Dr. Keely Heuer
Dr. Keely Heuer is chair of the Department of Art History and Associate Professor of ancient Mediterranean art history and archaeology. She received her master’s and PhD degrees in the visual and material culture of Classical antiquity from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a bachelor’s in public policy studies from Duke University. Her research primarily focuses on the iconography of painted Greek, South Italian, and Etruscan vases, as well as the interrelations between Greek settlers and the native populations of pre-Roman Italy. She has presented invited lectures and conference talks in the United States, Europe, the Near East, and Australasia. Dr. Heuer’s essays and articles appear in Athenian Painters and Potters III; Hope in Ancient Literature, History, and Art; Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife in Ancient South Italian Vase-Painting; Adoption, Adaptation, and Innovation in Pre-Roman Italy: Paradigms for Cultural Change; the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Arts, and multiple supplemental volumes of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, the leading international series on ancient Greek and Italian ceramics. She has also written catalogue entries for the Loeb Art Center at Vassar College and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her current book project explores cross-cultural imagery in the red-figure vase painting of pre-Roman Italy. She has twice been a fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has received other fellowships from the NEH and La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
Dr. Heuer has taught at SUNY New Paltz since 2013, having previously taught courses at Hunter College and New York University. Her passion is offering extraordinary experiential learning opportunities for her students, including her month-long summer archaeological tours in Greece and Italy. Her classes often involve experimental archaeology to bring the distant past to life and demonstrate how much it can teach us today. For example, in spring 2025, her students organized and hosted “The Convivium,” an ancient Roman banquet in which roughly 500 SUNY New Paltz students, alumni, faculty, and staff enjoyed 2000-year-old recipes (of course, made by using ancient techniques by the students themselves) while listening to live performances of original choral music and excerpts from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. For the past 11 years, she has served as the faculty liaison for the Art History Association, one of the oldest student groups at SUNY New Paltz, which hosts numerous public events, including an annual thematic lecture series featuring renowned art historians, curators, conservators, activists, and other distinguished guests. Dr. Heuer is also the founder and organizer of the SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium, a virtual five-day conference held each April that features presentations by more than 300 students attending colleges and universities on six continents as well as a prominent keynote speaker. She also enjoys working with the Honors Program, regularly teaching Honors seminars and serving as an advisor for students’ Honors theses. She has also been a faculty advisor for the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience program eight times. In 2022, she was selected as the SUNY New Paltz Faculty Mentor of the Year. She is very proud to see the Department of Art History become the largest of its kind in the SUNY system during her tenure as chair, with its students regularly being selected for highly selective internships, archaeological excavations, graduate programs, and jobs.
Dr. Heuer excavated at the Sanctuary of the Great Gods in Samothrace, Greece, and is an alumna of the American Academy in Rome and the American School of Classical Studies. She is a member of numerous professional organizations in her field, including the Women’s Classical Caucus, the Etruscan Foundation, and the Archaeological Institute of America, for which she serves as co-chair of the Etruscan Interest Group.
“It is truly a delightful surprise and honor to receive the 2025 Friends of the Alumni Association Award. Our SUNY New Paltz alumni are an integral component in the ongoing success and growth of the University in countless ways, and I love finding opportunities to bring our current students together with our fantastic alumni, whether through departmental programming, alumni reunion weekends, or in my classroom. It is so important for students to understand that their SUNY New Paltz journey does not end with graduation, but rather that they have become part of an enormously talented and generous family that will continue to enrich the entirety of their lives. Engaging with our alumni is such a joy, and I burst with pride when I see my former students flourish both professionally and personally. There is nothing that brightens my day more than hearing from my department's alumni, and I am so grateful for their constant support, whether they are mentoring students one-on-one to even serving as volunteer Zoom hosts for the SUNY New Paltz Undergraduate Art History Symposium, allowing us to make it the largest event of its kind in the world. The loyalty and devotion of a collegiate institution's alumni says a lot about that organization's fundamental values, and I feel so fortunate to be a part of a community that believes deeply in the worth of higher education that holistically prepares people to rise to their full potential.”
