Carmen Arnold-Biucchi is Damarete Curator of Ancient Coins at the Harvard Art Museum in the Department of Ancient & Byzantine Art & Numismatics, and Lecturer on the Classics. She was born and raised in Switzerland. Trained as a classical archaeologist at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and of Heidelberg, Germany, she later specialized in numismatics. Before coming to Harvard in 2002, she worked as Research Associate in numismatics at the Editorial Center of LIMC in Basel, and later at the US Center at Rutgers University. She was at The American Numismatic Society in New York for eighteen years, and remains the First Margaret Thompson Curator of Greek Coins.
Carmen Arnold-Biucchi taught at the ANS Graduate Seminar from 1989 to 1999. She was Adjunct Professor at Columbia University (1995), Bryn Mawr (2000), and CUNY (2001), Visiting Professor at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy (1993), and at the EPHE of the Sorbonne in Paris (2007). She was the 2001-2002 J. Clawson Mills Art History Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the 2004 Robinson Visiting Scholar at the Ashmolean Museum and Kraay Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford.
At Harvard since 2002, she has been teaching graduate seminars in Greek numismatics and courses related to coins and mythology in the Department of Classics and at the Extension School.
Her major fields of expertise are the coinages of Greek Sicily and Hellenistic numismatics, but her interests and background are broad: from Cypriot archaeology to Greek art and iconography. She is finishing a corpus of the archaic coinage of Selinous in Sicily, working on the lifetime coinage of Lysimachos of Thrace, and hoping one day to write a book on Greek coin types
She served as Secretary of the International Numismatic Council from 2003-2009, publishing the yearly Compte Rendu, and was elected President for the next six-year term with the task to prepare the next International Numismatic Congress in Messina/Taormina in 2015. She is on the Managing Committee of the ASCSA and on the Editorial Board of Numismatica Antichità Classische Quaderni Ticinesi.