St Catherine’s College, Oxford, Arumugam Building 1.2
Thursdays 5 pm. All welcome
Thursday, November 7, 5-6:30 pm
Elena Lichmanova, DPhil student, University of Oxford “Religious Storytelling and the Rise of Marginalia”
Thursday, November 21, 5-6:30 pm
Alixe Bovey, Professor and Dean, Deputy Director, & Head of Research, The Courtauld Institute of Art “Visual Storytelling in 14th-century London: Subtexts, Pretexts, Contexts”
Thursday, December 5, 5-6:30 pm
Ben Tilghman, Associate Professor of Art History, Washington College (Maryland, USA) & Visiting Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh “What Art Does When It’s Doing Nothing: Stillness, Perdurance, and Agency in Medieval Art”
Questions? Contact Nancy Thebaut, Associate Professor, History of Art & Fellow, St Catherine’s College
Header image: Smithfield Decretals, Toulouse (?), c. 1300; London, c. 1340. London, British Library, Royal 10 E IV, fol. 4v. Image courtesy of Alixe Bovey
Nancy Thebaut is Associate Professor of the History of Art & Tutorial Fellow, St Catherine’s College. She writes for the Medieval Booklet:
Hello! I’m delighted to be joining the Oxford Medieval Studies community. I grew up in Florida and earned my postgrad degrees at the Courtauld, Ecole du Louvre, and University of Chicago (PhD). I have been living for the past few years in upstate New York, where I was Assistant Professor at Skidmore College, and I just completed a year-long sabbatical at the center for medieval studies (CESCM) at the University of Poitiers. My research and teaching cover a wide range of time and object-types, but I am especially interested in manuscript illuminations and ivory relief carvings.
I’m currently at work on two projects. The first is an exhibition that I am co-curating with Melanie Holcomb at The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY) on love, sex, and gender in the late Middle Ages and that will open in October 2025. The second is a book, entitled Lessons in Looking: Difficult Images of Christ, ca. 850-1050. It considers a selection of narrative images in liturgical manuscripts from northern Europe that depict moments at which seeing Christ is at stake, often at moments when his body is partially obscured or visually absent. In both projects, I’m invested in the agency of images, or how they actively shape how we look, think, and understand ourselves in relation to others.
I’ll be teaching a variety of medieval art history courses, in which I look forward to centering Oxford’s incredible medieval collections and sites. I’ll also be convening the Medieval Visual Culture Seminar. We have an exciting line-up for the 2024-2025 academic year, and I hope you’ll attend!