Gregory Warden has served as the Mark A. Roglán Director of the Custard Institute for Spanish Art and Culture at the Meadows Museum since June 2022. He taught at SMU for 30 years, where he is now a Professor of Art History Emeritus and where he was appointed University Distinguished Professor, Meadows Foundation Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Altshuler Distinguished Teaching Professor. He is Executive Editor of the journal Etruscan and Italic Studies, President of the Etruscan Foundation, Consulting Scholar of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology, an elected Fellow of the Istituto di Studi Etruschi e Italici, and an International Fellow of the Explorers Club.
Warden’s research interests are Mediterranean archaeology, urbanism, materiality, and digital cultural heritage. He has authored or co-authored seven books, over 100 articles and reviews, and specialized studies in archaeometallurgy, archaeological theory, architecture, economic history, and ritual studies.
A native of Italy, Warden is the founder, PI, and co-director of the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project and excavations at the Etruscan site of Poggio Colla. He is also co-director of the Potentino Exploration Project, which aims to connect archaeology and heritage with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Warden teaches a MMIAM course at SMU in the fall and leads the students through a one-week site visit to Potentino in the summer.
Are you an artist? How did you become interested in the arts?
I grew up in Italy. My father stayed there after the second World War, where he met my mother, who was Italian. He studied art and was a painter who then moved into the field of design and opera. When we moved to the United States, he became the President of the Philadelphia Opera and the Hartford Opera.
I grew up in Italy with artists. In post-war Italy, there was a small group of art people. My father was not a good artist, but he became a much better opera person. So then, in the United States, I grew up with singers and opera people. I would go with my father to rehearsals all the time as a teenager. I joke that I have heard La Bohème at least 500 times. I love it.
I was very lucky to grow up in a family that really valued the arts. My father would take me to museums, which I will tell you as a kid would bore me to tears, but then, you know, I grew to love them later on. As we all know, you have to start early. It helps.
I went off to university and was actually an international relations major. I somehow foolishly thought I should be a diplomat or something. That lasted a year. I hated political science, and I hated economics. I then realized I could do something I’d always dreamt about, archaeology. I happened to be at a university that had a wonderful program.
When I got my doctorate, I had two job offers, one was in a museum, but the museum’s funding fell through, so I went into the academic world, which I love because I love research, but I’ve always stayed connected to museums.
When I first started, I taught at the University of Texas at Arlington for a year; that was my first job and my first introduction to Texas. I went up to Maine then and almost froze to death at Bowdoin College. Then I taught for a couple of years at the University of Pennsylvania, where I had been an undergraduate, which was wonderful. Then I got this wonderful offer from SMU in 1982 to come down there. And I loved SMU because they liked ideas and innovation. I was there for 30 years.
I then got this offer to become president of a university in Lugano, where Italian is spoken, and I’m a native Italian speaker, so that worked perfectly. Just three years ago, Mark Roglán, the director of the Meadows Museum, called me up and roped me into helping him create the research institute. The next thing I know, he has a description of the director’s position, and I said, ‘That sounds a lot like me, Mark,’ and he said, ‘Yes, you know, that’s what we’re thinking about.’ So, I joke that every job I’ve gotten has been through networking, through someone who knew about me and asked me to apply. Don’t get me wrong, I applied for lots of jobs that I didn’t get, but the ones I got were because there was a connection. This is one of the things I tell students immediately: network, network, network. So, for half a century that is what I’ve done and what I’m still doing because I love it so much that even at my age—I’m going to be 75 at the end of November—I just love it. It’s just so much fun.
So, it sounds like you’ve got a handful of things that you’re passionate about. How does it all come together for you?
Remarkably, it all fits together. I mean, everything connects in a way.
That’s one of the things I talk about at Potentino, at the castle. We’re doing radar and geophysics to find a temple, we’re doing all these kinds of things, and I take the students to this monastery, which is now a ruin. The Colombaio, as it’s called, was a famous Franciscan monastery where Saint Bernard of Siena lived. We look at it as a case study, and of course, it’s a Franciscan monastery in the Southern part of Tuscany, and you go, ‘Okay, what does that have to do with anything?’ But my point is that it has to do with everything because everyone’s going to be dealing with the question of what to do with heritage, what to do with the past, what to do with art? How are we going to save it? Do we need to save it? Can we save everything?
And the interesting thing for us is to work with the mayor and the local community and look at possibilities. You know, why is this so important to the local community? How can we help them with a sustainable plan.
I grew up with parents who were all about social responsibility. I was very lucky in the way I grew up; I had a very, by all standards, privileged background, but the lesson to me was to give something back. Don’t just take up space. My own cultural heritage, which connects across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, is important, but my message to everybody is that your own cultural heritage is important. We should be respecting it, and we should be helping you privilege that heritage. So, you see the long answers I give to the question. You asked how all of my work connects, and 10 minutes later, I’m still talking.
Professor Warden teaching to the MMIAM 12 cohort at Potentino, Italy, in July 2025.
