Susan Downey, a longtime UCLA art history professor whose scholarship focused on the architecture of sacred spaces, died Feb. 11 in Yucaipa, California, at the age of 86.
Downey joined the UCLA Department of Art, Design and Art History — now the Department of Art History — as an assistant professor in 1965, and she taught for nearly five decades, until her retirement in 2012.
“She was the longest-serving member of the art history faculty in recent memory, and I learned a lot from her,” said George Baker, a professor of modern and contemporary art and chair of the art history department. “When I began teaching at UCLA in 2003, Susan always seemed to be in the old slide library, constructing her lectures slide by slide on the light boxes we once used. Always open to talking about what she was exploring, Susan shared her love for archaeological sites and the ancient world with this classicist manqué, and this still inspires my broader teaching as an art historian.”
Among Downey’s wide-ranging scholarly interests was the ancient city of Dura-Europos, located on the western bank of the Euphrates River in present-day Syria. In “Terracotta Figurines and Plaques from Dura-Europos,” published in 2003, Downey explored how seemingly modest artifacts revealed insights about social and religious practices of the city, which was founded around 300 B.C. and abandoned in 256 A.D.
Beyond her work at Dura-Europos, she conducted field research in Greece, Italy, Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon. Her nephew, Richard Downey, said she was fluent in Latin, classical Greek and Italian, and could speak, read and write German, French and Russian.
Downey was chair of the art history department from 1990 to 1993, and she served three terms as the department’s vice chair. She also was twice the chair of the interdepartmental graduate program in archaeology — from 1995 to 1999 and again in 2000 and 2001 — and served as a core faculty member of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA.
“Susan was a tremendously positive force in the department,” said Lothar Von Falkenhausen, a UCLA distinguished professor of archaeology and art history, and a longtime colleague of Downey’s. “She could always be relied on for her good sense and was indeed a major source of support for her junior colleagues.”
Several colleagues and former students compiled a festschrift — a collection of essays typically written in honor of a scholar — to celebrate Downey’s retirement. In it, former UCLA Ph.D. students Maura Heyn (now a classics professor and associate dean at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro) and Ann Irvine Steinsapir noted “her ability to support and encourage students who choose to focus on areas outside of her fields of inquiry.”
As one example, they cited Downey’s encouragement, in the 1980s, of a then-Ph.D. student named Karol Wight, who wanted to study ancient Roman glass — even though the medium was outside of Downey’s own interests. Later in the festschrift, Wight, now president and executive director of the Corning Museum of Glass, thanked Downey for her “decades-long support and for her encouragement when I determined to study a small, discrete portion of the material remains of antiquity. … Her willingness to allow me to pursue a dissertation on this topic has led me to where I am today.”
Downey was born Dec. 22, 1938, in Kansas City, Missouri; she grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was active in the Girl Scouts and became valedictorian of Murrah High School’s first graduating class. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin from Bryn Mawr College in 1960, followed by a master’s degree from Yale University in 1961 and a doctorate in classics from Yale in 1963.
Prior to joining UCLA, Downey studied in Italy for two years, having earned the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, as well as a Fulbright scholarship.
Richard Downey said his aunt loved reading, swimming, travel and the outdoors, and she was devoted to her animals — especially a horse, Jasper; and Pepper, Thurber and her other dogs.
In addition to her nephew, she is survived by her brother, John “Zeke” Downey, and her niece, Katherine Mondanaro.
Source: In memoriam: Susan Downey, 86, scholar of ancient art and archaeology | UCLA
