Jenifer Neils taught at CWRU from 1980-2017 in both the department of Art History, and Art which she chaired from 1986-1998 and where she held the Ruth Coulter Heede professorship, and the department of Classics where she was the Elsie B. Smith Professor in the Liberal Arts. For six years she served on the curatorial staff of the Cleveland Museum of Art in the department of ancient art, and taught museum studies. She earned her AB from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD from Princeton University in art and archaeology. As a field archaeologist she has worked in Tuscany (Murlo), Sicily (Morgantina), and northern Greece (Torone)  and has published material from all three sites. Neils has been a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and has received fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, J. Paul Getty Research Center, Yale Center for British Art, and the Onassis Foundation among others. She is the recipient of two major honors from CWRU: the first Baker-Nord Award for Distinguished Research in the Humanities, and the 2022 Dorothy Hummel Hvorka Award for outstanding contributions to the University, the nation, and the world.

Neils has published 17 books in classical art and archaeology and over 70 scholarly articles. Her major publications include The Parthenon Frieze (Cambridge 2001), A Concise Introduction to Ancient Greece (British Museum 2011), and Women in the Ancient World (Getty 2012). She organized three major international exhibitions of Greek art with comprehensive catalogues: Goddess and Polis: The Panathenaic Festival of Ancient Athens (1992), Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past (2003), and HIPPOS: The Horse in Ancient Athens (2022). In conjunction with the last she wrote her first children’s book AVRA An Amazing Greek Horse.

See https://researchguides.case.edu/faculty-authors/JeniferNeils

In 2017 Neils was appointed the first female director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (founded 1881). Previous Western Reserve classics faculty closely associated with the ASCSA include its first student  Harold North Fowler and a former director Henry Robinson.