Dr. Ann Steiner, Shirley Watkins Steinman Professor of Classics and provost and dean of the faculty at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., will give a free lecture, "How to Read a Vase," at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, in Room 126 (auditorium) of the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts at the University of St. Thomas.

Steiner suggests that in addition to aesthetic principles such as balance, symmetry and repetition, Athenian vases also can be "read" as texts. They communicate through a visual code that conveys comparisons, point of view and narrative, resulting in messages that range from news to parody.

Steiner, an internationally known scholar who has been on the Franklin & Marshall faculty since 1981, has bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in archaeology from Bryn Mawr College in suburban Philadelphia. She was a research scholar at the American School of Classical Studies Excavations at ancient Corinth from 1985 to 1988, and served as the archivist for the University of Sydney and Athens Archaeological Society excavations at Torone in the Chalcidice in 1976, 1978 and 1980. She directs research at the Mugello Valley archaeological project excavations at Poggio Colla in Tuscany. Franklin & Marshall is a sponsor of the archaeological field school at Poggio Colla.

Steiner is the author of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: Joslyn Art Museum (1986), Joslyn Art Museum: Ancient Greek Pottery (1985) and articles in leading journals including Hesperia and the Journal of Roman Archaeology. Her most-recent book, Reading Greek Vases, was published last year by Cambridge University Press and is considered a groundbreaking study on text and repetition in Greek vases. The award-winning scholar is a member of the Archaeological Institute of America, the Classical Association of the Atlantic States and the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies.

This presentation is the third in the "Looking @ Greek Vases" lecture series sponsored by St. Thomas' Graduate Program in Art History and the University of Minnesota Classical and Near Eastern Studies Department.

During her visit to the Twin Cities Steiner will give a second lecture, "Texts in Context: Athenian Vases in Symposium," at 4:30 p.m. Friday, Feb. 29, in Room 155, Nicholson Hall, at the University of Minnesota.