Haha! I think that’s fabulous. I am curious, if someone were to ask you, how do you begin to connect—without any sort of formal training or tools—to heritage? What would you suggest someone do first?
You’re so special and so lucky to have your own heritage. I know it can seem all over the place and, you know, it’s difficult to connect all the pieces sometimes, or it’s difficult maybe to explain to people, but I would say embrace that heritage, talk about it, learn all you can about it, and support it in any way that you can. That is, I think, huge.
I’m teaching an undergraduate course on museums, and none of the students had heard about intangible heritage. So I started asking, you know, ‘What about you guys from Texas? What’s your intangible heritage?’ And of course, barbecue came up and I said, ‘Well, Kansas City might disagree with that.’ And then, rodeos came up, and I said, ‘Yeah, but also Wyoming and Colorado probably have them too.’ It was a great discussion. And suddenly, I think everyone realized that they had something special in their own way.
At a time when we’re kind of scared of everybody else, I think it’s time for us all to just appreciate each other.
So you mentioned that in Tuscany, you were having to help the government figure out these larger questions about cultural heritage—what to do with art, how to store it, where does it go. How do you do that? Is it through research? Is it through policymaking? What is that process like?
It’s all of those things, and policymaking is particularly difficult in a country like Italy because it is so heavily bureaucratic. It’s hard to do anything without having to fight through years of bureaucracy. In this case, we have a mayor and a local population that care about this ruin, well, what has become a ruin. People my age remember it from 50, 60 years ago, when much of it was still standing, and through neglect, it has just been allowed to crumble.
We’re working with a group from Dartmouth, great medievalists, who are using all sorts of techniques to reconstruct it. But the issue is, what can the town do with it? This is a town that is dying. It’s one of these beautiful medieval towns that sits on top of a hill. It’s magical looking, but there’s no one there, I mean, no young person there. No one young is there anymore because there’s no opportunity, and there’s no one like them, so they’re all off somewhere else.
There’s one café, and that doesn’t work so well. There used to be a restaurant where people hung out. It’s a very special place in terms of environment because they have a kind of olive oil and olive that’s not found anywhere else in the world. It’s a very special kind of environment. But they don’t have any money. So they don’t know what to do about the town.
The mayor and others believe that—you know, because it’s a Catholic country and there’s a strong tradition connected to Saint Bernard of Siena—this is a very special place, and that they can do something with that kind of history and with tourism.
Some people want to build a huge mega hotel there, and they have people who are interested in doing that. For me, that’s the kind of thing that just wants to take advantage of the beautiful setting and is going to spoil it by doing that. It’s a case study in how to make money in a way that doesn’t ruin what makes the place special, the heritage. This is where you need people with all sorts of different backgrounds to come up with solutions that we can suggest to the mayor and the town council, so that they don’t just build a mega hotel and ruin this absolutely idyllic kind of valley that has survived so far because it’s been out of the way.
Discussing cultural heritage with the MMIAM 12 at the Potentino castle, Italy, in July 2025.
That immediately brings to mind this phenomenon, if you can even call it that, of people buying these like one euro homes all across Italy, and I’ve heard sort of mixed opinions about how that’s working. Does that intersect at all with your work and the work that you’re trying to do with cultural heritage?
I do wonder, you know, does it work? Someone needs to research that and actually find the real story, and to go further, whether it would work in this case.
What I have suggested as an idea to the mayor is, don’t build a huge hotel. We’ve said, ‘You’ve got all these beautiful kinds of structures, instead of having one large hotel where you build an entire new thing, find the historic places and link them together in an Airbnb kind of way that you control.’
The people aren’t living in many of these places now. Their heirs are still trying to decide what to do. You’d have to raise money to set that up, but that might just create a new kind of tourism that would be effective. I think this is where the MMIAMs come in very well because you need people from different backgrounds, with different kinds of expertise. It’s a wonderful example of a problem that every other part of the world is going to have in its own way. What do you do in places that either have a population that’s growing too fast or what Italy has, which is a population that is not growing at all?
I have one final question: Is there one thing, professional or personal, that you are really proud of having done this year?
I don’t know, I’m an archaeologist, I think in terms of centuries, not in terms of a single year. I have collaborated with the O’Donnell Institute at UTD. We worked together on a project to do an exhibition at the Meadows Museum on the Legacy of Vesuvius. We brought over frescoes from Pompeii and talked about the Bourbon excavations.
But what I am really proud of is the fact that the director of that institute, Michael Thomas—who I know very well—and I taught a course together from both universities with students from UTD and from SMU. We had to do it ourselves. We couldn’t get the universities to do it together. We both scheduled the course at the same time, and we met in the same place, and we integrated students from two universities in what turned out to be a wonderful teaching experience, and I think a wonderful experience for the students.
That goes to show that sometimes you have to find a workaround or a way to deal with institutional issues, which I think is a real lesson for us all. I mean, we taught a course together, and now the two institutes and the two universities are working together on a number of different projects. So, I’m very proud of that. That’s one small victory.
*P. Gregory Warden’s headshot credit: Hillman Jackson.