In 1949, the Warburg Institute officially adopted the project, and this remained the central part of her research for 40 years. She began her academic career as an instructor at Wellesley College, and worked for NYU on the excavation in Samothrace, Greece in 1948-1949. She also taught at NYU, the Farnsworth Art Museum at Wellesley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1954, she returned to NYU and rose from research associate to full professor of Fine Arts in 1967, and became chair of the
Department of Fine Arts the same year. Her first book, Drawings after the Antique by Amico Aspertini, was published in 1957. In 1973, she accepted a job at Bryn Mawr College as the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and as a professor of art history and classical and Near Eastern archaeology. She retired from Bryn Mawr as Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities Emerita in 1991.She enjoyed hosting lavish dinner parties that recreated past historical cuisines, including one Roman feast at Bryn Mawr in which an entire wild boar was roasted in an oven. Her interest in food history earned her membership in the Dames d'Escoffier in 1995 and she was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in Rome the same year. In her book Art, Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy (1999), she explored prehistoric recipes, alongside reflections of art history and archaeology. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1999.