Distinguished Lectures in Medieval and Byzantine Art

2026-27:  Brigitte Buettner (Smith College), “Mineral Drugs and Pigments in the Medieval Herbal: A Visual History”; Artur Obluski (University of Warsaw), “African “Peripheries: Challenging the Paradigms of Archaeology and Art”
2025-26:  Stephen Perkinson (Bowdoin College), “The Print Generation: Innovation, Tradition, and the Crisis in the Book Trades, c. 1485-95”; Margaret Graves (Brown University), “Margaret Graves, Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Brown. Titled “Islamic Ceramics and Other Fictions of Capital: Fabricating the Middle East for Modern Markets” [Buchanan Lecture]; Melanie Holcomb (Metropolitan Museum of Art), “The Erotics of Gothic Ivories” [keynote for the Cleveland Symposium] 
2024-25: Pamela Patton (Princeton University), “Making Things Up: Authority and Invention in the Cantigas de Santa Maria”; Elizabeth O’Connell (The British Museum), “Material Matters: The Hay Archive of Magical Spells on Leather” [Mellon Short-Term Fellowship]; Heather Pulliam (University of Edinburgh), “Time and Motion: Early Medieval Art and the Living World” [keynote for the Cleveland Symposium]; Scott D. Miller, Material Cultures of Mobility in the Early Burgundian Court” [part of the EHI initiative] 
2023-24: Jeffrey F. Hamburger (Harvard University), “Flesh and Fabric: the Raiment of the Passion in a Crucifixion by Pietro Lorenzetti”; Dr. Helen Evans (Metropolitan Museum of Art), “Coming Alive: a Quarter-Century of Byzantine Art History”; Carolyn Twomey (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), “Beneath the Surface: Water and Sacrality in the Early Middle Ages” [keynote for the Cleveland Symposium]
2022-23: Nina Rowe (Fordham University), “Nero’s Pregnancy and the Body Politic in Illuminated World Chronicle Manuscripts, circa 1400”; Simona de Nepi (MFA Boston),  “From Accidental to Intentional Collecting: The Judaica Journey of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston”  [Mellon Short-Term Fellowship]; Medieval Art and Race conversation: Thomas Dale (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Asa Simon Mittman (Cal State University, Chico), Pamela Patton (Princeton University) [mini-talks]; Jitske Jasperse (Humboldt University of Berlin), “A Taste for Limoges: Colorful Caskets in Medieval Spain”
2021-22: Herbert Kessler (Johns Hopkins University), “‘Decorated with Life.’ Ornament’s Meaning during the Middle Ages and Beyond”; Vagantes Conference [keynotes: Daniel Smail (Harvard University), Elina Gertsman (CWRU)]; Philippe Cordez (German Center for Art History, Paris), “Music and Youth in the Kingdom of France: The Roman de Fauvel and the Cleveland Fountain (Paris, ca. 1320)” [co-sponsored with the CMA]; Eco-riticism and Medieval Art series: Danielle Joyner (Lawrence University), “Transcendent Birds: Crossing Oceans and Boundaries,” Ben Tilghman (Washington College), “Sanctified Stillness Against a Dynamic World in the Early Middle Ages,” and Achim Timmermann (University of Michigan), “Mnemotopes: Jerusalem and the Civic Imagination in the German Late Middle Ages”; Byzantine Studies Conference
2020-21: Robert Mills (University College London), “Recognizing Wilgefortis”; Robert Ousterhout (University of Pennsylvania) “Heaven on Earth: Justinian’s Hagia Sophia”; Mining the Collection series: Elina Gertsman (CWRU) and Gerhard Lutz (CMA); Lectures in Medieval Jewish Art: Pamela Patton (Princeton University), “Synagogue Architecture in the Middle Ages”; Julie Harris (Spertus College), “From Torah to Bible in the Iberian Peninsula”; Adam Cohen (University of Toronto), “Persecution, Privilege and the Passover Haggadah in the Middle Ages,” Eva Frojmovic (University of Leeds), “Gender: A Useful Category of Jewish Art Historical Analysis,” and Diane Wolfthal (Rice University), “Imagining the Self: Representations of Jewish Ritual in a Yiddish Book of Customs” [sponsored by the Nord Foundation]
2019-20: Vincent Debiais (EHESS Paris), “The Angel in the Square: Silence in Medieval Images” [keynote for the Cleveland Symposium]; Kathryn Smith (NYU), “Scripture Transformed in Late Medieval England: The Religious, Artistic, and Social Worlds of the Welles-Ros Bible”; Elizabeth Morrison (The Getty), “Beast or Monster? Animals in the Medieval World” [sponsored by the CMA]
2018-19: Charles T. Little (Metropolitan Museum of Art), “The Gothic Renaissance”; Anne D. Hedeman (University of Kansas), “Rereading Boccaccio in Étienne Chevalier’s Decameron” [Buchanan Lecture]; Vincent Debiais (EHESS Paris), “Images of Silence in Medieval Art: Visual Approaches to Theology and Practices”; graduate student workshop on medieval abstract art and an international symposium at the Index of Medieval Art, at Princeton University [organized by Vincent Debiais and Elina Gertsman; speakers: Jean-Claude Bonne (EHESS), Herbert Kessler (Johns Hopkins), Cécile Voyer (Poitiers), Licia Buttà (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), Robert Mills (University College London), Thomas Golsenne (Lille), and Charles Barber (Princeton)]
2017-18: Mark M. Epstein (Vassar College), “The Subversive Afterlife of Images: Implied, Ensuing Action in Medieval Jewish Visual Culture”
2016-17: Christina Maranci (Tufts University), “Adventures in Armenian Architecture”
2016-16: Kathryn A. Smith (New York University), “‘A Lanterne of Lyght to the People’: English Narrative Alabaster Images of John the Baptist in their Visual, Religious, and Social Contexts”
2014-15: Asa S. Mittman (California State University, Chico), “Real Monsters: Medieval Belief, Wonder, and the ‘Wonders of the East'”
2013-14: Richard K. Emmerson (Manhattan College), “Apocalyptic Visuality in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts”
2012-13: Thomas Dale (University of Wisconsin, Madison), “Experiencing Romanesque Sculpture: The Body, the Senses, and Affect”
2011-12: Elizabeth Sears (University of Michigan): “A Charismatic Thinker: Aby Warburg on Image and Word”